Hello all! I'm moving my Kickstarter-hosted updates back over to itch.io again, for ease of its text editor and embedding images and all that. If you'd like to read past updates, they're publicly available through this link, and there's a few years of them to catch up on!

Kickstarter updates link

I originally wrote the Fall 2023 update a few months ago, and to avoid the work of re-writing it, I'm going to leave it as-written, including my thoughts about stuff I've already actually done in the winter! Sorry if that's weird! It'll be normaly going forward, now that I'm staying here and avoiding the pain of Kickstarter post editing. (It's genuinely such an unfathomably bad editor I cannot do justice to how embarassing and barely-functional it is).

THE FALL CHECK-IN

(written and intended to be posted around Nov 6th/7th)

Hey folks! This update’s a bit later than planned, but, well - there wouldn’t have been much to update on if I’d posted in mid-Oct as planned.

Per my last update, quite a lot of the past few months was focused on my move-slash-eviction, as well as (to a lesser degree) supporting the Fellow Traveller label announcement. There isn’t going to be a ton of gifs to share here, and I did think about skipping the fall update altogether, but I’ll share what there is for now and it'll be as long as it needs to be.

(Not) hiring a technical programmer

A while ago, my supporting programmer, Benedict, exited the project amiably - the scope and length of work was larger than he’d initially signed on for, and he didn’t have much time for the project anymore, which was pretty fair! It's 2023 and counting, y'know. I do though still have need for the support of a technical coder who can help with the “making software” part of making a game, and do things like optimizing memory management that I hardly know how to approach. So one of the main things I did this past summer was looking into hiring someone else!

I worked out a second development timeline (IE. the impact with this contractor helping speed things up) and talked to FT about funding a budget to hire someone part-time for the remainder of the project, and they were supportive of it! Unfortunately, once I got past the point of doing my research, writing the job posting, working out a pay rate, and running the posting past some friends for feedback, it was time to pull the trigger, and… I still had many reservations. Part of those were financial, but to another extent, I expected application volume to be very high (especially right after all the layoffs this past year in the industry) and I didn’t know how to not be overwhelmed, particularly when I’m looking to hire skills that I myself don’t have and can't easily gauge. Vetting applications would have been very time consuming, and to some degree, even though someone in this role would be a boon and save me time, I still don’t really have the ability to put the project on hold to conduct interviews, followups, and so on. So… I backed away from it and put that back on hold.

While I do think moving on without hiring a contractor (for now) was the right decision, and it’s good that I now have all the details on what role I need worked out, it unfortunately did take up a good amount of time while also not resulting in that need being filled. That’s sadly just how it is as a solo developer - if I’m focusing on an HR thing, I can’t really be focusing on anything else, since I don’t have a business partner to divvy up that priority with. I may revisit it closer to, but at present the process would be too much of a departure from development.

Finishing off some older work

The main theme of development this season was 'finishing things that I'd already nearly finished, but that needed a little more work to be able to fully walk away from'.

I mentioned last seasonal update that the Blustergust Peak needed more attention - I'd worked on it in the spring, but something felt off and at around the halfway point of how much time I’d allocated for it, I ran it by playtesters and put it on pause, as feedback confirmed what I was sensing myself: It just wasn’t really working.

I came back at it this fall and finished the job, applying some learnings from working on the Manufactory and Duck Castle dungeons. First, it was too tightly contained: I wasn’t spacing things out enough, and the content felt rushed, and cramped, and made the mountaintop feel small. A few extra no-content rooms help a surprising amount in that regard. Secondly, the ‘feel’ of the mountaintop was coming across consistently in testing as more of ‘going back and forth through a canyon or ridge’ rather than the 'circling a peak or summit' it was intended as. I addressed that by moving things around and putting a cloud layer at the base of the region, and with that and some art support, it did eventually come to feel how I wanted! Some extra touches went in to sell the narrative progression as well, such as a new mini cutscene to better support an early moment in the region. Here's me in the process of rigging that, below!

