Finishing Another Round 🥃 / Starting One Last Job 📋

Stuck in the Middle with You

Welcome, friend, to that time between time -- when one project is winding down, and the next project is still in pre-production, and you'd think it would be a bit of downtime but there's actually still loads of work to be done (fixing bugs; last-minute localizations; submitting pages and builds for review; tweaking UI/UX...).

I told you last time how my administrative mistake led to a full reshuffle of our production & release schedules; as a result of those changes, it seems to me we're going to get more time to put together fewer games (releasing 3 games in Q1 2025 means we're a long way from "4 games over 15 months").

That's a good thing! I'm very pleased with what the team has put together with the extra time we had on Another Round; we're going to let the game rest a bit before it's release, and we'll take another look at it in the last few months of 2024 to make sure we still like what we see prior to its release in 2025. :)

Last Call with Another Round!

Steam Integration

Once we had the art and gameplay (mostly) in place on Another Round, there were only a few small pieces left to tackle -- the biggest unknown being Steam Integration (while the Hobfield team, Billy & Robin, have made more games together than we can count right now, this will be their first to integrate achievements)!

It wasn't long, though, before they had it figured out!!

We have 4 public and 2 private achievements (one of which is teased in the image above, oops!). They each have fantastic, meaningful, and interesting art provided by Heloisa (Behance) and, of course, localizations provided by our crack team of freelancers: Bea (X), Clément (homepage), Daniel (clane_k on Discord), & Dave (.avodavo on Discord).

Demo

Robin & Billy also came through on putting a demo together; what's really impressive is how easily (at least, from my seat) they were able to exclude functionality from the demo. With their elbow grease on GameMaker configs, I'm able to generate a dev, release, or demo build with virtually zero effort; this is a feat compared to other projects I've worked on in the past, let me tell you!

Amongst other things, we've made sure the player gets to experience as much of the combo-making fun as possible, while still keeping to the feel of a demo (in the case illustrated to the left, here, you can see that the demo won't allow players to generate cards greater than 7). It's a great taste of the game, if you ask me!

Starting One Last Job

Girls Just Want to Have Fun (Jobs & Characters)

While waiting for the tech & art teams to get through pre-production / discovery on One Last Job, Drummond (Myopic Studios) and Dean have been breaking ground on building up the data we'll need to generate interesting characters, to send on important jobs!

Who would you rather have in your crew: an agile snake charmer with a heart of gold, a brawny barista with a cyberarm, or a crafty voice actor with a charming smile? I know who I'd pick!

They're also exploring how much fun we can have with the kinds of jobs you're asking your crew to do; it's cyberpunk, but not everything has to be dark and bleak and dour in our future dystopia. :)

No Surprises (Pre-Production)

Finally, as mentioned a few months ago, we wanted to make sure we had time set aside to answer some questions before diving into production on our next game, so that we had a good understanding for how everything should come together as we progress.

For example, Robin is prototyping a bit on how best to bring characters into the game; I'm looking forward to seeing what options he offers up on his character selection menu. Billy's looking into some off-the-shelf tech we can use (especially tools in the Jujuverse) to bring additional features – which might even come back to help us in games like Null State and Another Round (once we're in post-production).

Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want

You should email me if you want to play Another Round, by the way. I will send you a Steam key for the demo, and all I'll ask in return is your honest opinion!

Come back again next month, and I'll tell you about the updates we're making this month to Null State, to finish some drafted features which were put in place just before production started on Another Round.

Until then, let's celebrate a job well done by the best team I could hope for!