Entry #12 - Itz coming!

Announcement

Last thing im missing right now is sound work for the gameplay trailer. All the rest is done. So if everything goes smoothly and Steam accepts my page, the game should be announced this week. It's a big day for the production, the biggest one so far. But what has been done lately?

Changes in game

• New biomes - There are two new test maps, swamp and snowy valley. They mostly serve presenting the planned diversity in game. Both of them are on a pretty early development stage but I think they are very promising. Especially the swamp map looks nicer than I expected. With snow biome I had a lot of issues adapting the Brushify landscape materials to look fine and it's not 100% there yet.

• Another thing was reworking ui. I've decided to go with a bit less clean and transparent backgrounds that reminded some people of a sci-fi game. So it's more "solid", dirty and a bit more green now. There was also some work on making texts look better, with more variety in color and more consistency in font sizes etc.

• Enemies death - for gameplay trailer I had to add some temporary death animation so I went with the easiest, fastest solution for now - ragdolls. It's not perfect but at least it's clear when characters die and they don't just disappear.

• More complicated stats - Both playtest and trailer work made me realize that I need to play a bit more with character stats. Now they depend on both profession and character itself. So each Shitling has his own, personal base stats that make him slightly better in different types of work.

  
  

  

  
  

• More particles - various missing effects were added, like magic turret explosions

• Various small content improvements - descriptions, ui allignments etc.

• Performance - This is a big one. Finally I have a build that works well enough and doesn't make my computer weep quietly in the corner whenever I start the game

  
  

  

  
  
  
  

Other preparations

• Steam page - All the descriptions, requirements, graphics, videos etc. are submitted. The only one missing is already mentioned gameplay trailer.

• Gameplay trailer is recorded, edited and almost ready.

• Shitlings.net is live, still almost empty but it works. And I got a proper "pro studio" email address.

• Im preparing a small starter press kit right now, so I can reach out to some media before the release, with all the relevant information. Easy to access and edit.

• Rough timeline for future development.

  

Conclusions

Preparing for this announcement took much longer than I expected. I had to fix a lot of stuff in game, learn how the whole process should look like etc. But it was a really valuable lesson. Not only from the experience point of view, but also looking at the game from a different perspective made me realize what else needs to be done, what are its weak points and how I need to adjust my plans to make the whole thing actually work. In the Basement Wisdom I will write a short description of the process I've used to determine what work is needed before the announcement. It can be useful for someone doing it for the first time.