We're making good progress, but we're taking our time and won't crunch for a date.
World:
The game world with all the exploration and puzzles is more or less there and ready to go. We wanna add some little puzzles here or there, and maybe some more combat encounters, but nothing major.
We recently threw out an entire region because it wasn't fun and rebuilt that. The replacement region now feels like Supraland. Previously it was lacking motivation, direction and the puzzles were too fetch-questy, not supralandy.
We also came up with a new puzzle mechanic that I'm currently building a new world area for, and this one will be available only after the end credits. It uses physical mechanisms that might not be easy to understand for most people, that's why I decided to put it after the ending.
Balance:
The biggest thing left to do is balancing in terms of currency, upgrades and combat.
We recently removed an entire system from the game because it was creating more frustration than fun. It was basically a mining system where you could mine different kind of ores with different pickaxe upgrades. The two things that made this unfun were that you could not mine something you stood in front of, but your pickaxe wasn't buffed enough yet and you would have to memorize where exactly this was and come back to it later, which is not an interesting interaction at all; just a tedious one.
The other problem was, that we had so many currencies: coal, iron, diamonds, coins... it was really annoying. We're getting rid of all of that and limit it to just coins.
But currently we have no balance in the game at all in regards to how many coins you find, what upgrades cost, what upgrades you can buy at all. So that's coming soon.
Combat is equally unbalanced as some weapons and enemies are not fully done yet. We'll get to this soon, and it's the kind of thing that makes or breaks a game.
If combat is boring, too easy or too hard, and if the secret upgrades are not balanced well, the player won't be engaged. I felt that myself in my last playthrough where combat was way too easy and coins were useless. Which led to two things:
- I didn't care for secrets because I didn't need upgrades anyway
- I had no fun collecting coins, because I couldn't use them for anything.
Combat itself will be separate from puzzles. Some encounters are more puzzly though. There is no more one-fits-all weapon and most enemies need slightly different approaches. There are no more respawning enemies, but the encounters are mandatory and you cannot run past them. If you die during an encounter, it will get reset and you need to try again. The idea is that they are properly challenging but by finding lots of secret areas with upgrades, you can make them much easier.
Performance:
We're currently spending a lot of time optimising the code. It's the same problems that I recently fixed in Supraland 1. It's all about objects on the other side of the world being active while you're not even close.
There are 500 coins spinning in the world somewhere? The engine won't spin them because they are not visible, but it will ask the game on everyframe "should I spin? should I spin? should I spin?".
Same for NPCs that are roaming around in a far away region or the glowing sparks and bubbles rising out of a lava hole somewhere.
All of these things combined can take so long for the CPU to check that your FPS is cut in half. So we came up with a system that automatically disables all these things when they are out of range so the game won't even ask if they should do something. This saves a lot of CPU time and this system only gets pinged every few seconds, not every frame.
So when your FPS in Supraland was not great in the past, it was probably not a problem of your GPU. Drawing the image is easy peasy. But all the work the CPU had to do before drawing was what took so long. In Supraland 1 I fixed this in a more complicated way. But now we have this system which automates a lot and does most of the work for us.
Testing:
When we have an OK balance, we'll let some handpicked people play it with us watching.
In the next round it goes out to Tier 2 Crowdfunders.
Then we'll go either Early Access or Release right away, depending on how we feel about it at that point.
I have no dates for either of those steps, but upvoting this post surely speeds it up... probably.
-David