Hey friends - it's been a hot minute since the last devlog, 4 months to be exact! Let me catch you up on the everything that's been going on.
Finishing Touches
In the last post I was finishing up the final region and mapping everything out in Tiled. After that was done I then went and placed all of the flora - grass, trees, shrubs, algae etc.
I still needed to add all the decoration for each region, as well as populate all of the indoor rooms - and I needed to draw all of that too! Here you can see the entire world map, plus all of the rooms. At this point I was playtesting things with Ash (who previously did QA for APICO!), so she was testing all the mechanics and all the routing.
Even though the world was pretty 'empty', what was needed to play and beat the game was there, it just didn't have all the setpieces I wanted yet.
Story Time
December was a lot of testing and playtesting and SO much writing - up until this point most dialogue and notes in the game were just stubs, but I needed to send off everything to Warlocs who would be localising the game in the new year.
Usually I have a bunch of screenshots and videos p. much for every week of the year piling up on my desktop, but December was mostly empty due to me just writing for the whole thing. I did a few fixes here and there as they came up so Ash could continue when she got stuck.
I'd written out the entire story in one document, and from that taken pieces to put in the game through dialogue or environment decor or notes - my hope being people can then piece it all together themselves without some minor points being spelled out exactly.
Towards the end of December I'd finished off pretty much everything, and had Future Friends and my brother Jamie, have some proofreading and also just generally picking the story for any holes or stuff that didn't quite make sense.
In the end the final word count is somewhere between 35k - 37k!
Interior Decorator
With the writing finished up, I took some time to enjoy the christmas break and the new year, then I started working on the decoration and room designs.
I already had a bunch of stuff drawn for the first region, as that was already decorated, so I started with those rooms using all the stuff I'd already drawn then adding new things as needed until I was happy with the look of them.
I wanted to make sure interactable items were super clear, but also make the rooms feel lived in and used. Some later rooms would have some storytelling clues in them too, so I just wanted to have a broad range of stuff I could put inside to build the scenes I wanted.
Seeing the rooms start to shape up was really satisfying, it finally felt like it was all coming together. While designing the rooms I also updated the overworld areas with some of the new decor I was drawing, just to make it all fit together.
At this point I knew all of the story, all of the notes and what they'd say, the routes the player can take - so all of that helped shape what things I needed to draw and where to put them.
At this point I also was planning to do a playtest of the game. I knew the first tutorial area was solid, but I wanted to test a bit further than that and see how players got on with the first 'main' region of the game.
So I prioritised designing and decorating the central area, that links the first region to the 3 main ones, and the first of the main regions - Kindergarten.
I tried to work on a single region at a time only, so I could focus on the story being told in that area and the day-to-day that would of happened in the pond before the storm that would then shape the functionality needed there.
Once I finished up those 3 regions, the game was starting to be ready for playtesting! However I still had a lot of time left - this was around the second week of January still, so I spend pretty much the whole of January designing and decorating every other region in the game.
The way the game is setup is it pulls all objects from the main map, then only loads in what's needed - so all the time I added new decoration objects, I could see those changes in game right away without needing to make a new save every time. This meant Ash could keep plugging away testing the game and slowly see all the rooms and overworld get populated as she went.
Early on when making a game it can get pretty easy to build things in a really unflexible way, so for a long time we all had to just wipe our saves and make new ones whenever I added some new stuff and it was a while before that was annoying enough to be worth spending time on changing.
Around the middle of January I got the playtest build approved by steam and then spent a bunch of time testing and retesting it to make sure nothing big broke immedietely, as well as added the gamepad functionality to the game!
Playtesting
Now it was time for the playtest! In the end a few 1000 frogs took part in playing, and I got some really lovely feedback. I was pleasently surprised that the parts of the game I was most worried about (the ancestry genetics), people didn't really have a problem with - I was getting reports from people in the Kindergarten region so they'd already aced the ancestry stuff to get to that point.
A lot of the feedback was signposting stuff clearer, routing tweaks, and adding some extra hints to certain things. There is a certain amount of mystery to Mudborne - you find a lot of things that you won't be able to make sense of until later, so it was a balance trying to keep that mystery while making sure players were not entirely frustrated.
Some stuff added based off player feedback included: added clearer genetic 'jumps' to the book entries so you could quickly see what you needed to do without hovering the actual trait column UIs, adding your own custom markers to the map, and some tweaks the basic machines that people use most commonly.
Overall I was very happy with the playtest - it made me feel a bit better about the game as until this point like 10 people had played the game in it's entirety, and working on something for so long by yourself you start to have... Doubts.
