Hi friends! Wil here with another end-of-year retrospective.

I can’t believe 2023 is already over. It has been a year of almost no changes on some fronts but a lot of progress on others, so we decided to call it a year of consolidation. We were able to identify the essential parts and dedicate most of our efforts there, while discarding a bunch of things we didn’t need.

Things that went well.

In terms of quest design, we experienced a before-and-after when we started using puzzle dependency graphs to reduce the linearity of our quests (thank you, Ron Gilbert!). It’s just amazing how we were able to improve the feeling and the flow of the tasks the player must perform in order to achieve a goal. Also, the implementation of the Quests and Objectives system helped us massively to keep track of the player’s progress and adjust all the objects (interactables, scenes, etc) accordingly.

On the narrative side, we started using callbacks and heuristics to make the story feel much more personal, and invested a lot of effort in condensing and “deweeding” the dialogues. We also implemented a visor for long-text format (called memory log) that finally enabled us to expose more lore, so the players can discover the bigger world outside the scope of the game.

We also made huge progress in the area of mechanics. One big win here was getting rid of the Tower Defense minigame and replacing it for something simpler. It was a tough decision mainly because we invested a significant amount of time implementing and polishing it but, thanks to the great feedback from our friend Patricio, we realized that the Tower Defense was too complex (compared to the other minigames) and decided to reuse an old mechanic, make some adjustments and convey the same core concept in a much simpler way.

Last, but not least, we invested some time on improving the look and feel of the minigames and we’re pleased with the result. There is still a lot of room to improve but at least we feel that the minigame interface is more integrated with the look & feel of the game and it’s not just a black screen with some widgets.

Things we want to do better.

At the end of 2022 we said “we’re gonna release episode 0 (or at least a very very polished version of it) and, while people are playing it, we’re gonna develop another game”. Oh boy, we were so, SO wrong. Not only we didn’t finish episode 0, but we didn’t even have time to think about another game.

Remember that I said that this year some fronts didn’t have much progress? Well, graphics and audio were those fronts. I’d say we did the bare minimum to not suck completely there. Just a few SFX here and there, some improvements in the minigames but that’s it. There wasn’t just enough time. Next year I want to work more closely with David to make some good improvements in the soundtrack and enhance the mood of the game.

Another learning this year was understanding that getting rid of the things we don’t need makes us agile and lets us focus on what matters. The next step is to systematize that learning and spend less time and effort identifying things to cut.

Stats.

I love numbers, and putting things into perspective is always fun for me. Here are our statistics for 2023:

• Hope is now ~38,874 lines of (C#) code
• 4 public builds (OSX, Windows and Linux)
  • 20% less compared to 2022
• 1102 commits (~3 commits per day)
  • 76% more than 2022
• We made a total of 7,499 changes in our source code (60% more than 2022). Of which:
  • 556,738 were insertions
  • 185,550 were deletions

Numbers are even more beautiful when you compare and graph them (a picture is worth a thousand words, right?). So, let’s take a look at the comparison of changes between 2022 and 2023 in the picture below.

It clearly shows that we didn’t add so many things as in the previous year but, more importantly, that we removed a bunch of stuff! That’s the stuff we didn’t need and that allowed us to focus more on the mechanics and the narrative.

For us, that’s the big takeaway from 2023. Even though we might have felt slow, dispersed or that we didn’t invest as much time as we wanted (you know, because adulting is hard), the little time we had we were actually focusing it on things that matter. Hopefully, that shows in the build we are planning to release next year.

In the meantime, stay tuned and happy new year! 🎉