7/26 Status Update

This week has mostly been about refining what I did last week. I've been trying to get the first three levels into a more polished state so I can better see the current state of the game. Especially the first level and intro, that's been changing pretty much every day so far.

I want to strike a balance between the player having enough information to choose a POV, and not spending a lot of time on exposition and introductions. Ideally you get into the gameplay right away, but a lot of gameplay elements require you having a POV already chosen. So finding the right balance has proven to be rather tricky. It'll get there, but there's been lots of adjustments and tweaks this week.

Speaking of POVs, a big focus on Netoria 2 is making replays more enjoyable. The first game isn't really designed to be played multiple times. It has lots of different outcomes, but those are there to add consequence to the various things that can happen, not as incentives to play the game many times over. For Netoria 2, the POV system and more branching content/alternate levels should make multiple play-throughs much more rewarding. The game is also slightly shorter in length, with only 20 main levels.

However this does have a consequence, increased development time. Currently the timeline looks like a public release of act 1 early next year, act 2 done in full one year afterwards, and the game finished about six months after that. So Netoria 2 should be my main project for about two years. Other content will be released of course, hopefully Naked Ambition will get finished in that time, and some other project is sure to pop up. But that's still a two year commitment to getting this thing done. Sorry, two-years-from-now Apollo Seven, I'm sure you'll be sick of this game by then. But that's just how it works in game development, if you want to make finished games at least.

There's three main factors restricting how fast content can be made. Money, artist output, and my personal time. Money isn't an issue at the moment. Even with my Patreon count dwindling recently, the Steam release of Netoria Tactics has already matched what I made on this platform all of last year. I'm actually making a profit for essentially the first time ever.

Because of this my art budget is basically "make it as fast as you can". As fast as possible without losing serious quality is about a week per piece of scene art, like the one above. And with the character artist is working on gropes and alternate classes, the sprite artist on the pixel art sprites, it's in full swing. Act 2 is currently pegged to have over 50 needed scene illustrations, which as I said are done at the rate of one a week, so that's where that year long dev time for act 2 comes from. Of course that's not accounting for breaks or slowdowns so it'll likely be longer.

And of course, there's my time and labor without which all of this is pointless. Usually in these calculations I ignore my own need for commitments. My labor is "free" after-all. Internally I still view this much more as a hobby than a business. My work is free because it's my game and I want to make it. I'm not sure if that's really a sustainable attitude longterm, but hey this is year six of doing Apollo Seven stuff and it's still working out. Unfortunately I am very bad at estimating how long things like this take me personally so those timelines I said above are probably wrong. Can I keep pace with the art output to get everything ready to go on time? Probably not! But I'll be optimistic and keep my production timelines based on the art.

That's all for this week. Less focused of an update than last week but most other systems and characters I could preview need a bit more work before I show them off. As always, thank you for your continued support.