It's the beginning of 2025 and it's a good place to talk about the current state of things and our plans. Our track record when it comes to following those plans hasn't been great, but the important thing is that we are still here, we are making progress, and we will make it through. So here's the plan for the next couple of months.
The plan
- Weak DEMO on Steam - mid-end January (that's just in two weeks).
- Strong DEMO and Next Fest - end of February (Next Fest starts February 24th).
- EA release - when it's ready (best case scenario at the very end of March).
I'm calling the first DEMO weak because it will certainly have some things in there that are below our internal quality standard. But given the state of demos on Steam and how niche the game is it should be acceptable. It's not like a million people going to play it anyway and we need the demo out as early as possible to have some time to process feedback and enter Steam Next fest in a better shape.
After Steam Next Fest we will focus on the Early Access release and that's a very complicated matter. Even if we'll manage to complete all production tasks in time there is a high chance we won't be able to release the game for marketing reasons. I don't want to spend too much time talking about this right now, but the game doesn't perform great on the marketing front. I hope that Demo will change that, but even if it will, the game might need more time accumulating wishlists.
But all that is a bit too far from the current moment. Let's talk about the current state of the project.
Where we at
I'd say that the project has gotten to a decent spot when I don't want to die from embarrassment from the thought that a person on the other side of the planet is going to launch the game by themselves. We still have placeholders here and there, some features are missing and certain screens haven't been polished at all. But we started 2024 with, say, 20% of the content ready and now we have, maybe, 20% missing.
Let's break down this number a bit. Here are my naive estimates:
Codebase: 90%
Gameplay content: 75%
Art: 85%
Polishing: 60%
Sounds and Music: 65%
Marketing: 25%
Miscellaneous: 10%
Codebase
The codebase for the project turned out to be massive. So, the missing 10% are still a lot of code that needs to be written. But I don't think we have any more multiweek features left.
And the best part about the code is that more than half of it we will be able to reuse in the next projects.
Gameplay
Right now the game has close to 200 nodes. Almost 35 of them are Cores. I think 50 Cores is a good number to aim for. With 50 Cores you can have 3 runs 15 levels deep each and not get bored by repeat encounters.
Then, there are ~40 Aspects in the game right now and this number should be close to 100. There are a ton of cool things that can be done here, but I can't afford spending time on this yet. Similar to Cores 75 Aspects seems like a good number here given that 5x5 Aspect Matrix contains 25.
And then we need to add a ton more levels and map segments. That's the easiest part of all this (although balancing them all would take time).
There are certain gameplay features that I want to add. For example BITS (game resources that are placed on exhausted nodes), SCRIPTS (similar to items, but reusable and with activation costs paid in Data) and Challenges. But I think they can wait until after the early access release.
Overall, I can talk about the gameplay plans for NET.CRAWL for hours. After all that's what I've been thinking the most about for the past 2 years.
Art
I'm very happy with how the project turned out visually. It's very refreshing to see 0 placeholders on the first page of the Gallery:
There are maybe just a couple more visual things we need to figure out (for example a table to show upcoming trace/firewall pairs, and BITS and SCRIPTS that we are only going to add later). But overall I expect very few problems with art going further.
Polishing
This one is tough. It takes so much effort to do this stuff. I feel that's because we don't have enough experience shipping stuff.
Sounds and Music
We have 6 tracks already written for the game. 3 more the composer already started working on. All the tracks are really cool in my opinion.
Finding the right sounds turned out to be a much harder task. Our sound designer doesn't play the same games as me and Alex, so finding the common ground wasn't easy. We are still figuring some stuff out.
Marketing
Here we haven't done much apart from occasional posts on reddit and compiling a very solid (imho) teaser trailer.
The sad reality is that the game doesn't have great marketability and we don't have enough experience and resources to do this right. The wise thing here is to team up with a publisher but that's easier said than done.
Publisher or not, there are many things we'll have to figure out on this front.
Miscellaneous
Here we can list such things as localizations, controller support, wide screen and steam deck support, etc. We have done much here apart from localizations. None of those things are particularly hard, but all together they will easily consume a full month or more of our time.
Conclusion
Well, that was a lot of words, and writing all that made me realize that perhaps we have a lot more things to do than I thought just a few hours ago. That doesn't matter much though. What matters is that the intermediate goals are clear and we still have resources to keep pushing. And we will.
Thank you for reading
Denis (ObsoleteOne)