Development news
Hello Slayers! It's been a while since the last time, so this will be a long post with lots of explanations about what I've been working on, current changes, and future plans. I'd also like to give you a little sneak peek of what's coming. End of the Demo (and Demo 2 is coming) V
Hello Slayers!
It's been a while since the last time, so this will be a long post with lots of explanations about what I've been working on, current changes, and future plans. I'd also like to give you a little sneak peek of what's coming.
End of the Demo (and Demo 2 is coming)
Valve's changes on how demos work on Steam
Let's start with the current changes. As you may or may not know, Valve recently made some changes regarding demos. As part of that, demos now have the chance to appear in more places on Steam, which I believe is a great change.
Unfortunately, since NeuroSquad's demo has been out for a long time, it doesn't have access to all the same benefits as new demos. I've been working on a brand new second Demo for some time, so this opportunity would have been perfect for that otherwise. Ultimately, I decided to remove the old demo until I figure out how to proceed.
Overall, Steam has shown again that they listen to developers' feedback, so I trust their changes to have a positive effect. I'm hoping I can still release a Prologue for NeuroSquad in the future, with all the things I have for it, as originally planned. (More on that below.)
About the old demo
So the old demo no longer appears on the game's store page. Instead of pushing smaller updates to it, I've been working on a big one for Demo 2. (I talk about my thought process below.) In hindsight, I should have done a public Playtest from the beginning instead of a demo, and I believe the demo was made available a little too early anyway, but I've learned from this, and I will definitely do a (limited-access) playtest before the final release.
Still, it has been great for getting feedback (feedback that I'm extremely thankful for 🤍), and it has served its purpose. With all the development progress I'll detail below, the old demo no longer felt representative of the game. It no longer presented the game in the best light.
About the upcoming Demo 2
I'm currently in the process of polishing the second demo. It needs some more time in the oven, but good news is that everything I make for that can go straight into the final game as well, so there won't be such a long wait before the 1.0 release in the future.
I'm refactoring the whole game, making every aspect of it more performant, more expandable, and just generally easier to work with. The purpose of this is to be able to add new content and make changes way faster than before. This is already happening in regard to the new content I'm adding to Demo 2.
My thought process about updates
As I was working on performance optimization, I kept thinking "I will just add this one more thing, and then I'm done". Every time I finished one aspect of the process, I discovered another little detail that I wanted to fix before pushing an update. I felt like it would be half-assing it if I left any inefficiencies in the game, and I just kept going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
I apologize for not communicating more clearly about this since the last update. The reason for that was that a lot of times I felt like I was very close to the finish line, and the update can go live soon. But then I kept moving the goalpost, for the reasons I mentioned above.
The other thing about optimization is that it's the kind of change that (if all goes well) will not really be an obvious change. It's an "under the hood" thing, with no visible difference to the game (other than that it runs smoother of course). The more time passed since the last update the more I felt that I needed to add new content as well, something that actually adds to the game. So yes, the second demo will be a content update as well. (See below.)
Implementing ALL the feedback in one go
Ever since NeuroSquad was first made available, I received a lot of helpful feedback, and incorporated these suggestions to new builds of the game. (See all the previous changelogs here, where I marked every change that was based on player feedback.) This means I had to prioritize which piece of advice to focus on first, since I was updating the game regularly, and not all of them could fit into the timeframe of a single update.
Now I wanted to take a different approach. Since there will be a whole new demo anyway, I'm implementing all of the remaining feedback I had received. This is a more efficient way to do this, because making incremental changes, generating builds, testing them, uploading them... all of this takes extra time. So instead, the new demo will have all of your feedback that I added to my list of things to implement. This time there's no need to prioritize, I'm going all in.
With that in mind, let's talk about content in the upcoming Demo 2:
What will be in the second demo?
(Work in progress Hub area, subject to change.)
- A Hub area that acts as a base for your characters. This expands the meta-progression upgrade framework, replacing the UI-only menu system in the previous demo.
- Elite gear system. This was originally intended for the 1.0 release only, but I decided to incorporate it into the new demo as well. Elite gear is a new way to make your characters permanently stronger, and enhance their special abilities (or add new ones).
- Character mastery. This is tied to the Elite gear system. You will get rewarded for playing well with your favorite characters.
- A full revamp of the upgrade placement system. During a run, you will be able to restructure your loadout at any time, swap upgrades, or put some of them to the side. (There will also be tutorialization for picking and placing upgrades, valuable for new players.)
- All planned changes implemented. As mentioned above, every piece of feedback that I received from you and wanted to add, will be added. As well as all of my ideas that I had throughout the old demo period. Genuinely everything overhauled.
- Improved performance. I'll write about the details of optimization extensively in another post.
Future plans
The new demo will go live as soon as it's done and tested, and there will be more pre-release stuff to come after that. As I mentioned, overhauling the underlying systems means that new content can be added much more quickly, and changes can be made more easily. Putting in this work now is an investment into the future, resulting in a more stable and quicker-to-expand game.
So some time after Demo 2, I'm planning to publish a Prologue as well, which will include new game mechanics, a new map, new characters, new upgrades, new enemies, and more. I decided to do this because I want to give a piece of the game away for free to keep (as a complete package, as opposed to a demo, which is more like a... well, a demonstration).
Here's a little sneak peek:
More info on that later.
Thank you
Lastly, I'd like to thank you for sticking with me throughout the dev process! All the suggestions, the positive feedback, the wishlists and follows, all of that means a lot to me! I've learned a lot and I'm very excited to soon be able to finally share the improvements.
Also, thanks to Valve for not putting a character limit on these news posts, this was a long one haha
Stay tuned, and have a good day!
- Matt
