With 2 months 📅 to go, what's left to do? 👷
Happy New Year!
Hey, thanks! I hope your holidays went well, and that you got a chance to see family / loved ones / no one (depending on what you like to do with your time off) since you last heard from me.
Most of the Triple Eye team got some time away to rest and recuperate for the big push to release coming up these next few months; we're all back now, though, and have been cooking on our "Road to Release" to-do list – which is a list of ~150 tasks and bugs we need to get done in order to release our three games in March!
As of this newsletter reaching your inbox (here in mid-January – I'll get the Feb newsletter to you on time, I promise!), we've got more than 50 of those things done already, meaning that (if all goes well) we're right on track to have everything done JUST on time!
How about I tell you a little about what's changed so far with each game?
Not Much has changed in Another Round, tbh
Aside from a few bug-fixes, Another Round already got a lot of attention back in Oct/Nov last year, so it's the game with the least amount of work left to do.
Before we ship, we've got a handful of localization-related bugs that need fixing – and Billy (linktree) has already been hard at work on getting those knocked out.
Another Round x One Last Job Crossover!
While we're talking about stuff Billy's been doing, I'm super excited at how quickly he was able to put together a fresh crew datapack in OLJ – one hour's work, and it's got all of the named characters from Another Round (and they look great, too – nice work on the crew customization, Heloisa)!
Null State has some Big Changes!
Robin (linktree) dug deep through December and January to make some major, last-minute revisions to significant portions of Null State. As a many-time producer first-time game director, I have to admit that I asked for some wacky stuff... and he rolled with it! He's really amazing; thank you, Robin!
Like, take a look at this – Null State's diegetic display has gone widescreen:
Combat is evolving as well, with even more diegetic goodness (thanks mostly to the new widescreen display giving us more space to play with). The screen above will interact with the board below, and you'll be able to keep track of what's happening when and where using the progress / time bar in the middle of the two:
We've also got a bunch of great new sounds and other SFX added to the latest build of the game – which I can't really share with you in a newsletter. 😑
...but you CAN check out those sounds in the trailer on our Steam page!
This is great! What else is in the todo list, tho?
It's honestly a lot of little stuff, mixed in with some big stuff.
In Null State, there's still some decisions that need to be made about how difficult combat should be, as well as some balancing done to make sure you won't under-earn or over-earn when doing jobs. Also, I'd like to add a contact who acts as a random-job generator (asking you to do various things in service to their client/s), in homage to many classic RPGs from my youth.
In Another Round, it's mostly bug fixing and tweaking some text to make things a bit more clear; there were also some localization bugs that I think we've fixed... we just need to check and verify.
In One Last Job, I'd really like to get the Steam Workshop integrated, so that players can make and exchange their own jobs and crews. With that said, it would be a last-minute addition of a system that I've never used / supported before – so I'm not even sure what the implications would be to use Workshop vs some other modding platform. I'd also like to unbalance the current jobs a bit, so there isn't so much overlap between the job needs and your crew; it'll make the game a bit harder, but also a bit more interesting!
Wow, okay. So, what's your next big milestone?
Well, we're going to keep working on the games, prepping the demos to go out in the upcoming Steam Next Fest (February 2025).
We'll be reaching out to streamers and lets-players a few weeks beforehand to see if any of them would be interested in playing the demos before they land with the general public – so, if you have a favorite online personality who you think would like one of these games (whether they speak English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or German!), well... you know how to get in touch! Send me their channel, and I'll add them to my list.
And of course, please don't forget to head over to Steam and wishlist our games at your earliest convenience!
