We are working on RavenHeart Hospital: A Medical Visual Novel. The game is in development and you can get the demo now!
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.
Key Results:
A rising concern with this goal is the COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences for large group gatherings and school closures. We are keeping a close eye on this developing situation and understand if some events end up postponing or canceling as a result.
Feedback from our players is important since we want to make the best game we can for our audience. We submitted a demo build for the Steam Summer Festival and then published the demo our newsletter followers.
The latest demo of the game provides the option for adventurous players to create story packs and play them! Discord user CraftmasterMatt wrote up a detailed Cutscene Scripting Guide to help give interested players the means to write up stories with our characters or new characters.
With getting ready for submitting to Steam, we added in a lot of new features into the game and as a result introduce new bugs. We had been tracking bugs using a Slack channel and deleting messages when the bugs were finished. This system, while nice to start with, is something we have outgrown.
A bug can required some back and forth. It can require information about how to exactly reproduce the bug. It can require clarity on the intend behavior. It can also require prioritization relative to other bugs. Managing bugs in a Slack lacked the support for all of these operations easily and as more bugs of varying priorities came it, it became harder to track and overall bug picture.
So we moved all of our bugs over to Trello.
According to Wikipedia, "Trello is a web-based Kanban-style list-making application which is a subsidiary of Atlassian". With Trello, we find it is easy to make focused boards for particular issues we want to track, and use the flexible labeling system to provide a quick organization system for those issues. Another benefit of Trello is that each issue can have comment sections so that developers can go back and forth on a particular issue (we simulated this in Slack by creating "threads" per issue which became tedious to delete). Each issue also has its own History log so we can track how an issue evolved over time.
Items on our board represent bugs. Bugs can have a labels associated with them to indicate their severity. Red means Blockers, which should be dealt with right away. Orange is for Major bugs, Yellow is for Moderate bugs, and Green is for minor bugs.
This board consists of a few different columns where bugs can live. Below I'll sort them in order of usage
This is our first pass at using Trello to help us keep on top of the state of the game. We will continue to access the effectiveness of our bug labeling and column use and make changes as needed to help us address issues.
We worked this week with Michelle Pineda (@pininkela) to finish up another round of environment backgrounds. With more of these scenes happening outside of the hospital, we were able to take inspiration from various favorite downtown Baltimore locations to develop the looks of the environments.
The Crow's Nest is a cozy bar and restaurant serving mouth-watering appetizers like Korean BBQ Nachos and Pretzel Bites with hummus as well as a variety of brews on tap. They host live performances from local artists and have a trivia night that is fun for groups of friends.
Inspired by Fell's Point and Canton architecture, this area is a mix of residential buildings and various shops and dining locations. Great for a quick bite to go in the morning or a late night out on the town.
Though empty now, this side of the hospital has seen its fair share of cases come in. This is but one of many views at the sprawling RavenHeart Hospital campus.
We wrapped up this week with another round of characters by Zac Bolubasz (@_sneb_). We wanted pivoted our character art style a few weeks back and Zac was quick to adapt.
We have three playable characters for players to choose from as their doctor. Our idea with the doctors was say they are "triplets": they all are entering the hospital with the same training, they are all the same age, and they are all prime to become ace surgeons.
We would like to expand our game to have character creator for players to be able to customized their doctor's appearance, including skin tone, hair style and color, body build and facial structure, since we believe this kind of expression is important to players making the story their own.
An EMS Paramedic, Dante has a hot temper and tastes to match. He likes fast cars, and his flame-decal'd ambulance, The Inferno, is the cumulation of his passion. He likes spicy food and has a fascination with ghosts and cryptids. He has general distaste for authority, museums and country music (but maybe Big Tex can change that)
She is a veterinary surgeon assisted by her raven companion Edgar (his full name is Edgar Allen Crow). She appreciates nature with painting and gardening and takes breaks by enjoying her favorite brand of green tea, Red Dragon. Unlike Dante, she has an aversion to spicy foods. She dislikes horror movies and does not care much for poetry.
Always a favorite with the kids, Big Tex is our pediatric surgeon. He packs Eli the Teddy Bear (fear not, his gun is not real). He puts a high emphasis on bedside manner and will be assisting players not just to heal patients physically but to also properly consult the patients and their families. You can find him performing sometimes at the Crow's Nest (especially on Karaoke Night). Big Tex isn't shy around a grill and knows his way around a fishing rod. He isn't the biggest fan of sports and in particular swimming. He hates dishonesty.
JT has been brainstorming new character concepts and specialties to fill out the rooster of characters that you can interact with. These new characters would have their own episodes and certain types of operations that pertain to their character.
With the new demo and apps submitted to Steam for review, we are now waiting to hear back from Steam's review team about whether there are any changes we need to make for the game and if we will appear in their Summer Festival.
This week is we are going to focus on cleaning up the game, addressing more bugs that are outstanding. I also want to dive into performance optimization for the game to get an early sense of what the bottlenecks are now that we have a vertical slice of the gameplay in place.
With the Story Pack system in place for players to create their own content, I think it could be fun to have a mini game jam to get people together to create some new stories and see them in game.
We have been focused on getting a vertical slice of the game ready, with multiple character story paths, choices, operations with vitals and health recovery. As we look forward to creating more content this also includes considering other kinds of operation and procedures to introduce to the game.
I hope you enjoyed this week's edition of our studio's status update. Each week, we try to bring new and interesting updates about how our studio and game are developing that we think people will like and learn from.
If you have any questions, comments, feedback for me, you can email me, Zappy, at zappy@ravenheartgames.com.
If you like this post, you can see more in the Devlog section or check out last week's post.
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