...and what a ride it was. Some months of... an endless blur of purple text. Visual Studio, you see. Always with the purple text. I'll have nightmares of purple text.
I was contracted a few months ago by Arcen Games, makers of some of my absolute favorite games, to help with their newest one due to my extensive knowledge of the genre. It's actually my second contract with them, but it's the first that's with a full game; the previous contract was for an expansion pack for a game that already had released. But that went very well indeed, so a future contract of some point again was pretty much decided.
That time had been a relatively minor role; the game in question, The Last Federation, is a strategy game, with a main strategic section to it, and then combat that takes place completely seperately, and is best described as "turn-based bullet hell". They wanted complicated as hell bullet-patterns for the new ships in the expansion. Like, Touhou-level stuff, is what they wanted. That worked in a turn-based format. I'm not even going to try to fully explain it, but somehow I manage to pull that off, and to pull it off WELL.
So, fast forward to now, and I end up in another contract, this time for a game called Starward Rogue. A bullet-hell Isaac-ish roguelike, and my job is to do the bullet-hell stuff and help with balancing and suggestions. In other words, I make things that kill the player with complicated-as-hell patterns. Particularly the bosses. I'm also responsible for making the higher difficulty modes. Unfortunately I end up being the only one with enough skill to TEST those higher difficulty levels, so that bit got a tad stressful...
Unlike the first contract, where my role was fairly minor, THIS time my role was major, and central to the game (this fact also made me just a BIT paranoid). But I didnt screw anything up! Well, okay, a few small things, but the head developer keeps assuring me that "No, you did seriously great so far!", but... yeah, I've got one entire boss right now that A: is inactive because I forgot to set it to appear, and B: now needs a Hard mode pattern, because I forgot the blasted thing exists. And C: has a nasty exploit that I still need to figure out. I hate when that happens. Gonna try to fix those tonight and maybe throw in another boss for the heck of it.
I also had alot of freedom this time; I had alot of confusion at the very start, because I was expecting to be told what to do, but they were like "No, you're helping us design this time. YOU decide alot of the stuff that you put in". This was... daunting. But after a week or so I got into it, and that part came easily. There were only like, TWO things where they said "We need you to make this specific thing" and those were the game's 2 end-bosses. And even then, "make the final bosses" was basically all they told me; I had to decide for myself how the bosses would work and what they would do exactly.
But the game finally released two days ago, yay. The last week and a half or so, working on it is the ONLY thing I did. I now know the true meaning of "crunch time". But it's finally out! Not that my job is done; there's still stuff to be made and changed (like the bits I just mentioned). A whole other, crazier difficulty higher than the others is something I still have to do (ugh, that one is going to be absolute hell to test). I'd hoped that that bit could be done by release, but alas, deadlines! That'll show as a free update to players whenever I finish it (hopefully wont take TOO long, but really, testing it is going to be a nightmare). And there's fixes and tweaks and whatever to make, so my job is not done.
The game came out well though, and player response to it has been just amazing. Everyone seems to like it.
Quite an experience overall. And it's really, really surreal to see screenshots of content I made appear in places like PC Gamer's site or Rock Paper Shotgun. Or to see people on Twitch or Youtube fighting against the monstrosities I put together (and typically dying).
And right now I'm glad to be able to sit down and really PLAY it. Rather than spend 10000 years in the damn test chambers fighting the same sometimes-broken bosses/enemies/whatever over and over and over and over and over and over again during the making of them.
So yeah, that's been a neat thing, so I figured I'd ramble about it a bit for the heck of it.
This is the trailer for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXNg8DveIVg
So yeah, that's that! Still alot more to do, and I'm anxious to see how the game sells overall (if it does well enough: expansions and stuff). I also have to constantly patrol the devs' forums (and I help moderate now) and the Steam forums for the game in order to answer any questions that come up (which is often). Granted, I do that anyway when their games come out.
Quite an experience. I'm glad to just relax for awhile though. Until later tonight when I argue with stuff some more.
24 Jan 2016, 4:11 pm
I'm sure the game will sell well!
Fun but never an easy job. I hope you stick with it and we see more titles from you in the future.
