NOIRMANCER LIVES
Long time no see. My mind-erasing noir stealth game previously codenamed "MaskedDetective" lives. And I've been working on pretty consistently for the past year. There's a Steam page up now!
State of the game
The game has basically passed the vertical-slice. The core gameplay loop is in: guards wander around doing their stuff, you get spotted, run away, use your mind erasing powers to reset them. You collect intel, keys, read notes. Discover new objectives mid-level. You can use nine different powers to break-in, sneak around, and lose guards. There's a bunch of interactable props and other features to make levels from. I have made two complete levels and playtested both of them. Many things have been refined and reworked based on that progress. It's not as nice-looking as I'd like, but the art is generally representative of the intended look. It needs a lot of fleshing out, but it's a playable, real game.
Big shout out to artist Giovanni Fim, who I commissioned to make this promo art
What's Next? Public Playtest
I've spent the past two weeks since getting the steam page up doing some tasks I had neglected in favour of doing that. A big one was reworking some of the guard AI; it's a tough thing to get right and I imagine it'll probably get continously revised throughout the development of the game. But I'm ready to target the next milestone.
I want to make a small playtest demo and get it out there. It'll allow people to see what the game is really like, it'll hopefully allow me to get feedback, and it'll be useful in terms of promotion: having something playable can be very helpful for coverage and access to events.
I'm thinking a first playtest may need to be two levels, a short one that introduces core gameplay ideas and a second one that is a bit meatier. The last level I made took me less than 3 weeks, but I probably want to be a little more ambitious for this one; flesh out the game a bit more, take some time to refine it, etc. So I'm hoping to have something in July but obviously that'll depend a lot on how the creative process goes, how ambitious I get, how things go in an initial private playtest, etc.
I intend this to probably be the first of at least two demos. This first one will probably be a bit rough; it's about getting feedback and building interest. And there'll probably be another one for a Steam Next Fest closer to release. It probably wouldn't fit into the timeline but it would be great to do one in between those two; that would hopefully be a refinement based on feedback from the first one, but yeah it probably can't be done time-wise. I quite like the idea of developing a game with regular playtest demos; it's kinda like doing Early Access without the perils surrounding it.
Where the hell have I been
I have not touched this blog in ages. There's a lot of reasons for that. I spent many months with my focus elsewhere, and obviously a lot of time working on the game. But a big part of that time was me working through my pretty bad relationship with the creative process. I had some really bad priortization. I didn't push hard enough. And probably most importantly, I allowed myself to get paralyzed by uncertainty far too often.
Definitely heaps of good work happened in that time, but it happened at a far slower pace than ever should be ideal. Recently I feel I've gotten better at all the mentioned areas: priorization, producitivty, and working through uncertainty. Creativity can and should be very playful but sometimes it's work and I feel like I've finally gotten good at the work part.
Additionally, I really wanted to work on the game and work through those problems rather than just blog and social media post about it. And I think that was a good choice. I'm now ready to talk about the game, because it now feels pretty real and inevitable.
I'd like to blog more. I want to commit to a monthly update. So I guess you'll be hearing from me again in June.
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.