DevLog #14?

As a disclaimer, this will be a yap post.

Breeze Updates

It’s been a while, and I apologize for not updating as frequently as I’d like. A lot of things have come up in both my personal life (layoffs) and with Breeze, so I’ve been stretched pretty thin. That probably isn’t going to change too quickly for a bit, but I wanted to give everyone an update on where things currently stand.

I originally started the Patreon with the intention of sharing progress, development insights, behind-the-scenes stuff, etc. What I’ve come to find out is that something like 60–70% of my job running a project seems to involve business affairs and conversations that I can’t talk about or share, with the remaining time spent actually working on the game and trying to share what I can that isn’t spoilers or boring.

Big surprise there!

I’ll have to keep some of the project stuff a bit broad, but more recently:

Publisher Talks...

As you might have seen in the previous post, I announced that Breeze would delayed as we reacquired our publishing rights.

Since February of this year, I’ve been in talks with a publisher who showed interest in the game and invited me to pitch to them. Based on the initial conversations and the ones that followed, things were looking promising.

However, what we were originally expecting to take weeks gradually turned into months of waiting as circumstances changed. After reaching out for another update a couple of days ago, I was ultimately told that they would have to pass on the game.

Unfortunately, waiting seems to be part of the nature of the business, especially in the current economy and general state of the industry. After going through some variation of this process a few times in a row, though, I’m starting to seriously reconsider what the best path forward is for Breeze when it comes to publishing.

Self Publishing?

With that, and everything else that has happened over the last couple of years, I’m honestly considering coming full circle and trying to self-publish again.

I’m grateful for the opportunities and benefits we’ve had from working with publishers, even if some of those resources are no longer available to us. At the same time, the process of pursuing publishing has been pretty taxing overall, and the amount of time and energy spent on the business side has taken away from some of the creative focus I’d rather be putting into the game.

So, I’m taking a serious look at what doing this independently again could look like and what that would mean for Breeze going forward.

The biggest thing is that games cost a good bit to make, especially depending on what you’re making. We have a lot of high-quality animation and backgrounds in the game, and they’re simultaneously some of the most expensive aspects of it. As I’d like to avoid skimping too heavily on those, especially given how far along things are, I’ll need to make some decisions about the remaining tasks and look at efficient ways to use what we already have in certain areas.

Demos?!

One of the rewards that I’ve listed on here for the longest has been demos, and unfortunately, I think I’ve only been able to release one or two. There were reasons for this that I can’t divulge, but I will say it was largely due to the fact that releasing them would not have been ideal at the time.

That isn’t the case anymore, and now it’s more a matter of me releasing demos that I’m comfortable with and that leave a good first impression.

With prototypes and pre-alphas, there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t “done” and a lot of moving parts that are not complete. However, as someone playing a demo, this can be an off-putting experience at times. It’s like riding a bike where the brake works 48% of the time, and the steering wheel’s ability to turn left is still in progress. I’d prefer that to NOT be the experience!

All that being said, I’m looking to make the most recent demo that I provided to streamers available to Patreon backers soon (maybe this weekend?), then work out how I want to handle these in the future. I’m trying to figure out the best way to do it myself, but for any previous backers, if you want to hit me up for it, I can provide it to you as well once it becomes available.

My concern about doing these too frequently is overexposure to the same WIP content, while also trying not to sour “new” content by releasing it too early. With Breeze primarily being a beat ‘em up with extra aspects, I’ll be iterating on it constantly until it’s final. I know most folks understand this, but it’s still important to me not to sour the experience before it’s finalized.

Final Thoughts

Video games lol, lmao

But for real, I appreciate everyone who’s been along for the ride. This train has already missed way more stops than it should have, but live and learn, I guess!

I’ll be around to yap again soon with a demo and whatever else I can think of!

- SrBilyon