Well this blag’s been pretty quiet lately. To be honest, I set myself a goal of publishing a demo to BladeQuest by the beginning of August and until that was done, I couldn’t justify taking a break long enough to publish updates. But now it’s out there (albeit a few days late) so let’s talk about that.

First, some shameless plugs,

The first playable Demo of BladeQuest is now available to download for free from the android market. You can check out the market page here. And while you’re at it, you should check out our website, BladeQuest.net just because it looks really cool. The demo is free and only takes 15-20 minutes to complete. I highly suggest giving it a go before reading on as there is some spoiler-esque content in this post.

The Good

Although the full release is still a ways off, I consider the release of this demo to be a massive personal achievement. I have never completed a project to a point where people that aren’t my mom or in my immediate group of friends would be interested.

After the release, I got to sit and watch the facebooks, the google+’s, and the reddits slowly spider out from their origins as the demo was played, loved,and shared. To see someone who I had never met quote the dialogue and talk about certain parts left me positively beaming. It was really quite the rush.

The Cutting Room Floor

When I decided a month ago that I wanted to release a demo by the start of August, I had to crack down and decide which features were essential for the release and which had to be cut to release on time. It was all very executive I assure you.

Menus - The in-game main menu, a staple of the genre, which allows you to view the statuses of your characters, use items, change equipment, etc just hadn’t even been started when the demo date was set. I decided right off the bat that it would need to be excluded. The demo features a single character escaping a prison and so the use of the menu would be limited in that context anyway. However, the lack of ability to use items out of battle and equip the Silver Sword you can find leaves players (and myself) lustful for the menus. They will likely be my first post-demo-release addition and a new release of the demo should feature them.

- The in-game main menu, a staple of the genre, which allows you to view the statuses of your characters, use items, change equipment, etc just hadn’t even been started when the demo date was set. I decided right off the bat that it would need to be excluded. The demo features a single character escaping a prison and so the use of the menu would be limited in that context anyway. However, the lack of ability to use items out of battle and equip the Silver Sword you can find leaves players (and myself) lustful for the menus. They will likely be my first post-demo-release addition and a new release of the demo should feature them. Content - The story content of the demo is quite short. It follows a narrative that I wrote the first day of brainstorming for this project. I wrote the scene with the orb, sword, stained glass, and guards all with no idea how a full game story would attach to it. It was punchy and epic and in the end, our entire storyline branched from that narrative, a storyline we estimate will take some 30-40 hours to complete. I may part with the original narrative in a later post :)

- The story content of the demo is quite short. It follows a narrative that I wrote the first day of brainstorming for this project. I wrote the scene with the orb, sword, stained glass, and guards all with no idea how a full game story would attach to it. It was punchy and epic and in the end, our entire storyline branched from that narrative, a storyline we estimate will take some 30-40 hours to complete. I may part with the original narrative in a later post :) SFX - Another item cut for time constraints. We are still working on this particular feature. Our Musician, the talented BK, has taken a couple swings at using MIDI for sound effects and the results have been overall positive. I suspect we will ultimately go that route. One of the largest items for feedback from the demo was the lack of sound effects to supplement the amazing score and I totally agree, sounds for enemies dying, swords swinging, and the annoying-yet-essential drlrddrldrlldlrldlrldrld of scrolling text would really bring the content to life.

- Another item cut for time constraints. We are still working on this particular feature. Our Musician, the talented BK, has taken a couple swings at using MIDI for sound effects and the results have been overall positive. I suspect we will ultimately go that route. One of the largest items for feedback from the demo was the lack of sound effects to supplement the amazing score and I totally agree, sounds for enemies dying, swords swinging, and the annoying-yet-essential drlrddrldrlldlrldlrldrld of scrolling text would really bring the content to life. Battle Animations - We’re still deciding exactly how we want to do attack animations. We’re not sure if we want to go for a sprite-based approach or do it all with particles and blending. This also includes items such as swords being in the hands of characters when they attack and such. These will definitely add a lot to the battling experience but there’s still much to do with getting something nice so they were left out from the demo.

- We’re still deciding exactly how we want to do attack animations. We’re not sure if we want to go for a sprite-based approach or do it all with particles and blending. This also includes items such as swords being in the hands of characters when they attack and such. These will definitely add a lot to the battling experience but there’s still much to do with getting something nice so they were left out from the demo. Feature Suggestions - We received a wealth of helpful feedback about different points in the demo that need reworking as well as possible features to add. Although I absolutely abhor any implementation of onscreen d-pads for use in games, there are many who prefer them. I realized that adding that as a feature that could be enabled/disabled from the game menu would be absolutely doable and would appeal to both crowds. Also, there was a complaint about the picture looking stretched, which gave me the idea of adding options to change whether or not the picture is stretched to fit the screen or how much it is. These are things I had never really considered and is undeniable proof that focus-testing releases are essential to development.

