Internal playtesting on the first half of SLARPG has BEGUN!! (Patreon)

WE DID IT!!!

After working all year towards this goal, Acts I and II of SLARPG are now fully playable from start to finish with very little content missing! Our top secret internal playtesting on the first half of the game (give or take) has begun. After working on this game for so long, words cannot describe how satisfied we are for so much of the game to actually exist. At times the finish line seemed like it kept getting farther and farther away, but it now feels like we've crested a hill. So many sequences that I've been planning for years are now in the game, and have been experienced by another human being. What a good feeling.

To celebrate, here's a couple teeny tiny itty bitty spoiler-free sneak peeks (and a couple older screenshots from past Act I that folks might not have seen):

So yeah, that's the TL;DR version. After a ton of work, we finally reached our big milestone, and we'll keep pushing forward in the new year! But for those who'd like more details on what's been going on behind the scenes and where we go from here, here's a breakdown.

What took so long?

If you've been reading my monthly-ish status updates this year, you'll know that I've been saying we were close to this milestone since January. Here are several reasons why it ended up taking all year:

1. Life got in the way. Okay, here's the bummers. I'm sure this comes as no surprise given the state of the world, but yeah. Lots of things added up this year to slow our progress on the game. Needing to take on additional work every few months to pay my bills was a big one, as was general stress from the pandemic and several health scares with Anthony a few months back. (He's fine now, don't worry.) My creative work in general is also a constant uphill battle against ADHD and bad mental health days/weeks/months, and without medication that's not a battle I always win. (Over time, though, I think I've gotten a bit better at managing it. The fact that I hit my self-imposed Christmas deadline for this build should be proof of that.)

Now for the reasons that are actually positives:

2. The game has gotten much bigger than I originally thought it would be. A few years back, my initial estimate was that the entire game would be about 5-6 hours long. Short and sweet. But oops! In reality, average playthroughs of the first half are already around that long. This game is just jam packed full of stuff to do and see.

3. The new content in this build is much more polished than I originally planned. In early internal builds of the demo, important story scenes that required bespoke art were super bare bones, conveyed largely through placeholder assets and dev notes in the dialogue. At times it was more like reading a script. When I initially set out to get Act II playable, that sort of thing is what I had in mind. A rough outline of the game. But instead, everything is now like 95% done and pretty darn presentable, giving a better picture of the final game.

4. This build was not originally going to feature the game's prologue, but it now does. The demo we released for SLARPG skips over roughly the opening 20 minutes of the game with a brief slideshow to set players loose in Greenridge ASAP. The original plan was to leave the game like that for quite some time, only going back and adding the real prologue late in development. But I decided to do that sooner rather than later. While this added a month or so to the development of this playtesting build, this was probably a good call for the sake of the pacing and the presentation of the story.

What's next?

Like I said above, the content of Acts I and II is now 95% complete. There's some stuff I'll have to go back and do--proper mugshots for the new NPCs, interiors for a few unimportant buildings, dialogue for a few more optional NPCs, that sort of thing. But the vast majority of it is done! And as such, we're going to be moving on soon.

After working nearly every day in December up through the 26th (I think I took two days off, oops), I'll be taking things easier for a bit as private playtesting on Acts I and II continues with friends and family. Then, of course, it's on to Act III, and then IV and V after that!

I say this in every update, but I want to reiterate that half of the game currently being playable does not mean that only half of the work is done. I'm confident in saying that we are well past that point. Making the first half of the game required all of the foundational work, and now we're able to build on that foundation to fill out the rest of the content. We don't have to remake Greenridge every time you go back there later in the game, for example, and Bee's already got a huge chunk of the soundtrack done (if not fully mixed and mastered). Acts III, IV, and V are also shorter than Act II, and some of that content has you returning to earlier areas (although there will also be exciting new areas to explore in the back half, naturally).

In other words, while I still don't want to give a release window just yet, we've made amazing progress in the last year and change, even with so many things in life getting in the way. I have no reason to believe it'll take anywhere near another four years.

As always, thank you for your continued support! This game would not be possible without y'all, and we're super proud of what we've been able to make so far. We look forward to everyone seeing it when the game is finally done. And while it's still gonna be a while, finishing this overly-ambitious game is feeling more and more doable every day.