Hi everyone! It’s been a while, sorry to keep you all waiting. Here’s the recap:
Build v0.1.0
The first playable slice of Liege is finally ready to share!
I’ve uploaded our first alpha build to Steam and submitted the request to Valve for backer keys. Alpha backers, keep an eye on your inbox over the next few days. Those of you who prefer delivery outside of Steam, shoot me a PM and I’ll see to getting you a direct link. As mentioned before, to keep things manageable on my end I’ll be focusing on PC, Mac and Linux for alpha testing.
What to expect: The build contains the tutorial sequence shown two updates ago in its new, extended form. The demo is short and a lot of things are still rough, but I’m making it available in its current state with the following goals:
1) Identify any major system compatibility issues
2) Get a sense of how things are performing on a wider range of hardware
3) Start getting feedback on the tutorial sequence, mechanics, and combat UI
Following this first release, I’ll be putting out more regular updates which will incrementally extend the content. Once the keys go out I’ll be following up with details on where to send bugs, suggestions, questions, etc.
Dev Updates
With all that out of the way, I wanted to give you all a quick recap of what’s been going on since the last update. First, Kalen and Aakaash are pretty much waiting up for me to catch up with things on the dev side. I was hoping to be 100% focused on content at this stage, but I needed to go back to solidify things some more before moving ahead with production full steam.
1)Tools
There’s a ton of content that needs to be created, and pretty much all of the battles and narrative sequences are still scripted by hand. This is very time consuming.
That being the case I’m still investing a lot of effort in getting our tools into the best possible shape. Everything in v0.1.0 was rebuilt using the latest workflow, and things move much quicker now.
2) Optimization
With our technology stack more or less set in stone at this point, I’ve been spending a lot of time profiling the game to identify performance bottlenecks. There’s still more work to be done here, but the game’s now running smoother than ever.
3) Refactoring
I’ve been spending a lot of time taking apart rushed code from earlier and putting it back together in a way that’s more maintainable, extensible, and performant. While it’s frustrating to put so much work into something that yields so little outward progress, it was a necessary chore. On the plus side, our codebase no longer feels like a leaning tower, ticking time bomb, plate of spaghetti, which is good. In all seriousness though, the game’s on much more solid footing code wise now, which will pay off going forward.
4) A Million Loose Ends
The game’s been in a playable state for a while now, but it continues to find new and creative ways to break on me. My debugger and I have been spending a lot of time together addressing this issue.
Apart from bug fixes, I’ve also been continuing to work down a long list of changes to improve the game’s existing features. Of these, the biggest change was redoing the entire combat interface to be consistent with the character management interface I showed in the last update. Sadly this 1) took forever and 2) introduced a ton of new bugs, but it’s done, and it’s better now!
To sum up: things are still moving slower than I’d like, but I think the extra time we’re taking is worth it. Thanks as always for your patience, and have a great week everyone!