Dare Looks
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Status Update: Road to Release
🕑 Added 2023-04-30 01:26:56 +0000 UTC
Time flies, whoops! Sorry for the lack of posts, I've just been busy, busy, busy.
However, progress has been good, and things are starting to feel like the final stretch, until the game's release.
I still hope to release sometime in late May; probably around 20th~22th. ...Because soon after I will be off to ConFuzzled—and I'd rather not launch a game while at a con, just in case things crash and burn, heh.
(When push comes to shove I will have to postpone the release to early June, but let's hope everything goes smooth!)
Alright. I'll give a quick summary of what I have been up to, below...
Character Select Screen Improvements
Pawperty Damage deep lore has finally arrived.
The most visible changes to the game that have happened, recently!
Most of what I'm doing these days is polishing, performance optimization and bug fixing. But I always wanted to add something like character bios or fact sheets to the game, I've just never found the time... And with the release coming up, I realized it's either now, or never! So, here we are:
Looking at the paper, Shrynx Laboratories has a lot of coffee mugs, and no place to put them.
It's just one little more fun way to add some extra fluff to the characters and give them a bit of a background!
Stability
Improving the game's stability has been priority number one. Long story short, the game's stability has been improved! 🎉
Main changes included switching from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12, as well as fixing the many, many memory leaks. Yeeeah. Sorry about those.
I have spent hours of my life with memory profiling and don't even have a screenshot to show for it. This bites.
Level Up Translation
For additional localization support I have reached out to Level Up Translation and worked together with them to bring the game to French, traditional Chinese and Japanese!
So happy to see these languages added to the game's translations, and working with LUT has been an absolute bliss!
Road to Release
With the past few polishing passes (and fixing the stability issues) I'm really happy with where the game is, right now!
So what's still missing for the game's release?
That's a bit of a difficult question, because there is still plenty of small things I would like to take care of... but the only "big" things still missing are [drum roll]:
- Steam Achievements
- Game Trailer
Yeah, achievements and the game trailer are the only things on my 'must-have' list, still.
Also, here is my 'nice-to-have' list, of things that I would like to have in the game's initial release, but which aren't must-have's:
- Extra character skins and color variations (i.e. a snow leopard skin for Big Mig)
- A model of the Shrynx logo for the laboratory buildings
- High score, to compare personal bests
- A new car type (I'd really like to add an expensive sports car, of sorts)
- A new character (most likely a robot or mecha of some sort)
- ...
With only 3 more weeks to go, I'll be lucky if a single one of these items make it into the release. But even if they don't, they might still be added to the game in future updates!
(There also is still the matter of the 'custom character import' feature, but that one's definitely planned for until after the initial release—no worries, I didn't forget about it!)
Big Personal News, Ahead
There are some major personal news, coming soon.
Originally, I wanted to include them in this post, but I realized it would be better to split them off, so they don't get buried: Expect another post to drop tomorrow, or so!
If you have been following me on social media you might have caught a glimpse of it, already, but I promise I'll go into more detail.
Thank You for Your Support!
So excited to release the game, soon—thank you all so much!
I plan to make Steam keys available to all patrons who have supported me with $3.50 or more, regardless of tier: Think of it as a sort of pre-order, haha!
But more about that, once we're closer to release!
