Dev Take Tuesday - A New Year

2017 was a great year for me as a game designer. It was my first full year spent designing games, and I learned a lot in those 365 days. Unsurprisingly, I often use this time of year to reflect on the past year’s accomplishments and plan for the future. So if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to provide a quick recap of last year’s development, followed by the next steps we plan for Alkanaur in 2018.

As a team we capped off this past year with a finished pre-alpha demo build of Alkanaur. We’d completed a rough demo for our game in the summer of 2015, just in time for a local game convention. However, thanks in large part to feedback from that convention, we decided to change our engine and rebuild from the ground up. While this meant that 2016 was spent climbing back to a similar spot that we reached in 2015, it was the right choice for Alkanaur. We built the game on a much more stable platform now, and that choice will also help on the art side of things as we focus more on creating content to fill out the game.

I’ve learned to help our programmer out in some ways, but the engine change definitely required work from an experienced coder. With my extra time as a designer and creative lead, I focused on refining the battle system, class system, and other game mechanics of Alkanaur. Additionally, I had plenty of time to expand our game’s narrative, world, and character arcs and backstories. Heading into 2018, we have a lot of the framework for Alkanaur’s systems and story already constructed, which should mean much faster and smoother content creation as we plow forward.

As we collect and review feedback from our pre-alpha demo, we’ll work on polishing everything in that demo to provide a great user experience. We plan to create a fully-polished “vertical slice” of Alkanaur that should look and play exactly like the final product, except for being a short section of the 20-ish hour game experience we intend. We’ll make that vertical slice a public demo and launch that demo alongside our Kickstarter project so that any potential investors (backers) know that we can follow through on our plan. The Kickstarter campaign will be for a relatively small amount of money, intended to cover a lot of the small fees that come from organizing a company and releasing a game on Steam. Any surplus money from that Kickstarter will go to stretch goals for additional professional art, sound, and music to make Alkanaur truly shine.

I’m excited to see what 2018 has in store for Alkanaur as well as for my own life and growth as a developer and designer. If you’re also excited to see what’s in store, keep following our blog for updates, and sign up for our Alkanaur.com newsletter (link at the bottom of the page) to be notified about big events like our Kickstarter campaign.