Hello friends!
Here we are, a new Nova's Diary. It's been a long while.
You're probably wondering why we're here now.
You're also probably wondering where we've been these past few months, and what we plan to do.
But before we delve into that, I would like to give a huge thanks to user Sekoree on behalf of Safe Place, for developing a solution for the infinite loading bug in the meanwhile. It shouldn't have been your duty to try and fix our game, but we were glad to see this act of initiative and selflessness.
Now, allow me to give you a little bit of a rundown from where we left off...
[ RE: PAST ]
After the release of Venice 2089 back in October, we were admittedly pretty much done.
We had been working on the game for three years with little to no pause, so when it finally released, all we wanted to do was lie down, rest and find something to do next.
And so, while we were snooping around for opportunities, sidegigs et cetera, Venice 2089 won the Red Bull Indie Forge.
(In the back are some of us in Milan, after a post-win interview in December 2022)
For context: The Red Bull Indie Forge is a contest organized by Red Bull, open to all italian indie developers with the intent of promoting the italian indie scene both nationally and abroad.
It was very much a surprise to us. Our competition was strong, and personally speaking, with much more experience and budget than us, so I didn't quite expect us to win.
And yet we did. We won.
The next few weeks have been all about interviews and livestreams, as well as enjoying one of our prizes: a team of modelers, concept artists and VFX artists who would work with whatever we wanted for a fixed period of time.
(We may or may not asked them to produce material for something we are working on 👀)
So yeah, Venice 2089 is now literally an award-winning title.
And while all that was happening, we also started working on a joint project with different schools in our region of Veneto, where after some introductory lessons, kids and teens created a point-and-click adventure type game with our guidance. Some of us are already working as teachers and educators
on the side, so this project was right up our corner...
The game turned out pretty nice too!
It's a visual novel featuring a young student traveling to the past through videogame, where after meeting the famous painter Giotto, they work together so that the protagonist can return home and finish his homework that is (ironically) about Giotto.
Maybe a little cliche, but considering the game's been created by young students too, it's rather inspiring!
[ RE: VENICE 2089 ]
Now, let's talk about Venice once again.
First of all, sorry for how we handled the communication these recent months, especially when it came to bug reporting, but also generally engaging with the community.
Regarding bug-reports and fixes per se, the reason as of why we's been very slow in our response is that as of now we are down to just one programmer, who works on bugs on his spare time, whenever he's not needed on other projects. Our previous strategy of fast fixing cycles did not work, as well as our intention of incrementing our presence in the Discussion tab, therefore we rolled back to "fix everything wrong and push one big update"
That being said, we are working on that big update: a bundle of fixes and whatnot for the multitude of bugs and errors you all reported in these recent months. I know it's late, but still, it should fix whatever plagued your game. If not, tell us and we'll get back to it.
The update will come out next month.
And now you may be thinking: "Why are you making another Nova's Diary then?" That is because there are things on the way for Venice.
Straight up, Venice 2089 is going to release on all major consoles.
This was possible thanks to the support of Fantastico Studio, an italian B2B team that primarily works on porting games; they really liked the idea of Venice 2089 and we sure liked the idea of not only being able to bring Venice to other platforms, but to have someone else do that for us too, since we lack the personnel and experience.
Of course, it'll still take some time to finish up a couple of things, but the bulk of it is done, so don't expect to wait too long before being able to play Venice 2089 on Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.
Which opens up another argument: We're most likely going to change the price of Venice 2089.
This is mainly something that has to do with pricing in different stores, and agreements, conditions and whatnot, but it's also something that we pondered for some time after the release. Not that Venice is in a bad spot when it comes to its price, but it could help it being lower especially in console markets. Plus Steam has a thing for price parity.
We're still evaluating all possibilities, and I'm sure we'll talk about it extensively in the future. First thing we know, is that if a price change happens, whoever bought Venice at the current price will not be left in the dust...
Oh, and we'd also like to hear your feedback about it, so if you have anything to say about these news, do let us know.
[ RE: FUTURE ]
So, what exactly is our plan?
As you might have guessed, we do have something going on.
We're still early in the process, so it's quite soon to show something. Plus we are also trying to make sure that whatever comes next, it'll be enough for us to stick around (and then some!).
Regarding the future of Venice, with the advent of a console release we had the possibility of coming back and fix some stuff, but in our current situation it may be that some bugs still persists. As written above, let us know and I assure you we'll get back on it as soon as we can.
Now, because of everything we talked about, it's very plausible that another devlog is going to be on its way in the future, but for the time being that's all from us, friends!
...It feels good to get back to writing devlogs, I honestly missed it very much.
Have a great June, happy Pride Month and see you all next time! 💜🏳️🌈
