Category: Progress Update

October 2019 Progress Update

Hey everyone! Hope everyone’s been doing well. This post this month is super short as there’s only 1 thing on the agenda: The Demo Update!

Demo Update!

As we’ve been saying for months now, the demo update is on the way. We will have more details on the exact date sometime this month, but we’re happy to say that the demo is almost complete! Somewhere between 99% and 100% to be correct.

We had wanted to stream most of the remaining progress on Twitch last month, but due to technical difficulties it wasn’t possible. That being said, we did squash over 50 bugs! Our recent play tests have also produced very few critical bugs so the demo is all-in-all in a good place.

Speaking of bugs, we counted up just how much work has gone into this demo update. As of writing, we’ve made 887 changes! This includes either new features or bugs fixes and so on. Hopefully that number doesn’t climb too much higher…. but it’s quite a feat! This past year and a bit has been very very busy!

So once again, apologies for the delay. We hope it’ll be in your hands soon enough!

Have a spoopy October~

September 2019 Progress Update

Hey everyone! We hope your summer was sunny and cool! Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month!

127 Bugs in the Code

A bug! Zack, cover your eyes!

We’ve been working on hardening and stabilizing the demo. All of the content is in there now, but there’s a large number of bugs that need to be stomped out.

Unfortunately this isn’t the most glamorous period of time for any piece of software, but we will likely be streaming most of this process on Twitch this month if you would like to see our slow descent into bug-fix madness.

Demo Update

So with all that being said, how is the demo going?

Although we wanted to target a release for end of August/early September, it seems like it’ll be around early October at the soonest. We want to make sure this update is solid, so our apologies for the delay.

August 2019 Progress Update

Hello everyone! Here’s what we’ve been up to the past month!

99 Bugs in the Code

I’m sure everyone is aware of the old saying:

99 bugs in the code. 99 bugs in the code. Take one down, patch it around, 127 bugs in the code.

Which was more-or-less the status of the game this month. During the past month we held a play-testing stream playing through the current version of the demo, giving commentary, and finding 62 bugs. Which naturally swelled to 64+ as we proceeded to fix them all in the next coming days.

The good news? It’s 62+ bugs players didn’t find. The bad news? 62+ bugs.

In any case, we’re working on stabilizing the demo, finding weird edge cases, and making sure the game plays well. We do still get the occasional bug report from the previous demo, so we’re hoping to get everything more solid!

Ps. That play-through will be uploaded to youtube in the near-ish future.

Demo Update

So how is the current demo going? We’re still on schedule! We’re still targeting end of August/early-September!

We’re working on making a new trailer now, and gathering loads of screenshots. The downside is that we don’t have too many things to post at the moment, as we don’t want to spoil the changes we’ve made to the story. (Yes, we know we did a play test session where we spoiled everything but shhh)

So in the meantime we won’t have too much to show, but if you do want to see our slow decent into testing/bug madness Twitch is the place to go. For everyone else, we hope you’re excited to play the new demo soon!

July 2019 Progress Update

Hey everyone! Happy July! Here’s what we’ve been up to the past month!

Map Updates

This past month we added one of the more highly requested features from our backlog: The World Map!

This world map’s design is probably not surprising to people who’ve been following along for a while, but it is certainly a new addition to the game that we’ve been wanting to put in for ages.

This world map will show you all the major locations in the game, your rough position in the world, and where your next goal is, along with various warp point locations.

We hope everyone enjoys it, and it helps them navigate the world better!

Polish?

We’ve also been doing polish passes and slowly improving the quality of everything. For example, here is what the Statement Screen looked like:

And now it looks like:

There’s a bunch of other small things like that, but generally speaking we are slowly approaching:

THE DEMO

We can say for certain it will not be out this month. We have a good number of tasks to complete this month, so at the moment we’re targeting either late August or very early September.

What’s Next?

We’ll be continuing to finish off the demo. If you’re interested in checking in on how it’s going, or just want to hang out, we’ve been streaming a good portion of the development on Twitch as of late. We’re usually streaming about 3-5 times a week for 2+ hours at a time around 7pm-10pm EST.

June 2019 Progress Update

Hello again everyone! Here’s an update on what we’ve been up to the past month!

Debate Updates

We’ve been working hard over the past month to finish rewriting the demo debates, and making changes to debates in general. We won’t be going into particular details with the specific debate changes, but we would like to talk about one major change we’ve made: removing the debate progress bar & charisma stat.

The debate progress bar has been part of the game’s design since the beginning and was intended to display the debate’s progress. It would be influenced by a user’s charisma stat, and to clear a debate you needed to have a high enough charisma stat and be able to select the correct choices.

We ran into a few issues with this:

  • What the bar at the top of the screen did was unclear. It was assumed it was for:
    • Progress
    • How much your opponent liked you
    • Charisma
  • You could choose all of the correct options in a debate and fail because your charisma was too low
  • There was no indicator on how much charisma was needed
  • If your charisma was very high, you would have a full progress bar before the end of the debate, which was confusing
  • Even with the debate bar filled in, if a very bad option was picked you could fail, which was also confusing

So we decided to get rid of it.

Now debates focus more on selecting correct choices, and doing investigative footwork (i.e. talking to NPCs to figure out the correct choices) than choices plus stats.

We hope everyone will enjoy the debate changes!

Demo Status

So what’s the status of the demo? We have good news! We’re targeting to release the demo within the next few months in either July or August! We’re still figuring out the details, but keep your eyes peeled for it to drop in the near future!

What’s Next

As always, we’re continuing to work on the demo update and quality of life improvements! Look forward to the news in the next few months~