The Bad

That would be the stress. Granted the only one holding me to my August 1st release date was me but it was important to me that I reach the goals I set. Unfortunately, two 15-hour coding sessions during the weekend before the Monday release were insufficient to complete the product. This was a blow but my determination to compete that week was unfettered.

Delays were attributed to the final changes to the World Editor not coming together as nicely as I had planned, music implementation ending up costing me an entire day, and bug after bug after bug with every new “complete” revision.

The stress piled on quickly as every time I thought I was done, something new would crop up. It was my first real experience with the nitty gritty fine tuning of a release. I am extremely indebted to the friends, even off the team, who stayed up late each night testing each new apk for balance, tone, and bugs.

Thursday, the 4th, midnight, I signed the APK with my key and declared it ready to ship in the morning. And ship it did…but not as I had hoped.

There were some final editorial edits that needed to be made to some of the dialogue, so I cracked open Eclipse, made the changes, and repacked. The problem is that before I repacked, I had rant he game a few times to make some screenshots. Being as some of these screenshots are from later in the demo, I used some hardcoding to put the character in different photo-op points.

When I repackaged the release, I forgot to revert them. So the page went up, I sent links to everyone, and then downloaded it from the market to my phone and ran it to look, in horror, as the game started with the character standing before the final room of the demo.

I immediately fixed the issue and uploaded the correct apk as version 1.1 but, and remember this because it’s important, Android Market is a jerk. Although the update was posted and people who had version 1 were able to update, the “current version” listed on the market page did not update. So anyone downloading the game new would still get the bad version assuming they ran it before updating (which is a given). It took upwards of 8 hours for the page to update to the current version. This 8 hours was enough to give me an ulcer. I was frantically refreshing pages, looking up support docs, and having my friends retry. I about had a meltdown, it was not a pretty sight.

In the meantime, one tester noticed that the text looked fat and bold and that the game ran slower on his device. I hadn’t noticed myself but on closer look it was true. And we had no idea how to fix it. I thought perhaps it had something to do with the final apk export, or SDK versions, it absolutely astounded me that something could affect text size AND performance.

Many more hours of frustration and stress later, I discovered that, in an effort to make my apk more compatible because the market was showing it as not supporting any devices (this was caused by the apk not being ‘activated’) I had set an option in the manifest to allow any screen density.

I’m not sure exactly what that does, but disabling it made everything well again. It was around this time that the current version updated correctly in the market.

When I got home I published 1.1b with the density setting disabled and this time it only took a few short minutes for everything to update. I think the original delay had to do with it being a new entry.

In the end, I published by around 6PM and everything was swell. Once again I have to extend my warmest thanks to the friends who got me through that incredibly stressful day.

Reddit

I’ve been lurking Reddit for something like 8 months now and it is truly a great and fun community. It was actually the overwhelming support from this thread that motivated me to set such a short due date on the demo.

Many of the fans on Facebook and followers of this blog are from that thread so I just wanted to give a shout-out to them. You guys have been fantastically supportive and brought up several helpful and useful resources and ideas.

I was very hesitant to advertise my release on reddit because I know that advertisement is generally frowned upon. I honestly couldn’t recommend many companies trying it just because it is immediately seen as spam by the community. The reason I reached out to Reddit is because I think this particular genre appeals to a large amount of the community, chances are there are thousands there who grew up with the same old RPGs that inspired this game and I wanted to share this with them. Because this game is for those people. So if any Redditors are reading this, sorry for the spam, just thought you’d like it!

In Conclusion





This release has been an extremely wonderful experience. I have learned so much and gotten the astounding satisfaction of seeing other people enjoy something I’ve created. I wanted to shout out to TehCappy our artist who did all of the art int he game, this project would have gone absolutely nowhere without you, and to BK, the newest addition to the team whose musical talent and knack for what an RPG is supposed to sound like absolutely brought the demo alive.

I have a few more topics I want to post in the coming weeks, specifically one on my wrestling match with JetCreator. Until later, thanks to everyone who has supported this project, and onwards and upwards to release!

You can send questions, suggestions, and feedback to support@bladequest.net