I am sorry. We made progress this year, but not as much as I had hoped. The projected dates for the next updates did not work out as planned. We are focusing on the content of the game at the moment. That is slow work, as we are still somewhat inexperienced in this. (And it seems to me that working on story-based content will never be a straightforward process to begin with.) I appeal here to your understanding of the situation, and therefore will lay out what this current situation consists of.

Situation

We are a small team. Two core members at the moment, working full-time on Death Trash. We will look at potentially getting additional help after the city content update is done. This is our first game. We are still learning and mistakes will be made along the way, but we are willing to learn from them. Our main goals with this project are the following: 1. To create a game with soul and personality. Reminiscent of the role-playing classics, but a thing of its own. 2. To stay independent. To keep control over all parts of the game and to fully understand all the bits that go into making a game like this. Which means working on most parts of it ourselves. Or, to put it another way: working on something idiosyncratic in a personal way, staying close to the full process of creation. We have sufficient funds to finish the development. We have enough motivation. This game will get done, no matter what. Our communication this year was flawed. I think I responded often enough and in a transparent way, but I failed at showing where we are, at showing the progress, and at explaining the challenges of the project and its bottlenecks. I talk of helpful tools but I don't show what they are. I talk of the complexity of the project but I don't talk about the details. I get frustrated when pixelart games are lumped into some 'easy-to-make' category, but I don't outline the flaws in that argument. We need to do better.

Next steps

Removing the dates from the roadmap.

To avoid confusion and unfulfilled promises, we have decided to remove dates from the roadmap for now. More concrete timeframes will return once we make more progress on the content and can better estimate the remaining effort.

Regular update with improvements

Well publish a regular update in January that will contain improvements made over the last year which were originally to go alongside the next content update. These improvements include better inventory handling, which in our own test-playing fixes the recurring issue of the limited space inventory filling up too quickly.

City content on beta branch

Around that same time, we will publish the work-in-progress city content on the beta branch. (This will be unfinished and will be separated from the main game still, accessible only through a jump start from the main menu into the city. It's rough in parts and contains placeholders, but we could already use some feedback on dialogue, aesthetics, level design etc.)

Development Insight

From January on, after a short vacation, we will give continuous insight to the development process. I am not sure yet in what form this will end up eventually, but I would like to start out by making some short non-spoiler notes every day I am at work, probably in its own forum thread, and this journaling then might lead to questions which I could tackle in more long-form. Let me know what you would be interested in.

Conclusion

I hope you'll have a great 2025, and I hope that Death Trash has a great year, too. Thank you to everyone who supported us, and that includes all the small moments of friendly words and gestures. - Stephan

[ 2024-12-23 11:33:32 CET ] [ Original post ]