After working crazy hours for the last few months we’re taking a break (mostly) until the New Year, so I thought I’d take the time to recap what we’ve been up to for the year and look at what remains to be done.
Originally the plan was to release around Christmas 2021 (i.e., now-ish) but a bug called “not being ready” came up and we’re still working to resolve it. We also had some marketing opportunities we were hoping to leverage fall through, so we’ve bumped the release date to 2022.
On the one hand the delayed release is disappointing, on the other, it does allow us to do things like get voice acting for the entire game recorded, which has been what we’ve been working on a lot for the last week or two. About 75% of the game script has been recorded with the rest slated to be finished in January. Due to the complexities of the way time flows in Reina & Jericho this has been an interesting challenge. One character meets Reina and converses with her “for the first time” on up to four different occasions and never actually meets her a second time, despite Reina having numerous encounters with them. Time travel stories can get weird.
Looking back, we’ve had a ton of development on the game in 2021. We had two major demo events at PAX and Steam Next Fest and we got a ton of good feedback. This has led to improvements in the overall game feel, animation quality, level design and routing, and visuals (some of the changes have made it into the demo, but most have not). We’ve had the chance to work with a lot of talented artists and designers to help improve the game, and the efforts have really added up. It’s so strange to look at the reveal trailer for the game – it was pretty rough!
In terms of the remaining work on the game, I have talked a lot about boss fights and biome design aesthetics, and those account for the bulk of what is left. There’s also a decent chunk of cutscene work that needs to be done, some enemies that need implementation and the usual testing/bugfixing. And then we are done. Virtually all of the coding is done, we are just stuck on matters of content creation and testing out that content. Within that there is a lot left to do but we have come so far towards the finish line in 2021. I’m looking forward to sharing the finished product soon!