What's next for Shimmershoal?

First off, thanks to everyone who has followed the project and played the demo! You are the lifeblood of indie projects, and I can't thank you enough for the interest. I'm making this game in my spare time with no budget or content creator connections, so those who take the time to follow the project really make a huge difference for me.

As you know if you're reading this when it comes out, I recently launched this page and released Demo 1 and the announcement trailer. So what's next for the project?

Demo 2 is in development

I got very positive feedback on Demo 1, but everyone also agreed that it's a bit too short to get a good sense of the game. I agree, and my current goal is to get a second demo put together and released that will take you all the way through day 1 of the full game. The rest of day 1 will be lighter on dialog and heavier on gameplay, and I think it will be a great sampling of what the game has to offer. I hope you'll keep an eye out for that release when it comes.

I don't have a release date to announce yet for this second demo, so "as soon as possible" will have to suffice for now. I'm very eager to get this game finished, but because I can't work on it full time specific deadlines aren't feasible for me at the moment. The good news is that getting to the release of Demo 1 and especially the trailer required getting a ton of groundwork and systems in place across the whole game. If all goes well, most of my development from here on will be creating content rather than building systems. For those of you not familiar with game dev, this means making the rest of the game should progress at a faster pace thanks to this preliminary work.

Further in the future

Demo 2 will likely be the final demo for the game, and the next public release would be the finished product. The final game will take place across 3 days of roughly similar length, so this second demo will show off approximately a third of the whole game. There's much more to do to get to the finish line, but I hope you'll stick around and check in on Shimmershoal occasionally to see how things are going!

Thanks for reading,

Ian