I think now is good a time as any to identify my future objectives for the game, what’s already done and what remains to be done.

On the art side, I have a lot of things done and finished namely:
-New items
-New foes
-The Skill Tree
-New Rooms
-New Title Screen
-New Bosses

I’ve spent a lot of time here and there drawing those up. So there’s a lot of content there waiting to be implemented. So you could say there’s a bottleneck when it comes to art which is slowly being integrated into the game. The advantage with art is that unless there’s some glaring mistake I somehow missed which makes things look sub-par, there’s no backtracking necessary unless things look too outdated for my liking (which does happen over a period of 2 years).

Programming is a whole different process because bugs happen. Every time features are added (which is the very idea of Early Access), bugs happen. They’re quite simply impossible to precisely foresee but their future presence is a certainty. What then happens is that more time needs to be spent fixing said bugs which isn’t time invested adding new features (which is what I ultimately strive for).

Implementing feedback is another aspect of Early Access. It’s important and necessary. The caveat with this is limited resources.

Super Toaster X has been for me mostly a creative endeavor. It was a project to funnel my creative juice, to make an artistic vision a reality. To this day, I haven’t touched a penny from the hundreds of hours I’ve worked on that game and I’m not too bothered by it. I mean, some financial reward would be nice but it doesn’t demotivate me from working on the game.

Some people have criticized the game for being sold and not given for free. I think it’s important to address the conception that the game should be free and discuss the reason why it’s being sold in the first place.

When I started getting involved in game development two years ago, I figured I could work on this as a side project. The thing with game development is that it doesn’t involve a single set of skills but rather require a vast array of abilities covering not only graphical art but also music and programming.

Any developer wannabe is then faced with either developing the skills they lack or finding people who can already have them. If you ever doubt about this, read up the credits of most video games out there, it should give an idea about how many people and skills are involved in making them.

Which brings me back to fees involved in game development. Even though I don’t make any money working on the game, all of the game’s resources are funneled on hired hands. To sum things up, the game isn’t being sold for the fame and riches of the developer but rather to actually wrap up the game and finish it thanks to those people who can perform the tasks I’m not handling.

In an ideal world, we’d all work on this because we’re passionate about it. I could then include just about every feature you could ever dream of. Reality proves to be different however which brings me to the point I wanted to make about resources.

Basically, the current resources in EA must be invested in three different categories:
a. bug fixing
b. adding features
c. taking in feedback

All three are important but the resources to administer to each are limited. It’s all about making the right decision about the actual features to make sure the game progresses forward at a steady pace while fixing bugs and improving the game based on feedback without running out of resources and selling the game short.

Basically, for those wondering if the current asking price isn’t too much, it doesn’t even cover what I’d like to implement into it and I’m not making a dime from it. I feel like it’s important to shed light as to what happens behind the scenes at times.

There’s also that the game is very niche, there’s always the risk of going against the current, especially in indie game development.

Just letting you guys know what’s going on at the moment and what’s upcoming for the game.