I also needed more gameplay depth: While I had designed a bunch of enemies and creatures for the region a year ago, very few were actually ‘viable’ and used in the region. The Pupniks had turned from a ‘regular’ enemy into 'storyline' creatures more attached to the Batnik character, and so were no longer found around the mountain. The Nimby cloud creatures were serving better as obstacles than as enemies like I'd envisioned, and my other designs (Craghoppers and Crankles) had both already been used repeatedly in the preceding Blustergust Ridge region. That left me with little to work with that wasn’t painfully repetitive, and it felt like I didn’t have enough to fill out the area with. I also didn’t have a real ‘puzzle’ element for the region, which as I’d learned from Duck Castle, was something that made a huge difference in pacing and feel, even if a given puzzle element was itself simple.

To solve this problem, I made two new enemies unique to the region. One was a violent and territorial chicken, the Pekkin, which I could place as I liked throughout the region and filled a gap I’d felt of not having a simple melee enemy. The other was a stalagmite creature called a Surlag, which became the puzzle element: These creatures try to charge you in an orthagonal line, and can also block the air spouts already in use throughout the region, which allowed me to set up puzzles where you ‘bait’ Surlags into moving through a space to be able to redirect air currents to help you proceed. Since you also need to avoid getting hit by the Surlags while baiting them, it became a pretty enjoyable mechanic, if relatively simple, and hugely improved the region's pacing.

Testing Pekkin aggression

Testing puzzle solving with Surlags, and showing off the parallax background

Once Blustergust Peak was wrapped for good (and receiving much better playtesting feedback), I also needed to revisit the Ducklands region to wrap up some pieces on the west side, which is blocked off in the public demo. Since I’d finished the demo on such a crunch, I’d only worked on the part of the Ducklands I knew would be seen by players, and while the west part had been laid out, it was a bit barebones - I needed to finish things off by implementing a bunch of notable NPCs. Most of the work here was substantial dialogue writing, as well as some of my favourite animations I’ve done for the game so far! In the Imgur album is a sample for Keris, a young witch blacksmith, who is a major character in the story and needed a large set of expressions and animations to sell their energy naturally.

Testing a set of animations, and the transitions between them. Some of my best character work, I think!

Keris also got a slight redesign, to better match the more-solidified art aesthetic I've been working with - it's been quite a while since my initial backer design conversations in summer 2021!

'SAVING' the best for last (this is a pun) (it's not great) (I am prepared to proactively acknowledge this)

Lastly, while this technically isn’t ‘content,’ I also started and completed a successful refactor of the save system. While Scrabdackle has had saving and loading functions for ages, I built them quite early when I was still learning Godot, and some cracks were showing that were more than just superficial as unplanned-for use cases got added to the scope of the game. This won’t look or feel any different to players, but has meant the resolution of a number of important bugs that occasionally left players softlocked, and there's a system now for quietly migrating old save files to a new structure that is much (much) more maintainable going forward. Refactors aren’t cool or exciting, but this one had proven necessary, and I’m glad to have futureproofed against those types of issues recurring in the future - even if I add more unexpected systems.

Next up!

From here, I’ll be getting into the Wizard Academy region, which I’ve been excited to start for years now, and which will top off Act 1 of Scrabdackle! There’s much more to make after it, of course, but in the original Kickstarter-sized scope of the game, what is now "Act 1" would have been the full thing, so it still feels like quite a milestone to me.

I’ll have more in the winter next year, where I should be in the early regions of Act 2. Cheers!

THE WINTER CHECK-IN

Prior to this bit, everything you've been reading was from early November - everything from here on is "live" to the start of 2024!

