Hello! Welcome to the very first...
2024 Year in Review
2024 was an important year for the project. I had my first ever playtests. Scope creep was nipped in the bud, establishing a more attainable vision. The demo was released! There are so many things to cover, but I'll start from the beginning
First, things got off to a rocky start when I spent 4 months implementing a game feature that I ultimately had to cut. I tried to make a full-on first-person dungeon crawler section that would have been accessed after you go down the dark staircase.
It was a cool idea and all, but as I would have wanted to make multiple of these "alternate game modes" for the full game, ~5 months of dev time (I started working on it before the new year) just for this one isolated experience did not seem like a good investment of time. So ultimately I scaled back, saving at least another 1-2 years of dev after wasting 5 months.
Taking a month off to mourn this decision, I came back in the summer time to focus on releasing the demo. Many weeks of playtesting and bug fixing ensued, and what I thought would just be a 1-month turnaround until the demo turned into 3. Finally in August, the demo came out! I didn't expect much, but as of writing this, it has amassed 1200 downloads and 120 unique players. Not bad for a game that had no marketing, no publisher, and no online presence leading up the the launch. The rest of the year went by pretty smoothly. I had a lot of new ideas for new areas and slowly churned out characters, buildings, and scenes for them.
So what's next? Well, in addition to launching the demo this year, I also wanted to get a good understanding of my average working speed and use it to roughly estimate how long I need to finish the full game. Here is what I've estimated:
2025 Will be the Year of Content
There is so much content I need to make for this thing. There will be 5 main areas about as big as the town, if not bigger. Those areas are:
- The Swamp (30% done)
- Farm Town (40% done)
- Magic City (2% done)
- Cyber Desert (Not Started)
- Mysterious Forest (Not Started)
The percentages listed shows how much I was able to complete between September and December of this year. Because of ~3 weeks of holiday traveling and UFO 50 (I was completely absorbed for over a month) I only had about 2 months of full working capacity. This makes me optimistic that I will be able to reach at least 80% completion in each area in the first 10 months of 2025. But of course, the game wont be that near done by then, not even close...
2026 Will be the Year of Polish
Even though I don't think all the base-level content will be finished by 2026, I should still have a clear picture of every major experience the game will have. I'm still kind of winging it right now on future game design, puzzles, and even the story. But I am known to work best when I make content first, and then design around it. For example, one day I could be bored and make a little bird wizard. When I have to implement him, it will set off a chain reaction of ideas. Who is this character? Does he have any friends? Maybe he could live in a large birdhouse hidden in the forest. And eventually, there would be a quest where you have to bring him some bird seed in exchange for something. I could never dream up such a thing starting with nothing, I need a catalyst. So, coming into 2026, I will have many catalysts and reactions that have gone off that I will need to organize, polish and finalize. Giving myself a full year to do this seems pretty generous right now, but I'd rather overestimate since I have no idea what challenges I'll be up against!
2027 and... beyond?
In 2027, I expect to move fully into playtesting and bug fixing. I'll probably need a few months for this, which lands me in an early-to-mid 2027 release date. Will I actually hit this goal? Who knows, but it's nice to have something in mind.
We shall see if my forecast changes in the coming year. Overall, I am very excited! I'll be posting infrequent updates on my Bluesky account here if you want to follow along.
Until next time stay magical, and thank you for reading!