Now comes the hard part: 📦📦📦
Wooo! Why is shipping "the hard part", though?
Lucas here, getting a little philosophical with the newsletter after last month's overview of the work still remaining before we do a full, three-games-at-once sim-ship launch!
It's hard to know when something you're making should become something you've made; there's a threshold between imagination and experience that an idea only crosses once. The inclination is to keep tweaking and adjusting and improving before your idea passes through the veil of possibility into reality.
What makes the hard part easy, though, is that I know even after we've shipped that my team will want to keep tweaking, adjusting, and improving things anyway – so maybe I should go back and change the title?! Nah... 😅
Whew! Now that I've got that out of my system, let's dive into the details on what the team's been up to these past 30-ish days (T-2 months to release!).
Character Importer
Starting with One Last Job, Billy (linktree) added a handy feature for importing lots of names into a crew pack. This little feature is mainly targeted at folks who want to include a list of folks they know in the game... without having to go through name-by-name and create their crew members.
Normally we'd have some kind of picture or animation to show here, but there's not really much to it, visually – you give it a file with a list of names, and then all of those names are added as crew in a pack!
Running a Business without Bugs
With One Last Job, Another Round, AND Null State, the team has been fixing a slew of bugs spotted by the excellent testers at Indium Play. Here's a few samples of their work; let me know if you can spot what's gone wrong!
Thanks, team – we definitely wouldn't even be close to shipping if it weren't for your diligent and attentive testing!
Null State
With Null State, our writer Pip (site) continues to work on finalizing the Obsidian Wednesday storyline with the help of our localization team: Bea (X), Clément (homepage), Daniel (clane_k on Discord), and Hans + Mery (from the Warlocs team).
I've been helping a bit on that front, too! I made a tool to process the game data into a directed graph, which has allowed us to visualize how conversations and jobs flow across the course of our launch-day storylines:
It's been interesting to see the flow and connections between the different plotlines; the interconnectedness will make for very compelling storytelling!
With that little contribution out of the way, we've got to move on to the main event: Robin (linktree) has been doing some heavy lifting; almost too much to mention! ...but lemme at least mention the massive upgrade on how networks look/feel/sound, the massive upgrade on the player onboarding experience, the massive upgrade on managing pack dependencies, and the massive upgrade on combat. Whew!
Billy's also been working on a little feature which should make it in time for the full release: players will be able to make & play their own, custom storylines via a built-in datapack manager. Cool, right?
And finally, in addition to handling a big UI/visuals/iconography clean-up, Heloisa (Behance) is knocking some POWERFUL imagery out of the park – which we'll use at the end of the Obsidian Wednesday storyline:
I can't tell you how you get this ending; I CAN tell you this is part of just one of the possible endings, depending on the choices you make.
One More Thing...
The three demos WILL be in the February Next Fest... and we're also going to put them up a little early – in fact, they're going live this Thursday (13 Feb)! I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions after you've had a chance to play. 😃
And of course, don't forget to wishlist, follow, and share our games with everyone:
https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/tripleeyegames
