Alpha!😱😱😱
It's been some time since our last post, and we have some juicy news! We've been hard at work to get better scenes to prepare for a Steam page and have an alpha to validate ideas.
Time has been going really fast, and we're counting every minute. Anton just keeps producing art that we've come to love, we can't wait to properly use these assets in the game to make them justice.
Marketing has been lackluster, Twitter is proving to be almost useless to us, sometimes it feels like an echo chamber of developers marketing to other developers. Who knows. We'll keep going at it but this failure is one of the primary reasons that pushed us into public alpha territory.
It's been a week since we had a working F&F (family & friends) alpha, and we couldn't be happier, the feedback loop finally started, and it already allowed us to commit to some key decisions. In this post we talked about skill trees and about allowing players to unlock nodes as a reward. We've found it to be high attrition and slow the pace of the game, so we put the trees aside. Simply put, the skill perks (the nodes) are now proposed directly to the player after randomly picking a couple of them. We've found this to work pretty nicely so far.
The alpha (link at the end of the post), includes the combat and the skill system. We've decided to put it on itch.io since it's the closest thing we've to an early adopter crowd. That should give us some practice and help us in preparing for a Steam page, which will also come soon.
To reach a wider audience we decided to try our luck with a WEBGL build. Our database being based on SQLite didn't really help, and after a few hours of trying to make it play nice I decided to circumvent the problem by switching out the database backend for the build: it is just a bunch of lists and callbacks to keep up the facade of having foreign keys, but it works, and, most importantly, allowed us to ship.
Given the unpredictability and quirks of WEBGL, the page will also have a downloadable Windows executable, which will remain our "gold standard".
Here's a picture of the game running on my phone. Terrible framerate, but funny in its way.
Finally, if you've come here for the alpha, here's the link. Leave us some feedback!