One quick announcement before this quarter’s update:

Treasure Adventure World BETA will debut at the Halloween Game Expo in NYC!

Treasure Adventure World has been in beta for over a month and as you’ll see in the update below we’ve been focusing on balancing, bug fixing and the like. That’s why I’m very excited to be able to bring the latest beta build of the game to the Halloween Game Expo courtesy of Playcrafting NYC. These events are a great way to do additional playtesting and it’s also just nice to get to socialize with gamers and other devs. I hope you’ll check it out if you’re in the NYC area!

Dialog

In the last update I mentioned that there wouldn’t be much dialog to write since I have the script from Treasure Adventure Game to work from. What I neglected to consider is how much updating that script would need. Writing has never been close to my favorite part of game development. I rushed a lot of the dialog from TAG and I wanted to resolve that this time around. I’ve tried to make character motivations clearer and slim exposition down as much as possible, while having it sound natural. On top of that, there are brand new quests and NPCs that needed dialog written from scratch.

100% (previously 70%)

There will no doubt be some tweaks and changes to it as beta continues.  But I can now boast that the script and dialog is now 100% complete.

Testing

This is where we’ve spent the bulk of our time lately. So far all of our testing has been internal (some friends, and the kind folks at Chucklefish have completed playthroughs). Just based on these early tests we’ve made a number of changes to the game. Some are simple bug fixes, others are more fundamental aspects of the gameplay. Balancing has also been a priority for these early tests.

All said, I’ve made around 300 changes to the game since beta has started.  We are going to be ramping up our beta-testing club pretty soon so I expect that number to go up a lot, but hopefully not at the same pace.

60% (previously 30%)

Engine

The last few pieces of the core game engine have been finalized. The main holdouts were implementing some options (accessibility and performance options mainly) and the custom skin loading system.

To test the skin loading system I created this retro skin which will be unlockable in the game. It will be fairly easy for players to create their own skins(or tweak the default one) and I hope to see some great ones.

100% (previously 95%)

Steamworks

We have the game up and running on Steam (and GOG Galaxy) which is a relief in and of itself. Cloud saving has been implemented and the achievement plugin is working as expected. We still have to create a few more achievements and Christine needs to do the artwork for them (as well as trading cards). It looks like we won’t be able to implement the Steam Workshop for sharing skins at launch. But hopefully we can patch that later. Even without the workshop, creating and sharing customs skins is very simple.

80% (previously 70%)

And that’s another update for you!

One last thing… I know people want a release date. We have decided upon one internally, but we are holding off on announcing it for now. Our main concern is running into some unexpected problem during testing and having to adjust our schedule again. So please continue to be patient. We are getting VERY close to the finish line!