On the 11th of June, Gemstone Keeper was Greenlit on Steam. Since then development for the game has made a lot of progress, despite my lack of posting to certain places about it. Unfortunately that does mean I’m aware that I haven’t posted any articles on this site in seven months. So to bring all of you up to speed.
The game’s development was going very smoothly, I was getting boss battles done, I showed off Gemstone Keeper at the Insomnia Gaming Festival at the Birmingham NEC and was adding/fixing things found in feedback from the Steam Greenlight until around September when it occurred to me that some fonts require licensing rights. Fortunately I was able to get some good advice from legal expert Chris Taylor and the Lucida Fonts team, although I had no other choice but do a huge graphical overhaul and use another font for all the ASCII designs.
Music and sound effects have had the least amount of focus before the Greenlight campaign began, but in the last month or so that has changed. I have been looking more into the sound effects, looking for better sources and addressing some of the issues players have had with the audio. I’ve even been in talks with a professional game composer, so I’ll be able to announce who will be producing music for the game soon, and have some sweet music!
There are a few other game modes, aside from the main game itself. One which I have been working on this past week is the Daily Run mode. There will be a score mode, where players can traverse the caverns and collect as many gems, materials and defeat as many enemies as possible to get the best score. In the Daily Run, players will go through a score mode run to get the top score on the leaderboard. All player will go through the same levels, however they will only get one chance to play and upload a score to the leaderboard.
Other planned game modes are the aforementioned score mode and a boss rush mode.
As of writing, all of the game’s bosses have been created, as well as the epilogue, items, weapons and bullets that were in the initial plans. Last week I’ve said that the main game is almost done and I mean it. Essentially, from this point onwards will be time for extra game modes, features, objects, as well as polishing the game and fixing as many bugs before the game’s planned release on the 31st March 2017, but the game’s overall scale has been set.
And that's what has happened in six months, and to make the update all the more sweeter, I've included a download link to a demo build for you all to try out. The demo will allow you to play through the first five levels of the main game, all the way up to the first boss. Have a go and send me any feedback you have, the more the better!
