Devlog #4: Getting Rejected From Festivals Was So Worth It

June is festival / showcase season, and despite being totally not ready for such things, I really wanted to apply. So we did! Here’s the rough “trailer” we threw together in a couple days:

So, the bad:

• WIP assets all over the place (those rocks, ugh)
• No sound effects, so… let’s play some loud music?
• Enemies don’t have a death animation / ragdoll yet, so we can’t show the whole gameplay loop
• MicroVerse / MicroSplat, the third-party terrain tools I use in Unity, caused all kinds of problems that slowed down my attempts to throw together some scenes in a weekend (I still like these tools, though)

Then there’s the good. We were forced to build basic version of a bunch of necessary things very quickly, including: 

• Full attack routine, including VFX and damage floats
• Animation clip mixing to allow attacking while on the walk/run
• Minimal enemy AI
• Improved UI look and functionality
• A bunch of bug fixes
• A Chronicle Games website based off of PressKit (side-note, I really don’t believe most PC games absolutely need websites, but… the application forms require it)
• Choosing a name and logo for the game!

We hauled ass through the weekend to make the first event deadline, which was for Future of Play. And… I now know that they rejected us. They’d gotten 450 applications for 15 slots, and in all honesty, our game was way too early in production to seriously compete.

Still totally worth it! Sometimes, having some outside pressure can help show you what you really need to be working on. And after spending a couple months of setup time just getting the basic evolving creature rig working, it was so satisfying to see some semi-functional gameplay.

Now we’ve finished applying for all the events that we’re on our list, so it’s back to “normal”. And I can finally pick back up with some stuff like these devlogs. Later this week I’ll post more about the evolve system.