Hello everyone! Hope you’re all having a wonderful Friday and enjoying the campaign!
Today we thought we’d update you a bit on what’s been happening here behind the scenes with the game as well as share some exciting news about the upcoming demo release.
So... we didn’t have the best start to our year. In late January, I upgraded my laptop. In the process of moving files from my old hard drive to the new one, I somehow managed to corrupt the data, and subsequently spent the next two weeks scrambling to find a way to restore it all. In the end, I had to trawl through thousands of folders and manually copy and paste what I could. Fortunately, most of the Project Paradise files were previously backed up or copied without issue, but I still lost almost all of our raw sound effects and music files. A huge pain, but it could’ve been a lot worse.
Still, my data problems didn’t have much of an impact on Jason, who has been steadily churning through our list of programming to-dos, from squashing bugs, to testing the demo on various computers and operating systems, to tweaking old game systems that haven’t been updated in months. In some ways, coding can be a thankless job, with seemingly simple problems requiring inordinate amounts of time (and sometimes even necessitating entire systems to be rewired or rebuilt). Us non-coders tend to oversimplify what goes on in these labyrinthine systems, but rarely is anything as easy as simply flipping a switch or plugging this into that.
To illustrate, here’s a look at the various player animation/action states:
And strictly speaking, this isn’t even coding, but merely a visual representation of how the various player states link to each other and trigger in succession. Yikes!
But wait, I know what you’re thinking: "All this coding and game-building stuff seems pretty complex, so does this mean the demo won’t be releasing in early 2021 after all?"
And the answer is: Nope, it’s still coming soon!
After a long chat last week, trying to figure out which features we would implement in the demo release and which we’d hold for the final release, Jason and I were finally able to lock down a date:
March 31st, 2021.
We had actually considered releasing a few weeks prior to this, but with our assemblies, the campaign, and then the special talk and memorial at the end of the month, we thought it best to push it back a bit further. We hope you understand!
As we’ve mentioned many times before, this demo will be free to download and play. You won’t be able to save your game, however, and the total playtime will be nowhere near as long as the final version (most players average about an hour). And of course, releasing this demo so early is primarily to help us gauge interest in the game and determine if any of the core elements need to be tweaked.
So please, after you play the demo, be sure to leave us some feedback. (We’ll release a survey form on this website soon). We want this to be the best possible experience it can be, so each and every one of your thoughts and experiences is incredibly valuable to us!
So excited to release this, and see you in a few weeks!