It’s 2015 – and as someone recently pointed out to me in an email – our FAQs page said we were aiming to release the game in 2014 (It has been updated since). So, let’s talk about why this happened and then I’ll give you a breakdown of what we’ve been working on for the past month or so.

Release Date

Why didn’t we hit our 2014 deadline? I think it comes down to a couple things.

1. Predicting a release date on any game is difficult. And making a game like ours (content heavy, open world metroidvania) is particularly hard to predict. Some days I work on a particular aspect of the game for  8 hours when I thought it would only take 1. And the opposite is also true sometimes – I get lucky and something takes much less time than I predicted (but its usually the former).

This is a common issue that occurs in the Indie-Games scene. Out of 16 games that I’ve Kickstarted in the past few years only ONE of then has hit their predicted deadline. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that “everyone does it, so it must be ok!”. If anything, it’s a lack of experience, or blind optimism.

Indie’s have the benefit of not being beholden to a publisher and therefore can take as long as needed to make their game as great as possible. But even AAA studios making sequels often run into this problem (and often have to push an unfinished game out the door).

2. I mentioned “blind optimism” before and I truly think that many Indie Developers (including myself) under-estimate how long their game will take to complete as a coping mechanism. I started TAW in June 2012. If I knew then that I’d still be working on it 3 years later, I probably would have convinced myself it wasn’t worth it. It’s much easier to rationalise “It’s going to be less than a year to release”.

So, ultimately, my point here is that there was never any sinister intention in our original prediction of 2014. Call it inexperience, blind optimism, a coping mechanism or the nature of the work.

That said – we all believe that 2015 is our year (and I just hope I don’t have to write another post like this in Jan 2016).

Progress

Now let’s get to some positivity. The progress we’ve made on TAW in the past couple months has been fantastic. We’ve been motivated by the upcoming convention season and our plan on updating the public demo in the near future. So here are just a few things that we’ve done in the past month or so.

NPCs Now Have Talking Animations.

One issue we have run across while up-scaling the resolution and fidelity of Treasure Adventure Game is that NPCs who were once made up of a few dozen pixels now look strangely lifeless. This was especially noticeable when you were actually interacting with them. So, we looked into what it would take to give all NPCs a simple talking animation. We determined it wouldn’t be very difficult to implement and then result is definitely worth the trouble.

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