Well here it is. a little monthly newsletter from your friendly local dev.
Firstly, thank you to all who have wish-listed the game, and followed the community page, Follower growth has been really amazing, especially in the last month. It's so encouraging to see people interested in an RPG set in a prehistoric age - I was a little unsure the idea was going to "hit", but it really has.
Scourge featured in both Turn Based Thursday Fest and Best Indie Games Summer Showcase this month, and the exposure was outstanding. TBTF was on the Steam Front Page for 4 days - I had a hunch it would kick off, but it just exploded. All 400 games in that Fest experienced insane wish-listing, Scourge included.
If you haven't seen it yet, there is a new trailer on the front of the Steam page! Its short and epic. The music is wicked.
But this is actually a Dev report, as I am sure at least some of you are keen to know WHEN WILL THIS GAME COME OUT!! I'm proud to say that Dev is coming along at a good pace. Most likely the game will be well completed and polished by the end of this year. Not that long at all right? Scourge will no longer launch Early Access, and will instead do a normal 1.0 release, with a preview demo for Steam Next Fest. I also tightened up the Act 2-3 levels to make a more focused storyline that will be about 35h long instead of 45h. Still plenty long enough, right? Opinions welcome.
Act 1 is now complete, and fully tested. So thats 14 hours of gameplay across 9 scenes and about 40 different monster/animal/dino types to fight. The test run of Act 1 took 3 months to finish! Instead of a content check it turned out to be a really good way to do QA on everything that appears in the game - every spell, skill, npc chat, and UI element, etc. A lot of it was improved, and 900 bugs/changes were fixed/tweaked...
What that means is that Act 2 and 3 will take just 3 months to construct, leaving about 4 months for QA. Trust me, I won't launch Scourge until its super polished, and as fun to play as possible. RPG's are notoriously difficult to polish so be patient and you will be well rewarded! That said, the game is very playable right now, it totally meets my vision of tabletop-rpg style CRPG with a retro look and unique premise (Dinosaurs) - and the hex based party combat is both performant and fun. I keep finding tricks to improve the visuals too. For example, this week I managed to tech-art a nice looking swimmer so you can now swim in freezing cold lakes and rivers to get to tasty secret loot.
Just finished the 6th ridable mount out of about a dozen - 2 new modular armour sets have been rendered and look fantastic - but I can't show those to you due to spoilers! In fact all promotional art will be limited to Act 1 scenes, the back 2/3 of the game will be entirely spoiler free...so stop asking me if your favourite obscure dino is going to be in it :)
See you next month! Scourge is off to Anime and Video Game Convention in Adelaide, South Australia next month, so come play the new demo build if you're local.
If you are thirsty for weekly updates, BlueSky is the best social platform to find it, or X/Twitter, and please join the discord if you want to ask questions.