First, Escape Goat has finally PASSED PEER REVIEW!! It will be published to the marketplace within a few days (check back here for updates, or subscribe to my Twitter feed).
I’ve also created a page for the game in the top menu, including the debut of the cover art.
Finally, I’ve posted the official trailer to YouTube:
I’m thrilled to be able to release this title to the marketplace. There will be some new announcements here daily until it comes out, so stay tuned.
There’s this struggle. On one hand, you want to make the best game you can make. On the other hand, you want to actually finish the game. These are the opposing forces that make the creative process so difficult.
There are lots of indie games where I’m playing and thinking, if only they spent another two weeks, they could have bumped it up from a 3.5 to a 3.75. They stopped when they were in arm’s reach of something really polished. There’s some new stuff there, but it wasn’t given enough iteration. Not enough testing. Six months of work to get where they got, and maybe it would have been twice as good with just another two weeks.
Then again, by releasing the game they are able to start working on the next thing.
The problem is that games always seem to offer the most rewards right at the end of the project. You can finally see how things are working, and you’re making awesome strides every day. Just give it another couple weeks, think of how much better it will be!
Knowing how long to spend on the project is one of the most difficult parts of game development for me. I wish I had a formula, or some sort of answer, but I just don’t. There’s something to be said for spending another two weeks, and there’s something to be said for just releasing it even though two more weeks would have improved it.
By popular demand, I’m going to continue this series and dig up some of the relics of the Soulcaster design process. In part 1 I talked about lightweight design and posted shots of a few levels that ended up on the scrap heap. Well for today I’ve found a special treat: the original design document of Soulcaster 1.
I haven’t edited anything besides coloring the text. Stuff in red is stuff that never made it into the final design. Italics are annotations I’m writing today.
Tower Defense Adventure
like tarchon, but more focused on individual rooms with finite enemies and handling “waves” perhaps [Tarchon was an earlier concept featuring one-player party-based dungeon exploration]
take your party into a dungeon room and you start to get attacked. you need to fight your way from room to room within a floor, surviving waves of mobs. when one aggros, all others in a small radius aggro, so they start filing in for the attack. [I never tested this behavior, and it would be cool to have leader and following types of enemies in the future]
there are choke points like in any tower defense so you are facing waves of guys.
basically you set up your defenses by placing party members at key locations. you have ranged units who can fire at enemies, or over walls. aoe based attacks and that sort of thing. there are melee units, some of them can set up barricades. other disables such as stuns are also available. [There were no barricades or stuns. Status effects is something I hope to introduce in SC3, though it will be time consuming to balance.]
when you place a party member, he stays in one spot and executes a simple script. usually it will mean just firing at any enemy in range. it can also mean moving within a small radius to melee attack enemies that come that way. [The random skeleton friends in SC2 were an experiment with melee allies. I could experiment with it a bit more, but for the first game it took away from the unit placement strategy.]
This post is about Soulcaster I, and how it evolved from the first stages. This was the first project I designed and built from scratch, and my philosophy has been to keep the design as minimal as possible. Rather than write a lengthy design document and try to detail all the enemies, their behaviors, the items, etc., I just jotted down some rough ideas and used it as a starting point. To be extra careful, I didn’t even use Word, I just did plain text in Notepad, and didn’t bother with formatting–or even capitalization. This was not intended to be a blueprint I would refer to throughout the project.
