Devlog
We write about our game development progress, problems we face and how we solve them, week to week
Most Recent Posts
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
This week, I review how the Steam Games Festival went! We ran various livestream events and if you didn't catch them when they happened, we have the streams recorded to watch later. I took the last week off to rest up for our next steps forward with the project.
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
The Steam Games Festival was moved by a week. This gives us more time to gather and respond to feedback for the game and make our demo even better for new players to try out. Over the last week, we added a couple of new episodes for Annabel and Dante accordingly. Those episodes contain some new procedures for helping patients. We worked with Zac Bolubasz (@_sneb_) to update Dr. Holiday's design. We also been working on performance bugs and improving out workflow.
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
The Steam Games Festival was moved by a week. This gives us more time to gather and respond to feedback for the game and make our demo even better for new players to try out. Over the last week, we added a couple of new episodes for Annabel and Dante accordingly. Those episodes contain some new procedures for helping patients. We worked with Zac Bolubasz (@_sneb_) to update Dr. Holiday's design. We also been working on performance bugs and improving out workflow.
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
We made our Steam store page for RavenHeart Hospital public last week and already have 50 wishlists! We have new details on live events scheduled for next week. This week, I talk some of the awesome things Discord users made for our first Story Jam. We added in a new Scoring System to complement the operation gameplay. I also talk about the tech enabling some complex scripting and collaborating using Google Drive.
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
We heard back from Steam and RavenHeart Hospital will be at the Steam Games Festival! In preparation for the showcase, we are continuing to improve our demo and working on new features for operations, including new Tool UI by Amilia St. John (@milistjohn), a Scoring system and Pre/Post Operation sequences. We also have new script features to improve the story telling we can present players. This week, JT has some music to share for various interactions with Dante, our EMS Paramedic.
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
We submitted a demo build to the Steam Summer Festival last Friday. This new build is also available to our newsletter subscribers. For this post, I'd like to go over a transition we made in our bug tracking for the game as we were fast-approaching the Steam submission deadline. I also have some more character artwork from Zac Bolubasz (@_sneb_) and environments by Michelle Pineda (@pininkela) to share.
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
We are so excited to be submitting our demo build for the Steam Summer Festival this Friday. Over the last week, we worked with our community to bring their stories to life in our game and I will dive into how we are enabling players to create their stories in our game. We have some new art for our environments and characters to share with you.
by Zack "Zappy" Maldonado
We have less than two week until the final demo build submission for the Steam Summer Festival. We are working on pivoting the character art styles to better align with our game's direction. We are continuing to iterate on environment art for various scenes in the game. And I worked to integrate building the game for Steam into our build system.
by Zappy
We had several exciting events happen this last week. We started to work with Michelle Pineda (@pininkela on social media) on environment art for RavenHeart Hospital. On Friday, we submitted to the Steam Summer Festival. And to top things off, we decided to pivot the game based on feedback and our feelings about the direction of the game. But fear not, we think that you will understand and like the new direction.
by Zappy
Our second playtest build is available now. For this update, I go through some of the ways we took feedback from our first playtest and used them to help us polish the game for this current playtest. The new working title for our game is now RavenHeart Hospital: A Medical Visual Novel, and no longer Project Noho.
by Zappy
This week will be a shorter update. We are digesting and working to respond to all of the feedback players game us from our first playtest. Because we saw a lot of excitement around the characters, we started a new Discord server for players to get together and talk about what they loved. We worked with Tori Schafer on improving our writing. And we also got a start on writing for a new episode and a character creation for players' doctors in response to players' feedback.
by Zappy
What a big week! We applied to our first game showcase. We shared with our newsletter subscribers a playable demo of the game. In turn, we've received a lot of great feedback and we are revving up to take the next steps in developing this project. In this post, I go over some of my takeaway from what our players reported.
by Zappy
For this week's update, we have so much to share with you! You can listen to soundtracks and themes we've been working on over the last couple of weeks as well as more character concept art we are iterating on. Also, for our mailing list subscribers, we have some news about our first playtest!
by Zappy
This week we have some exciting news to share with you about art for the game. We also hunkered down and worked on new gameplay systems and music while communicating remotely to help with social distancing.
by Zappy
For this week's update, I run through a technical deep dive into our custom script parser and showcase the kind of data we are crafting for it. I also cover out showcase planning, progress on our writing, and searching for artist support to bring our story and characters to the screen.
by Zappy
Last week was a stricter working week. We focused more on a small subset of significant tasks. We have a rough outline for our first episode of gameplay. JT has been diving into writing out rough drafts for over half the scenes in the episode. I was busy getting the core minigame tech in place with scene transitions. We are incorporating our demo scripting format into the game engine to test the full pipeline of generating scripts and seeing them in-game. We also have a new, exciting goal that is fast approaching!
by Zappy
We are continuing to work towards applying for GameScape and getting a build that we are satisfied with handing out to interested playtesters. We've had some updates with searching for prospective artists to work with us. We spent a large portion of the week going over our intended audience, player profiles, themes, story, and characters. And somewhere in there, we squeezed in work on the core gameplay systems and mechanics.
by Zappy
If I had to choose one word to describe our first week, it would be "groundwork". It turns out there is a fair about of things to set up out when you are first starting out. We had considerations for how to properly form a new company. We knew there were software and hardware decisions that we needed to make early. And, because we had both recently left full-time positions, we had health insurance considerations that we wanted to make. But aside from the mechanical setup stuff, we also wanted to lay out the groundwork for who we are as a team.