Hey everyone!

Time for the last update of the year! The whole team will be taking the next week off so we can get some rest and start the new year right on track (and you know, Christmas is meant to be spent with family and those things ;-P).

Before calling it a year we got together for one last team meeting. We do this every few months. We go to a nice café and spend the whole afternoon just talking about our goals for the upcoming months, defining priorities, tasks and workflows. We also discuss new ideas or things that we can’t bring up on a regular day since we’re often too busy with our personal tasks.

We try to define milestones for new features and systems as well as for content creation. It’s hard to design systems without a given content to try them out, but at the same time creating content without those very same systems in place doesn’t work either. So we work on both things at almost the same pace.

Planning ahead when making a game is quite hard. You need to time things you know nothing about. Like when you need a new feature to fill a gap (though you still don’t know exactly what) and you know you’ll be doing some research, trying to come up with ideas and implementing them. You might need to produce some new assets at some point, test it and iterate (or if it doesn’t work at all start all over again). So yeah, we tend to assign more time to each task because we know it’s never as easy as just doing it (specially when we can’t find many references around).

So this is a pretty common conversation regarding new features.

• Reports show that players need some kind of indicator that highlights the item that is in front of them.

• Yeah, we could do A, B, C or D to fix that.

• Well, I believe A and D wouldn’t really work on “A Place for the Unwilling” because of X.

• I think B would be great.

• Sure? C could work even better.

We spot the goal and suggest different solutions based on references and personal experience. We then remove those which don’t really make sense. We usually end up with a couple of them which might work, but there’s no way of being really sure without actually doing them. We need to do a few tests to find out which one is the best. So a lot of time doesn’t go into completing a certain task but finding out the right approach for it.

Our next milestone will be focused on creating a new playable build that we can use to test more features and improvements made over the last months. One of the hardest things to get right on this demo versions is the very beginning of it. It’s usually the last thing we do since you need an overall perspective of the whole game to craft the right introduction for it; but people who try out the demo don’t care about that and you need a beginning that sets everything up..

We came up with a trick to avoid working on the actual beginning of the game while preparing the latest build. We would set it on your seventh day in the city. It seemed like a cool idea that would allow us to skip a few “not-so-fun” things and get right in the middle of interesting events… and it was a really bad decision, though we didn’t notice that at the time. While working on “A Place for the Unwilling” we try to make sure both player and character are synchronized (remember the reason behind turning strangers into shadows?), but skipping a whole week and having citizens who already knew our character (and having a main character who had way more knowledge than the player controlling it) kind of blew up the whole thing. It was a disposable beginning, one that was made just for that demo, but it still was one of those things that seem like a decent idea just before you hand the controller to somebody else and realize it doesn’t work at all. Iterating is fun, isn’t it?

And that’s all for today! We want wish you a Merry Christmas. Hope you all enjoyed reading our devlog because we love sharing all these stories with you.

Don’t go too far though, we’ll be back in two weeks with a new update ;-)