Another hectic month gone by. Getting Eternia: Pet Whisperer done and published on Steam in such a short time was no small feat. There were a few hurdles along the way as well, especially when it came to getting it ready for Steam, but overall I'm really glad we managed to get it out. Having a bona fide released title is amazing! Most of the trouble with getting it put on Steam was the manual review process they have. It turns out, real people actually check your builds before you're allowed to sell the game. And not only do they check whether it launches, they also do other tests like whether gamepad support works, whether captions are included, etc. It's a lot more extensive than I had expected, which is really nice! Unfortunately I was also confused by a couple of options, and misunderstood others, so I had to go through the review a bunch of times, which caused a bunch of stress for me and ultimately delayed the release of Eternia by two days. Welp! At least now I know for the future that I'll have to start with the Steam review process well in advance of the actual release. With Eternia everything was so back to back that there really wasn't any more time for that than we had. The days since the release haven't been much less hectic either. There were a few bugs that had to be ironed out that prevented people from playing the game. Most notably:

• People with surround headphones could not play as those headphones announce themselves as 7.1 surround systems, which I didn't expect anyone would have.
• Some bad versions of shared libraries snuck themselves into the release builds on Linux.
• The save menu was bugged due to a regression in the UI library
• Avast antivirus causes random Windows exceptions in the game (this is not fixed and I don't know how to fix it).

There were also some minor content fixes for typos and such along the way. In any case, the automated crash report system I instated for Kandria helped a lot as it told me when people were having issues. Still, it was heartbreaking every time I got a report, as knowing people can't even play the game and are likely very frustrated or disappointed stings a lot. I really hope the Kandria release will be more smooth and less prone to issues now that we have a better handle on the process. Still, the amount of issues that are only uncovered by having people with various PC setups try to run your game is... well, it's not great. One of the many perils of the PC platform, I suppose. It hasn't yet been a full week so I don't really want to go into the statistics of the Eternia release, but I'll be sure to talk about that stuff in the next weekly update! Anyway, aside from supporting the Eternia review and taking care of the marketing around that, I also did some planning for Kandria. I asked ProHelvetia, and it turns out the submission deadline for the grant is going to be 1st of September of this year. This gives us roughly four months to graft a tutorial onto the vertical slice, and polish the fuck out of it to make it look as good as possible. A first step in that is to iron out egregious bugs that were reported from people playing the public vertical slice, and making a new trailer that shows off all the new content we made. I've now started working on both of those things and we should be able to finish the new trailer in the next week. I initially also wanted to put out a patch for the vertical slice already, but while we did fix a number of bugs and there's a few improvements, I'd rather wait until the rest of the other known and egregious bugs are ironed out at least. Regardless though, if you're on the Discord or the mailing list, we'll let you know when that patch hits!

Composers

In the last monthly I announced that you'll get to hear the pieces the three finalists put together, so here they are! I hope you enjoy listening to them!

• Jacob Lincke: track
• Joo Lus: track
• Mikel Dale: track

While all three of them did a fantastic job and the decision was a hard one, we ultimately went with...

Mikel

Hey everyone, my name is Mikel - nice to meet you! I'll be working as Kandria's composer from now on, which means I'll bang some notes on the piano and hope they sound good. In my first week as part of the team, I've been working side by side Shinmera on the game's new trailer. Taking inspiration from OSTs like Astral Chain and Octopath Traveller (as well as using our secret weapon, Julie Elven), we're cooking up something real good! If you have any suggestions, any soundtracks you'd like me to check out, or any weird instruments/sounds you demand I incorporate in the music, please let me know on the Discord! It'd be great to have some feedback from you too :) Ah yes, time for shameless plug: if you'd like to listen to some other games I'm working on, feel free to peruse Underdesert (rogue-lite dungeon FPS game), Waves of Steel (naval battle!), Cryptonom (if you like monster RPGs), or Heredity (good ol' fantasy ARPG). You can also check out my website for more deets. Look forward to showing you what's next!

What's next

Here's a rough roadmap for the rest of the year:

• Make the combat more flashy
• Finish a new trailer
• Design and outline the factions for the rest of the game
• Develop the soundscape for Kandria and start working on the tracks for region 1
• Add a music system that can do layering and timed transitions
• Build and add the tutorial sequence to the beginning of the game
• Polish the ProHelvetia submission material
• Polish and revise the combat design
• Explore platforming items and mechanics
• Practise platforming level design
• Start work on the horizontal slice

Of course the size of the items varies a lot, but hopefully we should be able to begin work on the horizontal slice by November. If we extrapolate the time it took for the vertical slice and cut some content, this should leave us with enough time to finish by early 2023... provided we don't run outta money. Anyway, that's why the grant is the primary target for now. Though we were also accepted by ProHelvetia for GDC Online and the SwissNex US Game Industry Week, so that'll give us some more opportunities to look for a publisher. Having a new trailer for that should definitely help a lot! Well, see you next time then! Remember that there's a mailing list with weekly updates, a discord for the community, and my twitter with short videos and images on the development! Oh, and do check out Eternia if you haven't yet. We've gotten some really nice reviews for it, which has been a joy to see!

[ 2021-05-09 10:51:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hack and Slash Puzzle Platformer ARPG

Kandria is a hand-crafted, 2D action game, which combines the wall-climbing verticality and precision puzzle platforming of Celeste, with the tight hack and slash swordplay of NieR:Automata, all set within an epic, post-apocalyptic RPG story and world. Questions of artificial life and android ethics abound as you thread and fight your way through hostility, and a complex web of uncertain truths.

FIGHT TO SURVIVE

• Play as The Stranger, a powerful android recently unearthed from the ruins of the old world.
  
• Perform tight, smooth hack and slash combat against rogue robots and malcontent humans - you’re faster, stronger, and can jump higher. But are you smarter?
  
• When you think you’ve mastered things, prepare yourself for epic boss battles with beasts and machines, which slumber and lurk deep beneath the earth.

STRUGGLE WITH HUMANITY

• Explore vast, open and interconnected levels full of non-linear missions, challenging platforming, and gorgeous pixel art decay - cross the barren surface, or spelunk deep underground.
  
• Meet flawed characters and factions struggling to survive; choose who to follow, and who you’ll help or hinder as you forge your own future amongst the ruins.
  
• Thread your way through prejudice in an epic detective quest of mystery, grit and self-determination.

INDIE HEART & SOUL, MODDING SUPPORT

• Made by a tiny team headed by Shinmera, an indie developer of not only games but also art and software, who crafted the unique engine, world, art style and atmosphere.
  
• Features thousands of frames of hand-drawn, hand-animated pixel art characters and locations, and an atmospheric, futuresynth soundtrack.
  
• Built in Trial, a highly-moddable, custom game engine and toolset created just for this title, which lets you mod content and create your own levels.
  
• Indie love and passion guaranteed.