Noirmancer Alpha Demo Update
This a development update for my mind-erasing stealth game Noirmancer. I usually give some brief status on how development is going and ramble about some aspects of game dev I've been thinking about.
STATUS UPDATE
Demo!
An alpha demo is out! I've been collecting feedback and trying to improve it. So please give it a go and tell me what you think! Thank you to everyone who has tried it out so far. It has been very heart-warming experience because I just put the demo out quietly and it turns out there was enough interest that word got around a bit. While far from some big hit, it's just nice that there are people who care at all.
Big thank you to WungusDasPungus who made the trailer. It came out significantly better than anything I would've made, and he did a great job of working with my silly opinions.
ANZ Indie Fest
The game will be partaking in the ANZ Indie Fest. A virtual festival of Australia and New Zealand made independent games ran by theindiebrew.com.au. It starts at Friday 8th of May at 7:30pm AEST with a showcase stream on Youtube. Noirmancer is a non-stream participant and will just be featured on the accompanying Steam event page which will go live at the same time. Check out the event though for some Oceania indies :).
Trying to be more vocal again? Maybe?
I went quiet again on basically all communication fronts because I really hated the idea of just constantly being like "I'm working on a demo! Honestly!" I wanted something to actually show. And it only just recently crossed that threshold. I hope to be a bit more communicative again but to be honest perhaps I'll find myself in the same situation again: wanting more to show/talk about rather than just yapping.
What's Next?
Now that I've finally fulfilled my promise to get a public playtest out there, it's back to really working on new content for the game. I broadly have an idea of the next level I want to make. And I'm trying to make it a goal to playtest early this time. Especially now that I've shown people a more representative example of the game and I won't just feel self-conscious all the time.
A big thing I'm looking forward to with the next level is that the player will have one more ability. Which I'm hoping will drastically increase the gameplay variety. I try to make sure areas facilitate at least two abilities each (Black Out and Black Out Beam don't really count). So in the demo level I only had Telekinetic Mat, Shrink, and Turn To Mist to work with. Three individual options, but also three possible pairs. Quickly this makes you feel kinda nervous that you're just repeating the same three types of spaces over and over. Adding a fourth ability in there increases the possible pairings to six. I'm also looking forward to writing the story stuff for this next one, as I don't think the demo quite lands in that department. I'm looking forward to improving.
Here's a promise: I'll make another blogpost at the start of June. Hopefully I'll have made progress on this other level by then, but worst-case scenario I will talk about my love for adding details that most players don't notice, particularly all the random demo details that you may have missed :)
Follow along
Wishlist the game on Steam. You can follow this project via RSS (Don't know RSS?), or by following me on Mastodon. And of course feel free to contact me via email, or Mastodon with any comments or questions.