Welcome back Knights-To-Be,
As we come to day four of our countdown to version 1.0, we hope you’re beginning to feel the excitement. To distract ourselves and in an attempt to make the time go just a little bit faster, we’d like to continue regaling you with the tale of our development journey.
Epic Megagrants…
With a new year (2019) came a new GDC and this time we were coming in with realistic goals and realistic expectations. Our purpose was not to show anyone our project but rather to learn from other developers and connect with them. It had also been about 6 months since we’d all last saw each other in person, so this conference quickly became part reunion and part research.
After spending a year analyzing our own failings, we had begun to recognize the weaknesses in our craft. With these in mind, we attended a variety of specific talks, interesting round tables, inspiring meetings, really anything that could be related to the areas of development we needed to improve. The goal was to learn as much as we could and to keep an eye out for any opportunities that would allow us to level up further.
It was at this particular GDC that Epic announced a new commitment to their program, the Epic Megagrant, which was an initiative aimed at providing financial support to projects deemed innovative, creative, and noteworthy. Obviously, they garnered a lot of attention from everyone in the indie community. We knew immediately that Project Terrarium needed to be part of this.
After the conference, the planning for our Epic Megagrant submission began immediately. Within a week we had decided on our short term goals and we began development on yet another demo. We had one year.
The Name of Sands of Aura…
While quickly approaching the one year mark, we realized the name Terrarium was growing stale. It was intimately connected to our early designs, but many of those had been either heavily altered or removed entirely. The game had changed, it had grown. We needed a new name more in line with what our project had become. There were a lot of ideas. There was a lot of brainstorming. But eventually one stood above the rest.
With a new name and a new demo, work began on our first teaser trailer. Looking back on it now, this was the emotional moment our studio realized we were on to something special, and it’s the moment where we got to see just how far we’d come since beginning development in 2017. The first teaser was completed at the end of 2019. You can view it here.
But at this point, we finally had something that we were proud to showcase. Something that we believed lived up to our expectations. We submitted Sands of Aura to Epic MegaGrants on February 10th of 2020.
Now the challenge was waiting…
The Atmosphere of Aura…
With morale high and the stress of submission deadlines temporarily lifted, we turned again to analyzing other areas of our project that need more improvement.
At this stage in development, we felt our game lacked the immersive-ness of the RPG’s that we all greatly admired. Our Creative Director had written a fantastic base of lore for us to build from. His wireframes gave us our island concepts and multiple character motivations that paved the way for further design, but something was still missing.
Many elements add to the atmosphere of a game. From lighting and visual effects to ambient audio, to realistic sound effects, each of these can elevate an experience. But we needed something more to help heighten the mood and the emotion of our world. We need a writer and we need a composer.
New Companions…
As fate would have it, we stumbled upon a brilliant composer in the form of Eduardo L! From his first soundtrack to his last, Eduardo’s compositions have elevated our game to new heights. He quickly became a trusted addition to our small team.
Finding a writer proved much more difficult for us because no matter how great a writer someone is, if they don’t sync with the intended vision of your game, it quickly creates major problems. However, after a long search, we found Henry K.
Henry, and his ability to expand upon what little was given to him, was exactly what we were looking for. He was a fantastic wordsmith and he helped take the bones of our world and give them color. Many of the early characters, their way of speech, the world in which they interacted were expanded upon by Henry. He was a significant boon during the early development of Sands of Aura.
With Eduardo and Henry along for the journey, our team was ready to take the next step and plan for an Early Access release.
We knew releasing Sands of Aura into Early Access would be a risk, but our goal was to get players into our world, to get their hands on the gameplay as soon as possible. We knew we had a fun game and that our world was engaging, but we also knew that we couldn’t see everything and that the feedback from a community of players would be invaluable to truly expanding our vision into something great.
Spreading the word…
Marketing for an indie game is challenging. It is no secret that with numerous titles crowding store fronts, it is difficult for any game to stand out. While at first we believed that we could handle this on our own, we quickly discovered that marketing wasn’t a skill we readily possessed, nor was it one we could dedicate a lot of time to learning.
So, we enlisted the aid of a PR company to get us started. We already had a Discord and multiple social media accounts in operation but none were being managed to maximize their effectiveness. With the PR company taking over the marketing reins, we set our sights on our next goal: getting our game into the hands of players!
Steam Game Festival…
Autumn had just passed and with it went the Autumn Game Festival on Steam. Our goal was to be a part of the next one and so we set our sights on having a playable demo ready by February.
The next few months of development were hectic to say the least. There were major crashes, major blocking bugs, inputs that wouldn’t register, nonexistent frame rates. Each of these issues compounded day by day, and with the looming deadline, let’s just say that this was by far the most stressful experience of development for our team. On top of this, we’re only human and we couldn’t help but be plagued by doubt. We were terrified of player perception, terrified again of not living up to standards.
After a period of crunch and a few sleepless nights (something we always try to avoid), we managed to not only get things stabilized but we felt like the demo was actually fun to play! After a nerve wracking submission, the next couple of days offered us a breath of fresh air as Sands of Aura was out! At least in temporary form. It was such a fun experience to finally see others playing our game, uploading videos, streaming it and discussing it on social media.
And luckily, people liked it! Even in its imperfect state. Before the Steam Game Festival our wishlist numbers were in the low hundreds, but after they had grown by over 12k! This was an amazing milestone for our small studio and was validation that we were making the right choices.
Next time we’ll discuss our publisher journey, what it was like bringing our game to E3 and other events, our Early Access launch, and the creation of our wonderful discord community.
Thank you for reading!
- Chashu Entertainment