The Wizard Academy

I've been working on Wizard Academy for a while now! The exterior section of the academy is entirely done, and the interior section is level design complete, but needs a little more encounter design work. I'd love to talk about this - but honestly, there's not much I can say, or show. What I can say is - the academy's more or less divided in half between its exterior (the grounds and hedges) and its interior, and they're more or less designed as two separate areas. The level design for the exterior section was some of the most challenging I've done so far, and has some of my favourite new art and assets, but - I really want this to hit quite hard as an experience for the player, so the less said here the better, unfortunately, and I don't even have anything small I feel okay to show. The one thing I can say is - eventually I'm hoping to do a very (very!) minimal demo update, mostly adding the Arc Bomb spell and some of the modern improvements of the indev build into the demo game - and if/when I do, there'll be one single Wizard Academy room available. Right now, when you start a new game, upon finding a Nexus of Power (aka a save point that you can teleport from), you can't actually use it, since you don't know a second point. But it makes sense that Blue would know how to teleport home, if there's another nexus on the academy grounds, right? So, players will be able to get a sense of the teleport mechanic right away, and also a tiiiny preview of how things are going out at the academy.

I'm also finished with the Dark Wizard boss, which has quite a substantial amount of code as I'd like it to have a wide variety of attacks/spells, and be the real peak encounter of Act 1 that brings the whole thing home, after which the main story for the rest of the game is properly (and finally) introduced. While I don't want to spoil any specifics of the fight, here's a bunch of context-less animations! The dark wizard can cast a variety of spell styles from a variety of positions, so it needed a few 'general' casting animations rather than attack-specific ones. I'm extremely pleased with these! And, for reasons I can't show visually, they look even better in-engine with some mild lighting effect and extra visual polish :)

A set of Dark Wizard animations I'm extremely pleased with! And there's even more than this...

It's quite a fight, and has been really fun to play. At time of writing, it's fully complete, including environmental visual polish and all that, so what's left for this region is some minor extra encounter design for some other challenge events, a ton of dialogue, and the Kickstarter yearbook rewards (as that book will be found in this region!) That means I'll still be with this region for a while, and then breaking into Act 2 proper before the next update. (There's also some gamepad controls finalization to do, so that the game isn't only suited for keyboard/mouse anymore).

Other thoughts and feels

Mood-wise, things are... ok? Mixed! Working on this region has been really great content-wise; I'm really happy with how it's been shaping up, especially for a more important region for the story and main narrative/emotional setup that carries the rest of the game. At the same time, I've been less able to share any of my work, since I really want the academy to be visited blind (at minimum, not sharing anything even to the "I don't mind if I'm spoiled" crowd until the playtesters have tackled things entirely blind first). Feeling like I couldn't/shouldn't share my work was part of last winter's hyper-burnout, and while I did change things to overall share more, this is a section that's more important to not bend that rule for. And... there will continue to be more of this in the future! Much more. So. That's something I need to figure out how to handle, I guess, and one of the rare parts of development I'm actually not looking forward to.

But! The content is good. The game is good. The volume of work involved is... staggering, but, well, that's not really 'news' and something I mostly try not to think about anymore. More important to keep getting work done than obsess about how much is still left to do. I did, though, take a week off this past winter holiday season, which to be honest I hadn't really planned to. I still feel eternally 'behind,' and while I certainly didn't choose to get evicted in the summer, between that and my unplanned emergency break last winter, I've been having a hard time feeling like I can justify time off that's an actual vacation and not like. Digging myself out of some sort of hole. (Although, to be on-theme, I did spent some of my week off trying to work my way out of a bad patch of insomnia, so, there's that!)

Wrapping up!

OKAY! That's basically it - I should be back with an update in early spring. One last thing - I wasn't sure where to put this, but I've got some other misc links that I realize the Discord community is very familiar with, but which I don't really link enough for anyone who's an update-reader that isn't part of the server chat. So! Updating that a bit!

• The Youtube channel - I don't update this too too often, but there's neat stuff I don't always remember to mention in Kickstarter updates! Like this devlog I did in the early fall / late summer about how some of the environmental work is done :)

• The Soundcloud page - Not every track I've written is here, but there's a huge amount of game music here, and some other stuff. Basically every completed and non-spoilery soundtrack is here!
• And, as always, the Discord server!

I'll lightly encourage you to follow these spaces yourselves, as I don't really go out of my way to mention them in updates :)