Unlike many other developers, I like to work on my games without a lot of external feedback from others. At the start of Space Grunts I had some people look at it and give me some early feedback mostly concerning turn-based gameplay and mechanics, but for the last 4 or 5 months I’ve been working on the game without anybody else playing it.
So today is an exciting day, because the Beta version is now available for everyone who pre-orders the game ! (which can be done here: www.spacegrunts.com)
Which means people will now start playing a game that I’ve been working on religiously every day for months and months, any game-developer or artist knows how scary it is to open your work up to the critics of the world, but that’s also kinda why we create things!
I’ll be using the feedback/criticism to improve the game while it’s in the current beta stage, planning to push out updates frequently and meanwhile also adding the various things that I feel are still missing in the game.
In the last few weeks I’ve been fixing and improving the interface to make it as ready and user-friendly as possible.
Instructions and interface design have all been cleaned up, and where needed, added to make sure everyone can play and find their way around screens. And altho the screenshots show the keyboard-instructions, these are all added for mouse, controller, and touch-screen interfaces. A lot of testing has been done!
One of the big things left now is adding the actual “ending” to the game, just in case other players are more skilled at the game then me. And then a lot of balancing hopefully based on feedback from the current players.
There is still a bunch of new stuff I like to add, including NPC’s that give you hints, or options to trade items with. Some more weapons, items, and monsters (can never have enough of those) and various smaller features and tweaks.
Altho September is still something that I would love to make as a release date, if only on Windows/Mac/Linux, it’s really sneaking up on me with just a few more weeks. The problem with not releasing in September will be that I have to delay the game till January/February, because there is very little point in releasing the game in the middle of the big AAA releases that always happen near the holiday season.
So there’s some weeks of crunching coming up to see if I can actually complete the game in September!
Now go Pre-order and play the game ;)
