Hello and thank you so much for joining us for another Boss 101 update! We hope you’re doing excellently.
As you know –bugs and polish continue. This week we have a question from a fan and process ideations to share so let’s get cracking!
Upgrade Room Process
So the upgrade room has all these sweet little stickers to show various upgrade levels. They help with indicating what you are buying by giving a sense of purpose. We’re going to peel back the curtain right now and show you why things are the way they are and how we got here.
Let’s start with the basic stuff. Here’s a bounty sticker and how it’s assembled from various parts. As you might guess these parts are for interchangeability. We shuffle them around for different upgrades and we get to keep that jazzy layout. SAVES TIME TOO!
Basic setup for bounty
Here’s the various levels of the Bounty upgrade
When you are in the Make a Boss the color of the money is determined by your bounty level. (and corresponds to the dollar sign icon color)
Legendary upgrade – see how it colors the money display golden!
Examples of the shield patterns for the various upgrades
Once ONE upgrade is in place it’s a relatively painless procedure to start laying out the other upgrades. . .
Machine gun
Machine gun with levels
Other upgrade background samples
You see how we are? Making things as pretty as possible and fun as we can!
Here’s the whole bloody thing in action! You even get an achievement for completing the bounty upgrade.
You like that one? We hope so!
How’s the game going? GLAD YOU ASKED!
We get this question a lot because people care and we know you do too! You know you can always head to the Steam forums to speak with us directly. We try to get around to each and every question!
We had a fan ask us (for all the right reasons) about shipping the game NOW and maybe adding in little features after to round things out. Now I would NOT assume this person was asking to rush or crap out the game. I think the intent was to ask about perhaps holding out on some non-essential tidbit or something and just hitting the fun basics. Well, the deal here is Boss 101 has GOT to be our best. You deserve no less and most importantly we need to be true to OURSELVES and BRING YOU OUR BEST.
I gave a long answer to their question in the Steam Forums but I wanted to reiterate one of the general points. It was about something like a quicker release schedule and working in some neat things AFTER we ship.
What about Early Access or major updates to complete unfinished features with patches, etc
Generally speaking the above solutions are basically making you buy an unfinished product. That is not our goal. We haven’t ever had nor currently have plans to do any of those. We want you to have a finished game at $9.99. That might seem a little lofty but how many games have you seen lately which seem to have been rushed to hit a release date? I can think of a few. I can also think of a few games that while they seem bug free also seem feature light. We want YOU to LOVE Boss 101. Ideally, we want you to think “I got a FRICKING AWESOME DEAL and this game is FUN!”
While we know we have a savvy fan base following our development we can’t say everyone would be understanding of an early or unfinished release. You can check YouTube or Steam reviews for many examples of devs getting pummeled by effectively shoveling a game out early. People don’t like that. We don’t like that. We’re looking to avoid it.
Does that mean Boss 101 will be a flawless masterpiece? Hmmm, maybe not but let’s let time be that judge. What we CAN tell you is Boss 101 will be the best game we can possibly deliver given our time, money and resources. We want the BEST for you.
Come on people – we’re doing this not just for you but for us too. When you plunk down your $9.99 we want to knock you OVER with the fun of Boss 101.
Remember friends - be yourself, BELIEVE in yourself and live your dreams!
Best,
-Tim