Demo Upgrade
With the playtest ended I spent some time working through all the bugs and features that came from it, and then with the changes made, I split off the first region of the game to make the new demo.
The existing demo was fine, and had it's own different 'spawning pools' region, but the game had come so far, both visually and mechanically, that I wanted to upgrade it and make sure that it represented the game now. I had also got things working nicely on Steam Deck, so I wanted that to be an option for the demo too.
The new demo was released alongside the announcement that the game would be dropped on March 20th, World Frog Day! I also spent some time getting new screenshots for Steam, as well as a bunch of clips from the game to use for trailers later on.
Final Stetch
This was around the start of February now, and I still had quite a few things on my to-do list. I needed to add the languages to the game so Warlocs could test the localisation properly, I needed to finish adding the mod support, I needed to write about 8 more music tracks (i did the music myself this time!), I had a lot of art to draw, and I had a list of bugs to fix longer than both my monitors combined!
I'd say it's definitely around here the real stress started, and lots of sleepless nights, as I tried to get through all of the stuff left outstanding.
After a few very long weeks I managed to get on top of everything though. The LQA went well, with minimal changes needed for the game to account for all the languages, the bugs ended up all being mostly quick to fix and finished up all the art over the course of a week!
NextFest
Steam NextFest was fast approaching, so I spent some time triple-checking the new demo - it had been live for a few weeks already but never hurts to check again (and again).
Overall nothing major came out of nextfest (apart from a lot of wishlists!) so it was honestly quite a relief that I didn't suddenly have another 100 bugs to fix, as it was now getting to the end of February, and while I was feeling better about what was left to do I really did need all the time I had.
The end of february I had to do some APICO stuff for consoles, with the 4.3 patches finally coming to Switch + PS, then I came back and finished up some last bits of the game.
I was also able to work through a list of "nice-to-haves", mostly small details or polish that I didn't know if I'd have time to do, so they were put to the side during development to focus on the important stuff - but I had some time now to work through them, including the very silly 'fly fishing' mechanic.
End In Sight
I finished up all the music - I'd already sat down and created the 'main' parts of each of the tracks, I just needed to actually compose the full tracks, so I spent a few days finishing all of them up.
I then ran through the entire game end-to-end, once on PC with MKB, and once on Steam Deck. The PC run was mostly fine, couple small bugs, but also some routing stuff that I wanted to change as it didn't feel like it flowed nicely to me.
The Steam Deck run showed up a lot of bugs, I hadn't really played through on gamepad much at all tbh, so that's what I get! However they were all mostly easy to fix, and on the second playthrough there was some other small things I tweaked on the routing of the game - to the point where I finally felt happy about how it all felt.
I had already added the mod support at this point and wrote up a small modding guide, but I also wanted to have some example mods to get people started as Mudborne modding is a bit more technical and you're left to work out what you want to do using the games own code.
I added an example language mod, a new frog mod, and a mod that autoplants acorns when you chop trees - each showing some different areas of the game code and how you can change things.
At that point, with a few days left, I was done! Nothing left on my list, no more bugs to fix. Very close now...
One Day Left
So here we are! One more day before I press the button and release this game, a game that started as a silly gamejam entry 2 years ago, a game I've spent almost 9 months working on solidly.
I feel a lot of things right now. I'm stressed over bugs I don't know exist, like I'm straight up expecting people to play it and the game crashes in the first minute, even though I've put so many hours into playing and testing and retesting.
I'm nervous of what people will make of this game. Will they love it, will they hate it, will I be greeted with a wave of negative reviews over things I never considered, am I actually just a fraud, will it just be lost to the algorithm and flop.
I'm also worried in general about my gamedev future, this is the first time I'm releasing a game I am actually financially depending on - the whole time I was working on APICO I had a job, even with the content updates I was working part-time.
This will be the first game since quitting all of that and working on game development full time, and so it's success decides how long I get to keep doing this stupid job I hate and love so much. It's been quite different doing something creatively with that threat looming over you.
But I am happy with what I've made. I think it's such a fun little game, a blend of lots of different interesting mechanics. The story is interesting, and rewarding for those who like to explore and piece together a puzzle. It's a game that I wish I could of played growing up. And it's been so rewarding to look back at APICO and see how I've grown as a developer and artist and make something I never thought I'd be capable of doing.
I very much want to sleep for like a month, and never look at a computer again, but also I'm already looking forward to the next game - a glutton for punishment!
For everyone who's played the old demo, the new demo, joined the playtest, is excited for the release tomorrow - thank you all so much for your support and excitement. I can't wait for you to all get your slimy green hands on it.
~ Ell <3