And another week of work passes for us at Allugic. The game testing is going well. I am currently 90 hours into the game. I am at the beginning of year 7, the final year of the story portion of the game. Wow, I did not expect it to take this long. This is nuts.

There are many story related events happening during the later half of the game so I’ve been intentionally apprehensive about what I reveal. But I already had intentions of showing this particular major boss in the game trailer, so I’ll go a head and show a preview of one of the fights below. Enjoy!

I had to record this battle twice, with the first time taking me almost an hour. After the battle was complete, I realized I didn’t properly set up the screen capture and all I recorded was a black screen. Oh boy, the joy of game development.

The second recording is the one you see above. I adjusted the difficulty because the boss was way too beefy before. Even after that, the battle still took some time.

Sadly, year 6 has shown me my calculations were a little off here and there. Especially with the money. I now have way too much. I’m going to have to change that again, but I won’t be able to test the change since it requires going through the game linearly again. I can get a rough estimation by jumping around the game but I’m going to have to rely on data gathered from the testing and my gut feeling. lol

I have recently made a change to how I plan to manage starting a new game after completing the game once. Before, I was going to manually reset all of the variables except for a select few relating to the unlocked routes, but that method is too prone to errors. And more importantly, I don’t have time to test that.

So now, I am just going to reset the game and have a separate save file (let’s call it Profile) that keeps track of the unlocked routes, as well as any other data I need to carry over each play-through.

The reason I didn’t choose the second option right off the bat was because separate save files aren’t inherently supported in the framework I’m using. This is something I will be manually managing.

It’s not that big of a deal, but I don’t have a lot of time to make it super fancy. I’m going to be focusing on including everything I need saved and everything I could potentially use for any idea I might want to implement later.

Now, for the subject of time.

It’s something I don’t have a lot of right now. My release time frame is mere weeks away. I feel I have enough of it to get a functional product out, but I’m not 100% sure it will be bug free. (Sorry in advance)

Some will say, just don’t release it until it’s fully finished. But I’m in a situation where I need to start bringing in proper income asap. Whether it’s from this game or from a different job.

I will continue to work on this game even after it’s release but I want to make sure the release goes smooth enough for a positive reception.

With that said, for the next two weeks, I will be incredibly busy. I need to get through the 7th year fast. Finish and test the post game content. Complete a few needed features, including the separate save feature mention above. Get a functional version of the game uploaded to steam so they can approve it, as well as get some real world feedback from testers.

And then after all that, I need to focus on fixing as many bugs as possible, game balancing and make preparations for release. Somewhere in all that mess, I have to get a video and trailer made.

Wow, game making is like an exponential curve of stress. But I’ll continue to do my best! I’ll talk to you guys next week. Hopefully I’ll be fully complete with year 7 and maybe some of the post game.