Hello everyone, and welcome back to the VV Eekly Update! I can’t believe that we’ve gotten to #10 already – those double digits are a real milestone! For those of you who’ve been here since the start, thank you for sticking on. For those of you who’ve joined us on the way, thank you for coming along! Hopefully these will continue to be interesting for the future. I’m not sure that these are helpful for game development, but they’re definitely helpful for my motivation!
Today, as befitting of the double digit milestone, I want to talk through my plan through release – what I plan on adding to Vyn and Verdan, what sorts of milestones I have in mind, a vague timeline, etc. Before all that though, let’s talk about what makes a good game.
Game Building Blocks
Like many other works, games are built on a pyramid of sorts. There are many elements to a complete game, and they build on each other to create a success. I’ve sketched out some game building blocks below, and how they might link to each other.
As you can see, more basic questions like “Does the game not crash?” and “Can I navigate the menu to get to the game?” are answered near the bottom. These build up to intermediate questions like “What do encounters look like?” and “Can I play the game without gameplay-breaking bugs?”. Eventually, we get to very high-level, engaging questions like “What choices can I make to express my gameplay?” or “How can I do this differently next time?”.
Now that we’ve spent some time looking at this diagram, let’s try to identify what parts of the diagram that I’ve possibly tackled already in Vyn and Verdan, and which parts remain to be worked on.
I’ve completed a lot of the basic elements of the game, working my way up the tree of necessities. Hopefully, the top elements have begun to emerge! However, there’s still lots of work to be done on various aspects of polish, and in particular on bug-fixing and UI polish.
Let’s also take a look at the same diagram, but labeled for the “fun” parts of the game to work on. Which are the parts of the game that I enjoy working on, and which are the not fun parts?
Wow, that looks familiar!
That’s not quite a coincidence. In game dev, there’s not much to be gained from quickly polishing your game to perfection. Instead, you want to reach as high up as possible towards that elusive “Fun!” goal, to make sure that your game is actually fun.
Often, this happens at the cost of polish and stability. Why should you spend time making sure your systems are polished and stable when you might destroy that whole system in favor of another solution in a few weeks?
That being said… there’s a bit of a slog ahead of me. Luckily, I’ve saved myself some bits of “fun” work as well.
Roadmap
Here’s the large pieces of work I foresee working on, split into various buckets.
- Polish
- Main menu
- Pretty menu screen
- Intro animation
- UI Polish
- Revamp of inventory UI
- Revamp of overlay
- Improved map
- Artwork
- Add more to background
- Gameplay feedback (on damage, on healing, etc.)
- Sounds
- Music
- Sound design
- Main menu
- Game navigation
- Save states
- Control remapping
- Handling reconnects
- Separate cameras for local play
- Multiplayer
- Multiplayer stability
- Multiplayer testing and bug-fixing 🙁
- Content
- Encounters
- Third floor encounters
- Third floor affixes
- Miniboss content
- Final boss
- Difficulty modifiers
- Tutorial
- Easy mode
- Difficulty modifiers
- Encounters
There’s a lot here! And this likely isn’t all of it either.
Timeline
I was originally planning on releasing this game sometime in early 2025, in January or February, after the Steam Winter sale but before Valentine’s Day. However, there have been some delays… As could have been expected, the multiplayer aspect of the game has been more difficult than anticipated.
Currently, I’m planning on applying for the Steam Next Fest planned for late February. This implies that I’ll need a fully functional demo by mid January. Then, the release of the game will be after that, probably in March. Only time will tell how successful that plan will be… We’ll see how this goes!
If you have any comments or questions about the roadmap or timeline, please feel free to drop by the Discord and map/outline them for me there!