We’ve got news! We’ve also got a new build, but sadly, it doesn’t have much in the way of new content. We’ve got a lot to say about our plans for the future though, so stay a while and listen.
This build comes with another “double” changelog. Reasons down below.
GROUPEES BUNDLE
We are a part of a Greenlight game bundle by Groupees! You can purchase Gerty and 8 other games for the low, low price of 1$ (or more if you feel generous). Note that the purchase will include Steam keys for all the games once they are released.
Get the bundle! (all gone now)
Visit Groupees
INDIE-NO-GO
In relative silence, our Indiegogo campaign has come to an end. We didn’t reach our goal, but we want to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who supported us. Lessons have been learned and we’ve marching on. Here’s a few issues that we though needed to be addressed:
- We can’t afford to get music from Fabian Del Priore. We’ll have to recruit local talent, but luckily we have contacts.
- We can’t afford to rent new office space, but as we were accepted to Game Brewery, we’ll get to keep our current office for at least 7 more months. Yay!
- We can’t afford to buy licences for software, so we’ll have to keep using free/trial versions for now.
ALPHA 1.2 & 1.2.1
If you haven’t read our last few blog posts, here’s an important piece of news: We’ve moved on to monthly builds from weekly ones (in case that wasn’t obvious already). Now, we weren’t actually planning on releasing a new build just yet due to the lack of new content, but the Groupees bundle seemed like a natural fit for an update.
So, why is the new build 1.2.1 when we never released 1.2? Well, we did… In the Groupees bundle. We had to send a standalone build to Groupees a while back, so naturally we made it 1.2 since that was next build number. Risto though it might be a good idea to update the Web Player build while we’re at it, but as we had already managed to make a few tiny improvements to 1.2, we decided to make it clearer that it was a slightly updated version of the Groupees build to (hopefully) avoid confusion.
ALPHA “ROADMAP”
We realized we haven’t really talked about what our plans for the alpha-stage of development really are. Let’s change that. To put it simply, we intend to focus more on developing features than content and leave most of the content creation for the beta. This is actually more or less what the “official” definitions of alpha and beta are: alpha is more of a preview with missing features and beta is feature complete with bugs and missing content.
What this means in practice, is that you’ll be seeing new features like multiplayer and perk system in action, but you’ll be restricted to the first four levels of the game. This also means you won’t be seeing all of the new enemies and bosses we have planned.
This plan is still subject to change, but don’t expect too much change.
FUTURE CONTENT
Like I mentioned earlier, we really wanted to include some new features and content in this build, but we also don’t want to release half-finished or buggy systems, which is unfortunately where we’re currently at. We have quite a lot of things planned, in development or almost complete, so let’s take a short look into what we have in store for you in the future.
MULTIPLAYER
This is most likely the biggest thing we’re currently working on and as such, it’s also the most unfinished. Like I mentioned last week, we’ve had to rewrite a lot of our code to make it work and we’re still at it. Don’t expect to see it anytime soon.
MORE CONTROL SCHEMES
Very much related to the multiplayer, we’ve said in the past we’re going to add support for gamepads and a keyboard only controls. Risto has made some tests with gamepad controls in the past, but we’re not developing the feature currently. Expect to see them along with the multiplayer.
PERK SYSTEM
I also talked about this last week, but here’s an update: the core of the system is done and working. The problem is that our current perks break the balance of the game into a thousand pieces. Needless to say, we don’t want that. With any luck you’ll be seeing the perk system in the near future, but that’s more or less dependent on us fixing the balance issues.
PITS
We’ve talked about this on quite a few occasions now, haven’t we? Kind of like the perk system, the pit generation code is complete, we’ve fixed the critical bugs we’ve found, but they’re still not fully ready for deployment. We still have to test them more extensively, because they can break the game pretty badly. We also need to rework the pit graphics, because they currently get mixed with the Fog of War too much. Also, they’re not that high priority right now.
MORE COMPLEX LEVELS
Currently, you can speedrun the game quite easily by just dashing straight for the teleporter in each level. We don’t want the game to be quite that simple. We’ve got some plans to make the levels more interesting and challenging and we’ve actually got one related feature partly developed. You might be seeing it some time in the near future.
DAMAGE TYPES, BONUSES AND RESISTANCES
Funnily enough, this system is already live in the game, but it currently has no use. All the players skills now have their own damage type (physical, explosive and fire), but none of the enemies yet make us of this. Again, this is due to potential balance issues and the fact that the we have more important things to focus on.
Here’s a secret though: we already have one enemy in development that make us of this system. With any luck, you’ll might get to see it soon.
SUMMARY
Whew! Busy times again. Though it’s only been live for roughly a day, the Groupees bundle has already given us quite a nice boost in visibility. Our Greenlight page has gotten a ton of votes, which is awesome! Hopefully our marketing ball will keep on rolling on its own for a while, so we can focus on development. We’ve got a TON of stuff to do, as you can see.
Till’ next time folks!
