Aloha Crew, Azrael here with an announcement!
Our plan has been to release Hope: A Sky Full of Ghosts episodically. That would give us the opportunity to provide each episode when it's ready while continuing to work on the next part of the story. It sounded logical and a great compromise for an indie team of two people looking to create a game while also having full-time jobs and families.
As we closed "Episode 0" this year, we started to encounter questions about how to implement the episodic nature of our vision, but we had more urgent matters to attend to. We needed to get ready for GeekFest West and Seattle Indies eXpo.
That meant that Azrael and Wil from earlier in the year decided those questions should be answered by Azrael and Wil from the future in their wiser and more experienced selves.
Well, girls, weren't past Azrael and Wil naïve? We are not that wise now, and we haven't spent those experience points much better yet, but the time has come, and after the feedback we received at GFW and SIX, we need to face the music.
Providing episodic content has two main facets that we needed to address: the player experience and the developing experience.
Player Experience perspective.
We came to the realization that we hated having to wait for a week to watch a new episode of The Mandalorian. And we don't have Star Wars' or Disney's clout to make the conversation of our game be a topical subject "for the masses", nor we have that level of an interested audience to lever. So, at best, the most engaged player wouldn't be happy, and at worst everyone would forget about us while we developed the next bit of story.
Developing Experience perspective.
We thought we had this down. We understood the challenges of episodic content. Wrong! Turns out that developing the framework to bridge one episode onto the next and have Steam handle it and our engine manage saves and creating recaps at the start of each episode is... a lot... a lot of work.
We could put the effort in and do the work it takes to make it episodic OR we could just make the game and skip all those extra features that no one really likes. And that won't even be needed once the full game is out.
The last nail in the episodic coffin was asking ourselves: Will the story be better served by an episodic approach?
The answer was a definite "NO".
So, yesterday, on our Sprint Planning meeting we laid 'episodic' to rest, kissed its forehead and let it float away to its very own Viking funeral with the very clear understanding of why no one does this type of content (except a few very famous developers). It's just not worth it.
I guess this is just a really long way of coming to the conclusion that 99% of the industry has already come to and we are going to develop the game as a standalone full experience.
Fly Free.