​Hi again, in today’s blog post I’m going to quickly be talking about The Elementalist being content complete, what that means, and what to expect between now and release.

Basically, when I say the game is content complete I mean that all of the levels and all of the cutscenes for The Elementalist are now in a finished state! While in places they make lack polish, I could release the game right now and you could play the whole thing from start to finish, but, naturally, I won’t; there’s still a lot more to do in the way of polishing the game and adding in extras, so, here’s what I’ll be working on over the next few weeks before release:

1) Beefing up the cutscene system. While it is largely robust there are just a few special case actions I want to be able to perform in the game which I can’t as it stands. They only crop up in a few cutscenes so I’ll be going back and making minor tweaks to get this working properly.

2) Endless mode! This will let you replay levels from the main game but with no score limit. Play for as long as you like and try to beat your own high scores!
3) An options menu. This is going to be pretty important but is also pretty dull. Fortunately I’m not making a triple-A open world sandbox where I need options for everything from shadow detail to foliage complexity.

4) Difficulty settings! I was, at first, considering this as maybe some small extra. But on further examination I think it’s going to be quite crucial. Instead of a traditional few preset difficulty options I’ll give players a bunch of fun values they can tweak, such as spawn rate, health, and mana recovery. I’ll take the values the player enters, put these through a big ball of maths, and output a value, likely some kind of percentage, which represents their chosen difficulty. I’ll give the player this option for the main campaign and it will save the hardest difficulty the player has completed it on, and also for each level in the endless mode. In the case of the endless mode, the difficulty you choose will affect your score, decreasing it for lower difficulties and multiplying it for harder difficulties.

5) Trailers and a release date! Pretty soon you can expect to hear exactly when you can play The Elementalist via a very swish little trailer. It will definitely be before the end of April, and the price is still going to be sitting at $4.99.

So, that’s my what I’ll be up to! I’m very excited to have finally gotten the game to this point. It’s been really fun to develop, much more so, than anything else I’ve worked on, and I hope you enjoy playing it very soon. Thanks for reading! Follow me over on Twitter​ for all the latest updates on The Elementalist. Until next time!