It's Polishing & Content-Making Time
Together, we've reached the development stage where we can start "locking" the development of earlier scenes in the game, such as the ISA scenes, after a thorough round of testing through all the ISA gameplay content. That means that big changes aren't meant to happen to those gameplay scenes anymore, and instead, they should be in a fully polished, working state.
That's one of the goals for the end of this month, the other goal is working and working on content so I can fulfill the promise of delivering the end of the village content by the beginning of fall (climate change might help me here? bad joke, I know).
Realistically I can say that it's definitely achievable to FINISH the village content by the end of the fall, but not to DELIVER it, and I'll go into more detail in the following bulletpoints that will represent my tasks for this week:
Add in all the bar content dialogues I've written so far and make sure there are enough dialogues to advance with the stamps content for the finale of the Village.
Add NPCs to the bar and together with them develop the cutscenes that will take place in the bar.
Have the Steam store page up by the end of the week if possible, to seek your opinion on the design and your wishlists 😇 (they'd really help me)
Now the optional tasks, secondary to the above:
Polish up all the ISA scenes involving lighting and everything else that might look out of place.
Release a public build this Friday (dependent on whether the steam store page will be up, to gather wishlists)
That's my plan for this week. My primary focus is on content, as today the steam store page was prepared and submitted for a review. If everything goes fine, that means it should be up when I post my next status update, hopefully.
The possibility of a Steam release has been a very motivating factor for me lately, and it's driving me more than ever to make sure everything we have and we'll have is in the best state it can be considering my skills.
Why am I so enthusiastic about the Steam release you may ask, well, the answer is that it feels like crowdfunding platforms like… hint, it's the one you're reading this on right now, they require a ton of marketing and I feel like people aren't so happy about being subscribed to so many platforms at this point.
I agree with the principle, you buy it once and you own it forever, and I bet at least 90% of people who play games think the same. It's very difficult to grow your crowdfunding platform, I don't know what it takes, but I know it's too much work that could instead be spent on actually making games and this is where platforms like Steam can come into play, instead of spending so much marketing my Patreon page I'd rely on the algorithm Steam offers to recommend my game to players who might be interested.
And of course, if the wishlist and release campaign go well then it'd be a looot easier to work on what happens in the space content, because as we are right now things are tough and even though I enjoy developing this game for me and for you all, financially it can be a struggle and this struggle would manifest in lesser quality content which isn't good for anyone.
I hope this made a bit of sense. See you on Friday!