Welcome back to yet another VV Eekly Update! Today, we reach the milestone of twenty updates, twenty whole weeks later! I started the VV Eekly Update back in June, with this real throwback of a logo sketch.
I don’t think I had told many people about starting the VV Eekly Update immediately, so if you saw this back then and you’re also seeing it now – thank you so much for reading this all the way throughout! Writing this update every week has really helped me to put my thoughts in order, to focus on what’s interesting in the game, and to decide what I should work on.
Since we’re on a nice round number again, I feel like it’s time to come back around to a road map update. We last checked in in VV Eekly Update #10, so let’s see where we’re at now!
Timeline
I briefly mentioned my planned timeline in the previous road map post. It hasn’t changed much – I’m still aiming for a March release date! Let’s go over the details, in chronological order:
Steam Winter Sale (12/19 – 1/2): We can’t do anything here, but we do want to avoid doing much publicly during this. It takes up all of Steam’s organic marketing, so, without anything to show off, it’s best to avoid this.
Early January: Release Vyn and Verdan demo! This demo needs to be released before the Steam Next Fest. Ideally, this would be as far in as advance as possible! But we need to be careful to not release during the Steam Winter Sale.
Early February (2/10 – 2/17): Participate in the (unannounced, shh) Steam Couch Co-op Fest.
Late February (2/24 – 3/3): Participate in the Steam Next Fest. There is a currently ongoing Steam Next Fest – live now! – and you can see all sorts of interesting looking games that are coming out soon. Other indie developers have been reporting that they get decent amounts of additional wishlists, although they’re also reporting that this has been one of the busiest Steam Next Fests yet. There’s lots of competition in the indie game dev world!
Early March (or late March?): Release Vyn and Verdan! Woohoo!
Steam Spring Sale (3/13 – 3/20): We can’t participate in this spring sale since it’s too soon to the release date. We do want to take note to avoid it though!
Steam Summer Sale (6/26 – 7/10): We want to participate in this one though!
As I noted above, I’m not sure whether Vyn and Verdan should release in early March, before the Steam Spring Sale, or in late March, right afterwards. I’m currently leaning towards early March, just because it’s earlier rather than later… but we’ll figure it out later!
The biggest ticket item next up is to release a Vyn and Verdan demo, coming up in early January! If I manage to keep up in regular VV Eekly Updates, then the 30th VV Eekly Update will be VV-ednesday, January 1st (or the 2nd, perhaps), and the demo should be coming out right about then! That’s pretty cool!!
Roadmap
That segues (that’s how you spell that word?) right into the next topic: What’s still needed for the demo to be available?
In VV Eekly Update #10, I outlined the big pieces of work that I needed to work on. Using that as a baseline, here’s what I foresee for the demo.
Color coding: Red is needed-for-demo, Yellow is needed-for-release, and Green is done.
- 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
As you can see, there’s a lot still to do for the demo release! I will call out, in particular, the music and sound design. I’ve taken a big crack at it (and shout-out to Stella Sun for pointing me towards some resources she uses!~), but it is still incredibly intimidating and will require lots more learning and a lot more work.
I am… reasonably confident on everything else? That’s surprising to say, and feels kinda nice! Let’s say it again. I am REASONABLY CONFIDENT on everything else!
Whoo!
That’s your regularly scheduled road map update. If you have any regularly scheduled thoughts or comments, please drop by the regularly scheduled Discord!