DEVELOPMENT BLOG #3 - New talent, Steam and Playtesting

Holy shit we have reached the $1000 p/m milestone! This in incredible and more than we could have ever hoped for. Seriously, thank you all so much for funding this project and sticking with us. 

For the past 10 days I haven't been able to be very active on Patreon, apologies for that. While I did share a fair bit of content in our Patreon-exclusive Discord channels, I haven’t been able to get around writing a blog post for a while now. A lot of Selaco related projects had to be put on hold earlier due to a lack of funding, but now that we have a Patreon, things are firing in all cylinders and I need to be there to communicate with the team and make sure things are going into the right direction. But today is Sunday, a perfect time to write a short little blog post!

New talent

Lets begin with the big one: We have a new artist on board! Silvia Merconchini, fresh out of the Nemo Academy of Digital Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, who will help us out with the illustrations and concept art for Selaco. This week was our first week of working together and things are going very well! We mainly focused on getting her familiar with the art style of the game and are slowly easing her in. Silvia already made an ingame asset which I will show here soon, a lovely fictional branding poster! Above you can see some of the work she has done in the past. We are thrilled to her on board and are confident that she will create some amazing things! And yes, backers get to see it first!

What are working on?

Everything. The OST has been put on hold for a few months due to a shitty budget, but now with Patreon we can finally continue. YijArt is working on brand new gore models for the enemies (kind of like Quake 2, where they get riddled with bullet holes when they are nearly dead, except even more awesome), Borion is creating some delicious food voxels, I'm working on polishing up Selaco's gameplay systems while also doing some effects work, the rest of the team are all fully focused on the art assets for Selaco. Its amazing to see how much of a well oiled machine we have come over the last few months. Going public and getting such amazing input from you guys is giving us a massive boost in morale.

Steam

As you might have probably heard by now, Selaco finally has a Steam Store page! Sorry that it took so long, I've been knee-deep in the development of Selaco and that has been top-priority for me. Now that the game is finally is a *very* playable state that could almost be declared as final, I started setting up the Steam page!

After making the public announcement on Twitter I was hoping to reach somewhere around the 1000 Wishlist's, but assumed it would hang around the 500-600 range. We reached 1500 Wishlist's in a single day(!) and are currently sitting at 2000. I have no words, this is incredible and more than any of us could have dreamed of. The release is still relatively far away (August 25, 2255 is still years away after all!) so we have plenty of time to polish things up and make it even better than it already is.

Yesterday I fiddled around with Steamworks and uploaded a Selaco test version which is what we are using to playtest the game. Much better than sending Google Drive links to playtesters containing a ZIP file with the game on it. Speaking of playtests...

Playtests

Now that we slowly approaching a playable preview builds, we started doing some extensive testing sessions. Playing the game back to back over and over to ensure that things are polished, bug free and fun to play. Seeing the reactions in the playtesting channels has put a massive smile on my face, one that I could not contain. Things are looking very well for Selaco and the combat has never been in a better place than it has now. The systems are beginning the click and I'm growing more and more confident as a level designer now that I know how the AI works. The arena design in the last few levels I have worked on have been better than anything I have ever done before because of it. Perfect playgrounds for both Dawn and the AI. I'll dive deeper into Selaco's level design later!

Demo

One of the tier rewards is a Patreon demo and wanted to give a status update on it. While the game is stable, there are still a lot of art assets that need to be replaced or added. Many sprites are literally just squares that say things like [DEAD CIVILIAN], [DEAD GUARD], [ROACH VOXEL HERE] among others things. We remove them for twitter post, but there is supposed to be much more going on in some of the screenshots we have shown, but we simply do not have the art assets yet.

A possibility is to just temporarily remove them all and send the demos out, but I strongly believe that our environmental storytelling takes a hit without those art pieces and that is a big part of Selaco's appeal. On the bright side, at the rate things are going right now, I'm sure the demo is much closer than what our original demo release target was, which was around October for patrons and December for the public. I'll give updates when I can and hopefully we can get the demo's out way sooner.

Conclusion

I established in an early blog post that I will always be completely upfront and honest with you. If you back a project, you deserve nothing more but the truth. With that said, trust me that Selaco is in a fantastic place right now. Over the coming weeks I will share some extensive looks into the things we have been working on. If you have a Discord account, make sure to join us. I share a lot in the #Showcase channel!

I'm excited for the things to come, hopefully you are too. Thanks for being here with us on Patreon!

Wesley de Waart