Hello everyone, here’s news from the front.
First of all, happy new year to all! I wish you good health, and success for your projects. As for me, I hope that this year will be productive, with the release of The Goblin’s Week :)
It’s been a year since the publication and acceptance of my game concept on Steam Greenlight, and the first video trailer. I announced that the game would be released in 2017, and that was not the case. The game should be released in 2018. It’s time to take a look at what has been done this year, and to present what remains to be done.
Review of the year 2017
This year, I was tired of adding more and more content, accumulating bugs, temporary 3D models, unfinished features, and so on. So, I focused on the first part of the dungeon, so that the content of that part is clean and polished.
So I redesigned and modeled the 3D characters, they are now all ready. I reviewed the 3D models used for this part, I reviewed the meshes, optimized the physical colliders, and improved the scripts. I got down to the hard task of optimizing performance, including setting up a progressive dungeon loading system. I did a thorough overhaul of a lot of the code to clean, optimize and solidify its basis. I notably reviewed the dialogue system, localization system, save system, inventory system, game management system, footsteps and collisions system, and weapons equipment system.
The first level is almost complete. All game features are implemented, although I still have to improve some stuff.
For the other levels, some are already in an advanced state, others just in prototyping phase.
Having realized that the game development would take longer than expected, I tried to find an alternative funding source by selling assets for Unity. To date I have published three assets, sales are starting to take off a little but I have finally not gained more development time, compared to the time spent producing them. I would like to publish other assets, including the dialogue system, but given the required work I prefer to focus on the game.
To conclude, even if the remaining content of the game is still substantial, the state of the game itself has progressed enormously. I now have a solid basis, and everything is ready to create the rest as efficiently as possible.
Roadmap for the year 2018
This year, once the last elements of my version 0.1 are done, I will finally be able to work on the level design and game design, so that the gaming experience is the best possible and the closest to my goals.
I have already started to review all levels of the dungeon either on paper or in the editor, to rework the overall game experience. I want to have a first version of all areas to get the game as a whole. I will also have a better estimate of the remaining work, and I will be able to focus my efforts, and remove areas if necessary. I will then rework the levels gradually and iteratively, and I will create the necessary content and scripts as I go along. I will of course continue the playtests, although at the beginning I will continue to favor the observation tests, at home.
There are still some tasks for which I have trouble anticipating the difficulty, for instance the music composition, replacing all temporary sounds, and translating the game in several languages.
I talked about publishing a playable demo, it will not be for now. I’ll let you know if such a demo is finally released.
I hope you are as eager as me to see the game out. As always, do not hesitate to give me some feedback,
See you soon,
Arnaud
