Hello all,
We have some news regarding Genesis Noir’s launch date. We have decided to move the game’s launch to early 2021.
It wasn’t an easy choice, but we know it’s the right one. We’re around a month behind schedule due to some widescreen monitor and controller issues discovered in QA, but with the upcoming next-gen consoles releasing in November and holidays in December, we don’t have a good window to launch until early 2021. An indie game could easily get lost amidst the big news, so it’s necessary for us to wait a bit to attract people's attention.
The extra time will let us put an extra coat of polish + playtesting to ensure we deliver you the best experience, however. We’d like to detail some of the challenges that have led to this delay and share our goals for the extra time we have to make Genesis Noir extra spiffy.
Jeremy’s Engineering Efforts
We recently purchased a wide-screen monitor, in order to make sure our game behaves properly on larger displays. Sadly, it does not behave very properly at all!
The game displays correctly, with a 16:9 aspect ratio view in the center of the screen, but the cursor is allowed to interact with things behind the letterbox bars. This is a pretty large problem, as most of our interactions are built assuming the cursor is limited to moving within the viewable area of the game. Unreal Engine also doesn’t have any built-in functionality to do this, so we’re currently working on figuring out the best way to solve this problem.
Another tricky aspect has been making sure the game behaves correctly no matter if you’re playing with the mouse, keyboard, or gamepad. For a small team like ours, it takes a lot of time to playtest the game with multiple inputs, as we have to make sure that interactions work even if you switch input methods at any time.
Additionally, we’ve sent the game to a professional QA company in order to more quickly find bugs we need to fix. A few have been found which have been difficult to solve, due to the fact that the QA team can see the bug happening, but I cannot, for reasons I’m not quite sure of yet! It’s difficult to try and solve a problem that you can’t fully see.
All these things together have made the final push to finish the game a bit more difficult than anticipated. Lots of unexpected things can still happen, so it’s important for us to buffer in some additional time for anything that could go wrong, and I hope to be able to talk about the process of fixing some of these strange bugs next month!
Evan’s Polish Plan
Over this last year, Jeremy, Skillbard, and I have been working 80+ hour weeks to make Genesis Noir something special. I’ve never worked on something so hard. I’ve never been so invested in a project. I’ve never personally grown so much through the process of creation.
It’s a delight. I’m truly enjoying seeing the project grow. I feel proud of myself and my team that we are striving to make something beautiful. I feel my stamina developing and my work ethic being honed.
But there’s a cost to such dedication. Beyond work-life balance issues such as spending less time maintaining relationships and health, singular attention to the work can lead to over-familiarity. After staring at a scene for days, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify how to refine it. Sleeping on it, looking with fresh eyes, getting a first impression, etc. very well might provide the solution.
As we’ve been polishing the project, we’ve been jumping all over the game. We debug or refine a scene in the ending level, then jump to the start of the game which shares some assets or code. Whereas when we were focusing on making a single level at a time, we could return to another level with fresh eyes, now we have a familiarity with the game as a whole. We have a big checklist of little tweaks that we’re working through but knowing what to focus on when they’re all completed is less clear.
Over the next month I’m going to stare at these scenes less and return to more normal work hours. I’m going to take a few weekends off. I’m going to utilize our delay to gain the negative space to view the project anew so that I can determine that yes, this animation could use some more inbetweens or a blink here or there. Or maybe this tree in this level should be removed. Or that this interaction could use just a bit more snap or an additional bit of feedback.
Here’s a taste of our Kickstarter comic - Jay Quercia has got all the illustrations done and I’m excited to add some moire animation to the spreads!
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Thank you for your patience and support. We’re really excited to share this adventure with you and look forward to you destroying the Big Bang in 2021 (if the world survives 2020 that is!).
Evan + Jeremy