Kept You Waiting, Huh?
I know you all have been waiting for some news, so today I wanted to take some time and share a bunch of stuff. It'll be a lengthy post where I go over the latest developments and go into detail about what to expect over the next couple of months.
For the past 2+ years I have been looking at this splash screen while booting up the editor. Everyday I start the editor up I stare at it and it always feels like coming home. It's kind of weird that not too long from now I might not see it as much as I do now. What I'm saying is that I'm reaching the end of development and not too long from now I won't be looking at that image as much as I do now.
Chapter 4 (Part One)
Initially I planned to have five chapters to wrap up the story but while working on chapter 4 I realized that cutting the story up into two chapters would distort the flow of the narrative. I felt that both chapters would be too short in my opinion as well. As the story is progressing at the moment I feel that heading straight towards the ending is the best way to go forward.
This means that chapter 4 as a whole will be quite long. Not insanely long, but a proper solid chunk of gameplay. I will release chapter 4 in two parts however. Both parts will cover a good chunk of narrative however and I think everyone is waiting for something new to play so that's also one of the reasons.
So with that said it means that the game isgetting closer and closer to wrapping up the main narrative. I have split the remaining production time into three phases.
- Phase 1: Release Chapter 4 - Part One to the public. (I covered the details above)
- Phase 2: Release Chapter 4 - Part Two to the public. Part two will contain the narrative's conclusion. It will also contain a nice gameplay section where I mash up as much of the existing gameplay elements and create a bit more of a challenge while keeping true to the game's overall accessible design philosophy.
- Phase 3: Polish. Phase 3 will have me going back and forth into different levels and gameplay mechanics and brush out as many bugs as possible while doing a final pass on all the levels. This may vary from re-doing some of the inner mechanics or adding more detail, fixing up grammar mistakes and things like that. This means that everyone will be able to experience the full game and provide feedback so that I may adjust or add/remove whatever is in the game's best interest. I will also add two more sections to the ship that the player will be able to access at a certain point before the end-game portion. So hopefully everyone who has already finished the game may find a very good reason to go re-play your favorite chapter(s) to see what they missed. The chapter selection is there to make sure you'll be able to do just that. I will also deal with adding in the final rewards regarding our backers that also made this game a possibility from our old Kickstarter campaign.
The STARDROP Community (And What It did For Me)
This community is something else. When I got the game on Steam I was very, very weary about the kinds of communities that I have seen here on the platform. But it has been the exact contrary and I'm blessed with amazing individuals who have been incredibly supportive.
As some of you know my PC broke down after my trip. I was getting by using my NUC but I was saving money to get me an eGPU and thanks to a community member who donated to this cause I was able to get one much sooner than I planned. An incredible huge thank you to Cybrviper for me to be able to get a Mantiz Venuz which is currently rocking my Galax Geforce GTX 1060 - White Edition. Thanks to having the eGPU case I suddenly have a better working station than my old PC. It has helped speed up development in technical terms so I am incredibly appreciative of the support.
Behold my current setup
The development of STARDROP has been the biggest struggle in my life. This sounds negative and I have to admit that I don't know if I can go through a development cycle like this again. It all depends how well the game will be received once it goes out of Early Access and if I can sustain myself through it to work on a new title and also add new stuff to the base game (Which I still want to do).
I also learned that just being myself and be as open as possible towards everyone is the best thing any developer can do. I never liked the PR speak that most developers use or try to emulate and while I have to keep my tone a certain way and use proper wording etc, I can be myself.
It has taken me longer than I planned to get to this stage in development but I believe it's all for the better. I was able to take my time to truly flesh out the story, think about level design. Tweak certain elements, suddenly come up with a new spin or a new game mechanic so I am happy I was allowed to go this route.
I think it's interesting to note that I'm more of an old school game dev. I grew up with the Atari, NES, SNES all the way to the gamecube PS2 era and beyond. As well as the early FPS games like Duke 3D, Quake and Half-Life and it has shaped a lot of how I view games today. I always try to stay up to date but to be honest I'm not the biggest fan of current day trends in most games. I'll be pushing 40 in a couple of years and I'm late to the whole game developer thing. I've been modding since 2007, worked on Contagion as a level designer and now I'm at the helm of my own game. I love doing this however and I want to keep doing this. I have a bunch of ideas that I would love to bring to life. Games and stories that will have a lot in common with STARDROP in some ways yet be completely different in others. Whatever happens in the future I wanted to thank you all for at least allowing me to get this far. I'm excited to start wrapping up the story and I believe the ending is gonna be worth it.
How You Can Help
I would like to ask for your help too, one more time. I added a new support page on our main website where you can find ways to contact myself or the team if you need help or just want to chat about the game, or life. I also listed ways where you can support us in various ways. I added these in there because over time I've received a number of people wanting to help so I decided that having a dedicated page would be the best option.
STARDROP - Support Page
Sensi
I wanted to also take some time to inform you all that Sensi has not been able to help me with play testing. I don't want to disclose too much of his private information but he has had to deal with an illness that doctors cannot find the cause of. He's been dealing with it when he joined but he was okay. Last year around December it seemed to worsen and he hasn't been able to even sit behind his PC ever since. He's been the number one supporter ever since the early alpha stages and not having him around has been very, very noticeable. He's the one guy who would always bring the positive side of everything. And in this day and age where so much negativity exists he was such an awesome person to hang out with. I still email with him once in a while but it's tough for him to even write an email. I've kept him on the team and will continue to do so for when he will return. I will stay optimistic and hope they will be able to figure out what's wrong with him and properly deal with his illness.
Final Words
I can't say when exactly Chapter 4 - Part One will be released but it should not be too long from now. I'm currently waiting for new recordings so I can add them in. I've already started work on some of the levels for part two so I also plan to not take that long to get part two out as well. I think the polish phase might take some time as I want to get that done right. Obviously I will continue to fix/polish,whatever beyond the final release. If there's an issue that I might have overlooked I will fix it. As I said many times before I also want to add some more post release content in the form of SRO Missions and I have some neat ideas for some of these. So that's it for now I hope this news post was at least informative and I can't wait to finally share some new concrete gameplay stuff. ;)
I have also written down the final ending scene and I will be working on that too. That way I will have that all done while I finish up the rest of the game. This should make everything a lot easier from there on out, knowing that I have the ending properly executed and done with, leaving me with some room to tweak where needed.
That is all.
Thank you,
Joure & Team V