September project status update

A number of people have asked me when the game will be released.

Today is September 5th, and my plan is to try to get the game read for Christmas (this year!), which basically leaves me a little bit less than 4 months.

The current plan is the following:

• Finish the game logic and have the entire game playable from beginning to end without any major bug by the end of September
• In October, send a first beta of the English version of the game to a select testers to validate a number of things:
  • What they think of the game itself, including major plus and minus points that would need to be fixed (bugs, difficulty level, puzzle comprehension)
  • Compatibility: Does it run on the real hardware properly, or does it misbehave on some configurations.
  • Problems with the texts (typos, hard to understand phrasing, etc…)
  • Bugs of all types, crashes, etc…

While the game is being tested, I obviously continue to work on it, with a priority being on the polish but also the audio part which needs to be finalized

I no particular big rewrite of the game needs to be redone, I’ll be finishing the French version of the game and send it for review to a few French testers to get the same type of feedback as above, plus some specific feedback concerning the French localization.

November and December will be used to do eventual bug fixes, optimizations, possibly integrate some other versions (it seems the Spanish community is very willing to provide Spanish translation for games), then I’ll have to prepare some trailer for the game (aka “marketing” material), and try to contact some retro game reviewers (like Retro Gamer, etc…).

To facilitate the testing and the reporting of issues, I added a feature to the game where the progress is printed out:

 1:53:45    Score:0       You are in a deserted market square  
  >TAKE BAG                             
--------
 1 52:44    Score:0       You are in a deserted market square  
  >N                                    
--------
 1:51:39    Score:0         You are in a dark, damp tunnel     
  >TAKE SALTPETRE                       
--------
 1 50:36    Score:0         You are in a dark, damp tunnel     
Game started
--------
 1 55:52    Score:0       You are in a deserted market square  
What are you going to do now?
  >TAKE BAG                             
--------
 1:54:35    Score:0       You are in a deserted market square  
  >N                                    
--------
 1:53:33    Score:0         You are in a dark, damp tunnel     
  >TAKE SALTPETRE                       
Carry it in what?
  >BAG                                  

Most Oric emulators supports redirecting the printouts into a “printer_out.txt” file, that should make it much easier for me to know what players have been doing exactly when they report an issue.

And because you’ve been reading so far, here are a few new graphics that made it to the game recently!