Production strategy

bscotchsam

AYO. What with all this CANCER I'm going to be dealing with, we've modified our process to see if we can't get this game out in a reasonable fashion, sickness or not. This post is a high-level overview of our completion of all the parts of Crashlands. The order items are presented in is the order in which we will be tackling them, as we've found that doing things one big batch at a time is generally the fastest.

Tundra - 3rd biome

Environmental tiles x 8 : these are the bread-and-butter of the world. Or the grass and mud, IF THAT'S YOUR THING.

Resources x 25-35 : these are the interactable things out in the world - trees, shrubs, horrifying parasites, etc.

Creatures x 6 : these are the beasts of this particular biome. Each is designed to fill a particular combat niche and offer some new interaction to the player. They tend to take a WHILE. 

Components x 100 : these are the parts of all of the things that you find out in the world that you use to build things later on. Once these are established, we can define the progression of the tech-tree and GET ROLLIN' ON CRAFTABLES AWW YISS.

Tech tree definition : Seth and I sit at the whiteboard with an unsettling amount of coffee and figure out what things go where and what's used to build what.

Weapons and Tameables x 12: Beating-sticks and animal collars are important to survival in Crashlands and also give us a good feel of how the biome is working (or not working).

Stations : The crafting gates of the world take a bit of engineering to make, so I like to do them all at once after getting warmed up working with the materials from the weapons and tameables side.

Armor : To finish out the spinal-progression of a biome we do the armor. After having worked with the various materials in the weapon in station formats I'm generally comfortable enough to do more fun things with them visually, which is why we save this for last. Otherwise it'd get stale, AND WE CAN'T HAVE THAT.

Story

Once the tundra is complete the core progression of the game is DONE! HOOORAAAAY!

But, like Quadropus without Pete, what would be the point of all that delicious farming and murdering if, at the end of it all, there was no epic thing to cap off your experience?

This is where the story comes in. We'll take some time here to make sure you hate Q, the villain of this story, and add in boss fights and an overarching POINT to the game itself. We're also interested in mini-bosses, but those will likely have to wait until later.

Repass

The game is, at this point, technically done. BUT. It's going to feel as empty as the Grand Canyon with only those progression items in there. At this point we backtrack to the Savannah and dream up all kinds of crazy awesome things to add to the edges of the game. Things like sweet floor tiles, doors, walls, paintings, statues, guns, explosives, laser beams, trip wires, totems, mines, bait, etc. Basically anywhere we feel doesn't have enough cool new stuff, we come back in and fill it out. Our goal is to end development with a massive number of options for player housing, a bevy of ways players can fight and interact with critters, and other fun ways for people to live in the world of Crashlands. We'll likely parse this structure out more once we get here.

Monetization and Sharing

Finally, once the game is DONE, we'll add in the monetization layer, which we've outlined over on the blog a number of months ago. We're also going to experiment with some sharing stuff, to figure out if we can't get a little trading system opened up for others on the same wireless network. No server stuff, as that's out of our current skillset, but simple mechanics to make playing, and sharing the experience, more rewarding.

That's the ROUGH overview of what we've got left. There are a great many things we handle on the daily that don't fall strictly into the development of Crashlands, but we'll be keeping notes of what we've been up to so everyone can make their most accurate bets about when this game will hit.

MeaKitty

ooooh lan sharing?  That's nifty. Now I have no excuses not to drag my other half into the SHENANIGANS. woohoo. I'm so excited by this. Can't wait. 

Duh83

I've been looking forward to this game since you first announced it and since I quit the blockheads game because it sucks.  Now that Sam is wonderfully free of cancer is there a new time line for the release? 

bscotchseth

There is, but we're keeping it internal until we have a strong confidence that we'll hit the target.  

MeaKitty

So we haven't got a new schedule for Beta testing yet then?

YOU know you guys don't make this easy. SO much tease, so much want. Gah, I know it's going to be fantastic but sometimes you make me want to claw my way through the screen and grabbypaws everything so much. XD

bscotchseth

NOPE! When there is... YOU'LL KNOW!

InferiorPickle

You're just like me. Doing whatever actually leads you to a good result! I plan my speeches after my powerpoint!!! Anyway, keep on being disorganised in an organised fashion!!!!