Welcome back Knights-To-Be,
With the day of 1.0 just three days out, our minds are filled not only with excitement but with anticipation of just how much we will learn from this experience. Each of our subsequent releases, be it a prototype, a playable demo, or our Early Access release, has taught us so much about ourselves and Sands of Aura. We’re eagerly looking forward to what 1.0 has to teach us as well. With that in mind, I’d like to recount some of our previous releases and reflect on what those experiences taught us.
A knock at the door….
Not only did Sands of Aura generate interest among players at the Steam Winter Game Festival, it also captured the interest of several publishers! There was a lot we learned during this process and a lot of outstanding people that we met—many of whom we’ve kept in touch with despite deciding not to work together. We learned more about what Sands of Aura is and isn't during those months than we did during development. It was an eye-opening experience. But after months of meetings, of pitches, of important considerations regarding Sand of Aura’s future, we ultimately elected to partner with our current publisher, Freedom Games.
Freedom at the time was a brand new indie publisher who had yet to announce themselves. They were like us, new and brimming with excitement. Not only did they align with our vision for Sands of Aura, but they had a passion for their role in the industry that attracted us to them.
Our new partners had been hard at work preparing for a little show called E3. It was also the first year that E3 and many other game shows were conducted digitally due to the pandemic. During this E3, our publisher was able to get us set up with some memorable one-on-one interviews with members of the press to give our little game a try.
Trailer shown at E3.
For the next couple of months, we participated in a few more shows and spoke with the press at each of those events. It was an exciting time of the year for us as we were able to gauge interests and talk about Sands of Aura for the first time, publicly.
At the same time, during the summer of 2021, we finally received an update on our Epic MegaGrant submission in February 2020. They have approved our submission for Sands of Aura to be part of their program!
We were elated, everything seemed to fall our way. We have received a wonderful reception at the Winter Steam Game Festival, we have secured a partnership with a publisher, we have been accepted as a MegaGrant Recipient, and our roadmap to Early Access was progressing smoothly.
Early Access Launches!
By the close of summer 2021, our team of nine had grown to a team of twenty. While the additional help brought several advantages, it also was a challenging experience learning to manage a team of nearly double our original size. Despite that, and despite us having so much to do for the Early Access launch just a couple of months away, we elected to add voice acting to our game with the intent of securing just one more element that would bring life to our world.
The initial plan wasn’t to include voice acting, but when creating our Early Access launch trailer and hearing the very talented work of Rhiannon M as our narrator…we quickly reconsidered. To say we were blown away would be a major understatement. Rhiannon’s talent revealed just what we’d be missing without quality voice work and so, very soon after recording her lines for the trailer, we began the grueling process of getting our other characters voiced.
In fact, it was our honor to have Rhiannon cast for the role of Aura, herself! (among other roles)
If you haven’t already guessed, two weeks before our expected Early Access launch date, things began to catch fire. There were performance issues, low frame rates, quest bugs, combat problems. While it wouldn’t be a Chashu Entertainment release without a little drama and chaos, luckily, we now had eleven more team members with us to weather the storm. So, with a lot of effort from everyone, and a lot of unhealthy meals in front of our computers, we narrowly crossed the finish line and officially launched Sands of Aura in Early Access on October 21st of 2021!
We’d made it, Sands of Aura was officially in the hands of our players. We were ready for feedback. Ready to improve our game. Ready to look at criticism in the face.
Or at least, that’s what we thought…
Our first hurdle… Not Recommended
While we had anticipated there would be unforeseen issues missed by our team before the Early Access launch, we had planned on being as vigilant as possible to address issues as soon as they crept up. This is exactly what we did. An issue would be reported, we would race to fix it and push out to our players. What we didn’t expect was just what an impact the negative reviews would have on our team.
Reviews during Early Access were quite disheartening. We didn’t understand it. Each negative review cratered our morale more than the last. We believed in our game. We believed there was something great there. Maybe it was just that our players didn’t understand it? Maybe their opinions were misguided.
I’m sure you can tell how flawed this way of thinking was. It was defensive, rigid. We weren’t listening. Quickly we realized the problem wasn’t with our players but with ourselves, with our designs. It had been our job to communicate the intent of the game, to make sure its systems were clear and concise.
Luckily, we adjusted our outlook rather quickly and began to look and trust our players’ perspectives and used their reviews as a springboard to find exactly where we were letting them down.
We dove into reviews and into the valuable feedback received through our discord. While many spoke of quest confusion, of balance issues and item costs, the crux of the problem appeared to be combat. Unfortunately, that was going to be the most difficult issue to solve.
Fixing anything that has a subjective “feeling” to it is always going to be a challenging prospect. As well, most of the feedback regarding it struggled at pointing to something specific, which is at no fault of the reviewers. It’s just “feeling” is a hard thing to pin down. Regardless, we knew something was wrong, and at least that gave us some direction to begin exploring.
The first of our changes came about a week after launch and was a quick combat patch which addressed the few mentions of responsiveness. where we worked to improve a lack of responsiveness, adjusted speeds, damages, and adding more visuals to combat. The reception to those changes were better, but not perfect. At this point, it would have to temporarily suffice while we spent more time diving into the core design principles around combat.
While a few members of the team focused their efforts on our combat, others began addressing another big concern.
The cost of a beauty…
The next pressing issue we needed to address was that of gameplay performance. Our world was beautiful at its current state but there was frustration among our players about how its current presentation was impacting performance. After many months of consideration, we realized that to address the core of most performance problems we were going to have to change the way we loaded islands into player view. To accomplish this, we expanded the size of our world to keep the islands from loading in simultaneously which was what we discovered was a main contributor to the throttling performance.
Originally the islands were clustered much closer together to allow room for even more islands else where in the world, this caused unforeseen issues with performances, island progression and story development as well.
Before Reshaping Talamhel
After some trial and error, we decided that this would be the proper placement and distance of our islands that also made the progression of the game to flow much better.
After Reshaping Talamhel
As this was occurring, our team was also working on solutions for how to improve combat. We couldn’t fix everything about it right away but after considering a lot of player feedback we spent a few months updating the way Spellblades worked in combat. Despite its appearance, this was a significant change on our end, and it improved our combat ever so slightly.
With patch 0.01.08, we finally felt a small sense of relief. Sands of Aura wasn’t perfect and there were still a lot of improvements to make for us to get to where we wanted but we were getting feedback that our changes were improving things, and this was enough to raise our studio’s morale.
We weren’t alone…
The biggest boon to our studio during this trying time was that we attracted very passionate individuals to our discord. Their discussions of and passion towards Sands of Aura was inspirational for us. It was through them, our Mentor Knights, that we got a renewed sense of what we were working towards.
With a few patches behind us, it was time to commit all our energy to our next major content patch, 0.02.00, the Twin Thorns. To prepare for this we need to take the next step toward growing our team and growing our studio.
Thank you for reading!
- Chashu Entertainment