Oh hi Mark there!
Allow me to shift gears a bit this week and tell you a story of how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air. Wait, that’s a different story, this is the story of how we joined the Steam Summer Festival.
Last month we became aware of the Steam Festival when we were looking for someone to help out with the marketing aspect. At that point in time, we were remaking most of our human unit animations so the artists can have full control of them and be able to fix any issues quickly (which is much harder with mocap animations). We found out the deadline to submit a build for the Festival was 2 weeks out, and we’d need to finish those animations and make a self-contained experience of the game (which by itself isn’t that long as well - we’re aiming at around 4 hours playthrough, with high replayability value). For the demo submission, we wanted to make a bare-bones experience of around 4 node jumps, that ends with a fight and loops the demo. For basic replayability, it would have around 8 encounters, so every attempt would at least be somewhat different. Each encounter in the demo also has internal variation - mad props to our amazing writers Jonas and Verena - by making a random roll for which King rules the land at the start and having most encounters use that information to control different paths through the encounters with potentially very different outcomes. So those 8 encounters actually end up being worth more than double because there are 3 different Kings.
The deadline for submission was coming near, we’re fixing any last-minute bugs and are mostly happy with the build when our builder machine decides to throw a fit and start showing red. No problem, I just have to connect to it and delete some files to make the build finish, but doing so prolongs the build slightly (we resolved this issue after that). Midnight rolls over, the builder decides it’s time to do a full clean build. Seeing it’s actually a virtual machine running on a slow physical machine (so horribly slow builder), this takes almost 2 hours of waiting. It’s now 2 in the morning, we finally upload our build without immediate problems and are happy. We pass out for the night.
A week later we get the notification from Steam that they’ve done their review and we will be participating in the Festival. We’re both happy and terrified at the same time. :)
Tech side note: the builder is now on a better machine and takes 15min for a full clean build. FML.
We start working on adding more interesting things and fixing other less common issues. Doing plenty of playtesting before the deadline, Mat was suggesting expanding the demo playthrough to more jumps, something like 10. We tell him it would take many more encounters, and he’s already working like mad to make both the encounters and the combat. We decide we need another person to do the encounters, and after a pretty quick interview process led by Mat himself, we got another member for the team! Mia is our quest designer and is pretty great at writing out the mechanical flow of the encounters that are ripe for the taking by our writers to do their magic. (Hi Mia sorry for not introducing you before :3) So thanks to Mia, we now have 45 encounters ready for the demo (what! I didn’t even know this, just found out because I’m writing this post). Couple that with the internal variations of some encounters, the effective count probably just shot up to 60 or more, I can’t even guess.
With all those encounters, we’re pretty happy with how things are turning out. We have our levels, the combat works fine, no visible bugs, no crashes, we added hints, and we think we’re improving the player experience. We can’t know this without players tho, and we need to know how we’re doing, so join our Discord and tell us after you play the demo!
We make a final submission of the build. We’re happy. The next day we find the festival has been pushed back a week. Oh nice, another week to cram more stuff in, why not :D
So there you go, a short story on how we expanded the demo from having 8 encounters and 1 fight to 45 encounters and 3 fights, of which 2 are exclusive to each other, so you’ll have to replay the game to see them all. Most of what I've shown so far in these blog posts will be available in the demo, and we really hope you’ll like it. There will be more skills, units, monsters, and encounters in the final game once it comes out this winter, and I hope you decide to join us for the ride. We could really use some public feedback.
As always, thanks for reading, and throw me a message sometimes. I long to hear from you. :)
MarkoP