DevBlog-5 Roadmap 2020
Hey everypeople, it's been a while since I put out a new Roadmap and I thought now would be a good time. It's been a long journey, with a few mistakes, but I'm really excited to be nearing the end of Phase 1 for SuperPowered. I'll go ahead and cover some of those mistakes and how I plan to avoid making them again in the future.
1. Putting the development plan up to vote.
Now I'm all for holding votes for those that back the game, but I really should have just stuck with my gut instict and left the overall design plan of the game out of backers hands. I knew that the school was going to take a long time to make with the amount of characters I wanted to add, but... I was trying to give more value to the different backer tiers. Being stuck working on a single aspect of the game for a few years will burn anyone out, and that deffinitely happened to me. In the future, I will be a little tight around the design plan, while giving morewhat I've found to be much better recieved votes for things that players care about ...such as character design...outfit design, and so on.
2. Ignoring Burn out.
I tried to ignore the burn-out in 2018 and just trudge through and honestly, I feel like the work suffered from it. One reason why game dev studios that operate with heavy amounts of crunch tend to put out crap games, is when a coder and designer are mentally spent, the work they put into the game usually needs to be redone. Anthem is a good example of this. This last year I've been making a concerted effort to seperate myself from a project when I'm feeling completely uninspired. Starting dev in Loser has helped tremedously in this area.
3. Feature Creep.
This is tied closely to the first issue. I would spend so much time working on a character in a given patch, that by the time the character was released, I never wanted to mess with that character ever again, and I would break these monotony cycles by doing a function update, that would add new systems to the game. Some good, Such as more powers, some not so good, such as the dispersed influence system. I've generally avoided anything that wasn't in my initial plan that added to the render workload, but even those little things such as maintaining your school grades each month have probably hurt the game a little bit.
4. Ignoring the story.
I initially didn't want to add any story into the game until the primary locations were finished. So the School, Globex, The Initiative, and the Logistics Division. Considering I'm just now close to finishing the school goes to show that that would be a long time without any real plot so to speak. I will be progressing story elements more regularly once the school is finished.
Those are the big four mistakes I've made and how I plan to avoid them in the future with Superpowered, and Loser. Now let's move on to the positives.
1. All the school characters are finished for the most part.
I say for the most part, because there's tiny bits of content left here and there for different characters, but in general, the largest concentration of planned NPC's in the game is finished. It's also created a good break point for transitioning into the next pahse of the game. You finished school, now what? That's when choices really start to matter. Do you start working for the initiative, the logistics division, or free-lance? Lot's of potential content here.
2. The storyline for the school is close to being done as well.
I wanted to make a storyline, that gave some sort of introduction intot he hero world, andI feel like a I did a decent enough job at that. Excuse me while I pat myself on the back.
3. Reducing my monthly personal load.
This year was the first year where I stretched out my workload on character development from 10 weeks to 15 weeks, and while that's slowed progress on the game down, I feel like the writing and rendering has improved, becaused I'm not longer pulling 50-60 hour weeks to get all the content of a character rendered and written in time. Thus further reducing the burn out effect. I am after all more or less a one man show. I have a part time employee, but I've had them working on animations for Loser recently, since they eem to be pretty good at it, and I don't really have the patience to do it well.
4. Loser
Learning a new programming language, and game engine has done wonders for my coding skills in general, but has really improved my motivation with both projects. Being able to walk away from SP for a while has really helped me with my motivation for the project. After Grinding on C# and unity for a month, I actually look forward to putting on the comfy Ren'py coat afterwards. I'd presonally prefer to work 50-50 on both projects, but I think some of that might be due to my infatuation with Unity. After Loser 0.04.00 comes out, which would mark a year of Loser Dev, I may hold another vote regarding Dev time split between projects. But for the next 4-5 months I'll continue with the 2/1 SP/Loser focus split.
Ok I've been yak-yaking enough. Lets move on to the SuperPowered RoadMap.
Feb 0.39.00:
- Finish the NCHDL Storyline.
March
April 0.40.00:
- School Vacation (Winter & Summer)
- Modifying the Sibling Perk
- Finishing the jobs in the School (it's one of the few jobs that will have rank 3 postions for all 3 categories)
May 0.41.00:
- School Graduation
- Add BG music and mouse click sfx to the game. (finally)
June
July 0.42.00
- Work on Location(location will be voted on soon (after Loser 0.03.00 is released)
- Location could be: Globex, CoffeeShop, or Logistics Division
- Work on Location Character
- Location character could be: Nurse Anne, Sophie, or Courtney
August 0.43.00
- Work on Location Supplimental (see below)
- Work on Location Character
- September (Loser Development)
October 0.44.00
- Work on Location Supplimental
- Work on Location Character
November 0.45.00
- Work on Location(location will be voted on)
- Location could be: Globex, CoffeeShop, or Logistics Division minus previous location
- Work on Location Character
December
January 0.46.00
- Work on Location Supplimental
- Work on Character (will be voted on)
Now that's the tentative plan. This may change if Loser takes off, and people vote in September to do a 50/50 dev split. Also there are a few floating goals I plan to accomplish as well, which I will fit in where I can
Float content:
- Power: Humanitas
- Skill: Finance
- Skill: Chemistry
- Skill: Martial Arts
- Skill: Engineering
- Skill: Programming
- Power: Brilliance (requires all the skills to be in game first)
- Power: Huculean Might
- Initiative Trainee Ops
I'm sure you noticed " Work on Location Supplimental " mentioned a few times. Each location will have some supplimental content. For example if the Logistics Division is voted on, Then I'll develop the location specific scenes more. Right now there's a lot of boiler plate content when you apply for a higher pay grade, or what not, But once all that's done, I'll probably still have about a month and a half of working on Courtney, so the Logistics Division supplimental content may be a new job location, and job. The Coffeeshop will come with Sophie being Developed, along with being supplimented with working on Danni. (not promising to finish her here, just adding more interactivity than is currently in the game) Globex (Nurse Anne) will be supplimented with mostly Globex content, since there's a lot of boilerplate content from when Billy gets the Syrix shots. I plan to render each of those scenes. Plus, Anne will take a little longer than the other characters just because she has a work uniform, which adds 2/3rds more work to making a character. (one of the reasons the school took so damn long)
I'm sure you've also noticed that I haven't listed what I'll be working on Loser. That's because I'm so early in development with Loser I still can't accurately gauge how far along I am or will be after each update. Plus, I added a short term road map directly into the game, so you can see what I plan to work on for the next update there.
Finally I plan on updating my backer teirs sometime soon. Back when SP was a much smaller game it was easy for me to upload a test build multiple times in a month, but now that the game is over 3 gigs....Not so much. One test build and test build hotfixes is about the best my bandwidth can handle. So I'll be adding in some new perks to the $20 backer tier. Speaking of. I'm not much for pushing for subscriptions. I'm not a good salesman, and will never claim to be one. But, I do feel the need to bring this up. I'd like to hire my part time employee on full time or at least pay him more. So any financial help from you fine people that play my game but don't support my work could really help me, and my employee out greatly. And for those that do support my work thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Patreon has made many changes that have pretty much cut my income in half since 2018, and financially, things are becoming strained.
