I’ll lead with the most exciting news of the week, I submitted Aurora Redemptus to the humble store to be sold as an early access title. I got it submitted Saturday evening, so it will most likely be a couple of days before I hear back, but I’m very glad to have that done.
Of course I had some things that I needed to get done before I could submit it. The biggest thing was a tutorial. I added in a basic tutorial that covers all of the basics that I would cover with people at the Salt Lake Gaming Con. The whole thing takes less than a minute, I haven’t timed it, so it could be closer to thirty seconds. Anyway, it gives a brief introduction, then turns you lose to kill some turrets. Other small improvements include several bug fixes, and an improvement to how the machine gun bullets look. They use to be just yellow lines, but now they are bolts of light. They look a lot better.
At the moment I’m charging $1.00 for the game, of course I’m going to be providing access keys for everyone who liked the game on Facebook. I’m honestly still thinking over whether to charge or not to start charging for it right now. On the one hand, I promised free access to everyone who liked the game on Facebook, I will definitely provide that, but it feels a little funny to offer them ‘free’ access, then go ahead and give it to everyone for free. On the other hand my big concern at the moment is just getting people to hear about and play the game. I’ll have to see how it shakes out.
As for what’s next, I’m thinking that if I’m asking people to pay money, even $1.00, then I should provide plenty of content. I’m really wanting to add multiplayer, and that would provide numerous benefits. First, it would hopefully get a lot of people playing the game, someone plays it, then wants to play with their friends so they tell the friends about it, and so on and so forth. Another big benefit would be help in balancing the game. Anyone who played the game at the con will be able to attest to the fact that at the moment the missile ships are just way too powerful. If handled right one missile ship could take down a lot of other ships. If there were a lot of people playing the game it would help me get a feel for how the weapons balance up against each other. I think this would be something that would be really nice to have mostly done before I get too far into the story campaign. If I get halfway through, then find that I have to nerf some weapons system, then every level that made use of that is going to have to be reviewed for balance. One potential solution to that could be to have a different class of equipment only available in the story, and that are tuned to the needs of the story. So you would have missiles in the story and in the multiplayer, but they might be more powerful in one than the other. As I said before, I don’t think that multiplayer would be terribly difficult to implement, the difficult part would be handling all of the balancing. That could take a lot of time out of development. But then I think being swamped with work because so many people are playing your game would be a pretty good problem to have.
There are some other changes I’ve thought of making that I’m not sure where on the timeline they fall. Before the conference I was toying with a more distinct planning mode. The background would fade slightly, making the lasers and explosions less distinct, then all of the ships would light up with green, red or blue indicating player ships, enemy ships and ally ships. That would make it easier to pick out the ships, see where you are going, etc. I thought it was looking pretty cool too, but it was too buggy to include in the con demo. I’ve also got some new weapon systems I would like to implement, special abilities for ships, and of course the story campaign, which is one of the things I’m most excited about.
So a big task for me now is prioritizing, figuring out what will bring in more players, what will keep those players happy, and what will contribute towards the overall success of the project. Lots of very fun stuff to do. Any suggestions or thoughts would be very welcome in the comments.