Friday diaries: Kalaban has been Greenlit!

First off: A huge thank you for all the Yes votes! We could not have done this without you. :)

So, the natural question is: what now? We've been really busy for the last few days, implementing some important features, which will help the players and make the game more enjoyable. These include the item highlighting, added hovertexts and arrows which tell you where you will be travelling, if you go down a certain path.

We went through the scenes and looked at what's missing. The game certainly needs to give a few nudges here and there for the players. In the finished product, we will have the Steam Achievements, which are triggered after an important event is completed. In addition to this, we also have the quest markers for the main quest NPCs, which remind you of what they need.

We don't want to add quest arrows, because they're quite cheap way to give the player the right direction. They also have the disadvantage gameplay-wise, that once it's in the game, the players will be constantly staring at the arrow and not exploring the surroundings and figuring stuff out themselves. This to us doesn't sound like fun gameplay. We have wanted to make the exploration enjoyable, and part of the core experience.

Now that we've got the main quest somewhat working, we've gotten into the smaller details. Adding environmental storytelling, dead bodies, little story crumbs where they were still missing. This is a work in progress though, and we'll be doing this work until launch.

We've also included some new craftable items. In the very beginning we had this idea about adding a lot of crafting into the game. But as it turns out, that requires a lot of work. So, we decided focus on the story and making the main items work, instead of including an elaborate crafting system. We've now made it extremely streamlined, with just simple drag & drop style combining of two items. For example, you drag the batteries to flashlight to fill it up. 

There's still quite a bit of bugfixing to be done. Saving and loading bugs are the usual ones, that you have to be constantly fixing. The more items, the more moving parts, and more things that can go wrong. Sometimes you create absolute disasters, and have to revert back to earlier save states. Some important story item got lost, and now you saved the game without it.

But these things do happen. In an open world story game, you're bound to deal with all kinds of funny bugs. It's an intricate mess of variables and parameters, a chaotic construct, which you somehow just have to manage.

In other news: We have just uploaded a new Early Access version to GameJolt. As you might have already read, we're moving out of Early Access at the end of this month, so this is the last call to test the game before launch. Happy hunting!

Friday diaries: Main quest completed

Hello there, readers! Folks, we've finally got to the point in our development where you can actually complete the main quest! The ending is still placeholder at the moment, as we haven't created the final artwork for it yet. Second piece of news: on November 15, 2014 we conceived the first concept for Kalaban. So we're officially two years into development, yay!

Bob takes a hit from a canine mutant.

We're going for this comic book (or rather motion comic) style cinematic, instead of a fully animated movie. We have received a lot of feedback from the silly cinematic that we did for our Steam Greenlight trailer a while back, and we won't be making a prerendered cinematic for the ending. The trailer really split viewers, and people have clearly expressed that they want to see something less cheesy, and more polished, so we'll respond to that demand.

We might do a small treat for those of you who actually enjoyed the prerendered cinematic. But more on that later. Right now we're focusing on the core game, and putting all our time and effort into that.

Attempting to sneak past the enemy. Unsuccessfully.

So, all the key NPCs are now fully implemented in the game, and you can interact with them. We haven't added the feature to kill any NPCs yet, because that would give us a ton of headache right now.

Making the NPCs die, and stay that way, is easy of course, but we're constantly testing the game and playing with it while developing the other features. So, you would have to mess with the save games, and restore earlier state every time you've killed one off. So, NPC killing will be one of the very last things to be added into the game, just a heads up if you're one of our Early Access testers.

Mini-puzzle: Discovering the key and unlocking the house.

On that matter, we've decided to move out of Early Access at the end of November, and focus fully on the development of the final game. Those who have bought the Early Access version will still be able to play it, and will receive the Steam key for the finished game, once it's in the store.

We just want to give our 100% for the final parts of the development, and prepare a really kick-ass experience for all of you to enjoy. Right now we're implementing a bunch of beauty fixes, and stuff that we haven't got time to implement before. We wanted to have all the scenes finished, before we got into the fine detail and adding those finishing touches.

 We recently revised the drag & drop system in the inventory.

A few things in the UI will get revised, and we will look at the writing in the game. We will also go through all the scenes and add story flavor, items and bunch of visual stuff, that isn't there yet.

Our estimated release date is December 20th, and that's what we're still aiming for. We've been reluctant to give out a confirmed date, because as you know, software development is quite tricky and full of surprises. But we'll let you guys know the date, as soon as it's confirmed.

Bob exploring and discovering clues at the junkyard.

 

So, if you haven't tested out our Early Access and want to do so, head over to GameJolt and get yourself a copy. It costs 6 dollars at the moment, which is around 30% less than the price on the finished game. After the end of this month, you will have to wait for the finished game to pop up on the Steam store page with the actual retail price.

That's it for this week, thanks for reading everybody!