A Milestone Of Sorts

Time for another pseudo-quick update.

I know it’s been a long road so far with this game, a lot longer than I planned. It’s amazing how much the computer gaming world has changed since I started this thing — back then, there were no iPhones or iPads, and most gaming was either on desktops or consoles. Now, the game industry has shifted dramatically toward mobile devices, just like a lot of other industries. I sometimes wonder how many people still use their desktops for gaming. Nevertheless, this game needs to be done and put out there, and it’s about time I did something about that.

So as I mentioned in my last post, I managed to get over a pretty large hump at the end of last year, and since then progress has been rapid. At this point, I’ve finally managed to do what I’ve been trying to do for some years now: get all of Act 1 content and the first cutscene put together so you can play the game through all the way from the very beginning to the end of the first cutscene. There are assorted little pieces that still need to be slipped in here and there, but nothing too important. A few extra sound files, a few environmental objects, maybe some more non-essential verbs, and of course the occasional bug fix, but that’s really about it. The one important thing I haven’t implemented yet is the PRAY command, but that’s less important for Act 1 than it is later in the game, so I’ll work on that soon enough.

That content, in a nutshell, is what I’ve been talking about for so long as the “demo.” And I mean that more in the manner of “tech demo” than “demo of a complete game,” since this is really just one big experiment, and my goal is to see if this is at least worthwhile to continue all the way through to the end. But that means, with a bit of cleaning up and some testing, I might actually, seriously, no-kidding-this-time be able to get this submitted to the IndieCade meeting this year, since they accept works in progress. They may hate it (or, worse, ignore it), but at least it can get submitted and I can stop saying over and over (and over) that this is the year I’m going to do it.

So after I clean up a few loose ends, that means I need to start focusing a lot of effort on testing and feedback, and that is about to start in earnest.

I’ve already enlisted a handful of testers, but if there’s anyone out there still paying attention and who is really up for it, let me know and I’ll set things up so you can download the latest version and start hacking away at it. But please only do so if you can dedicate a bit of time to it and can give useful feedback. I’m also starting a closed, invite-only Google group to have a discussion forum for testers of the game.

I think the deadline for submission to IndieCade is toward the end of May, so there’s a good amount of time left to smack this thing around and fix some of the big problems. So it’s time to get started and move to the next phase. Who’s with me?

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