Hi folks! Wil here.

2023 is around the corner, that means it’s time for us to do a retrospective and reflect on the things we’re most proud of, the things that we want to do better and wrap it up with some numbers and highlights that will give us a better perspective of the TON of work we’ve put in during 2022.

Things that went well.

First, let’s talk about the milestone we’re most proud of. We went from a proof of concept to an actual demo.

What does that mean? Well, basically:

• We improved our aesthetics.
• There’s a story being told.
• We introduced all the core mechanics.

Let's dig a little bit into it, starting with the aesthetics. Graphics are usually the first thing we notice in a game (also the easiest thing to share) and ours went from placeholders to something more refined. Here is a look at that evolution by comparing how the game looked at the end of 2021 vs how it’s looking at the end of 2022.

But it doesn't stop there. We put together new scenes, like the detention area, the elevator to the launchpad and the MedBay.

In terms of narrative, we made a huge leap and we were able to close the narrative loop. As I mentioned above, there’s an actual story being told. We worked hard and consistently to take the script and transform it into scenes, then add objects with interactions, introduce dialogue and decisions that impact the player’s journey and all of this making sure the players understand the core mechanics without having to read walls of text to “learn” how to play. We even experimented with AI-generated voices for the cutscenes and we were kind of surprised (in a good way) with the results.

In the audio department we had just a couple of improvements. Nevertheless, we’re grateful for every ounce of effort Juan has put into Hope and wish him courage, strength and luck with the die rolls in the future.

Things we want to do better.

Now let's talk about the things we want to do better: 1) scoping and planning our iterations; 2) managing time more efficiently. With regards to the first one, I was a little too ambitious with the iterations in the last quarter and there was a lot of unplanned work involved in creating and setting up the scenes that I didn't account for and that made us fall short on our expectations. We ended up completing only 2 iterations out of the 5 we planned for Q4. As for the second one, Azrael mentioned he wants to do a better job at managing his time to be able to work on the dialogues outside of our weekly meetings and achieve the level of polish he desires.

The takeaway (if you want any) is that making games is hard. It requires juggling lots of things, putting in hours of work and making lots of sacrifices. That's why we are thankful for every line of code, every dialogue and every tiny sound we are able to put into the game.

Stats!

Ok, we talked about the good and the no-so-good. Now comes my favorite part: the numbers! Numbers and stats help you put things into perspective, that usually helps you realize that you did more than you thought you did. Our brains can trick us into thinking we didn't do enough just to make us quit but, remember, 1 > 0 and something is better than nothing.

So, here are some numbers:

• 5 builds released (a release almost every 2 months)
• 202 dialogue nodes added (~17 dialogues per month)
• 625 commits (~1.7 commits per day)
• 4,670 files changed (13 files changed per day)
  • 959,416 lines inserted (~111 lines inserted per hour)
  • 32,425 lines deleted (~4 lines removed per hour)
• 17 new SFX (1.5 SFX per month)
• 15 new (Unity) scenes added. Including areas, minigames and QTEs (1.25 scenes per month)
• 48 interactable objects across 9 scenes (~5 objects per scene)
• 3 big puzzles implemented (less than 1 puzzle per quarter)

And all of the above accrues for 45 minutes of gameplay! (rushing it, otherwise it could be more). That totally blew our minds because we thought we would have 20-30 minutes until we play-tested it from beginning to end in our last meeting.

Well, that was our 2022! We are hoping to release a build with all these changes before the end of the year but I have a few bugs to squash first!

Stay tuned.