We just officially submitted Breath of Death VII! As soon as it passes review, it’ll be available on the XBox Live Marketplace under the Indie Games section. The full version will cost 80 MS points ($1 USD) and like all XBox Live Indie Games, there’s a free demo as well. Although the game is only available in English, we’re releasing it to all countries that have an Indie Game marketplace (I wonder how it’ll do in Japan). It’s impossible to know how long it will take to pass review, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes out this week.
I’ll post again with the marketplace link when it’s up.
I finished programming what is hopefully the last version of Breath of Death VII a few hours ago. We’re going to do a little more testing to make sure everything’s working well and then it’s time to submit the game for peer review for official release!
Hi everybody. I’ve been taking a bit of a break from programming while I wait for playtesters to play through the game and give us their suggestions. We’ve received some good suggestions so far for things that we can tweak to make the game even better (mostly about areas that are too hard or too easy), but I’d like to wait for a few more people to give it a try before updating the game. Interestingly enough, my 9-year old daughter has ended up really liking the game. She played it for about 3 hours yesterday and not at my behest (I even made her get off at one point and she asked to play it some more later on). When I asked her if she liked it and why, she said that it was funny and easy. Now funny, I understood – even though she’s not going to get the obscure RPG references, she obviously is enjoying the other jokes – but easy surprised me because I had seen her die MANY times. With some further questioning, it turned out what she meant was that it was faster paced than most RPGs she had experienced. For example, with Blue Dragon, it can often take an hour or two just to finish a single dungeon, that may or may not advance the story in any real way. Final Fantasy XIII is even worse. Contrast that with our game where the whole thing is only supposed to last a few hours and that sort of pacing obviously won’t work -we had to speed things up a bit, to the game’s great benefit (nobody likes slow and plodding).
Speaking of length, the first playtester to go through the game (besides myself, obviously) said it took him about 5 hours to reach the final boss so it looks like we hit our time estimate.
In other news, I just discovered how easy it is to publish stuff for the Kindle. I think I’ll put my two previous games (Epiphany in Spaaace! and Molly the Were-Zompire) up there for $1 a piece - they’re already basically e-books so why not sticking them on an actual e-book reader?
I’ve just finished playing through a complete game of Breath of Death VII from start to finish! I’m uploading the current version of the game to xna.creators.com so if you’re an XBLIG developer, it should be available to download it for playtesting later this morning. Everyone else, you’re going to have to wait a little while longer, but it’s for a good cause – namely, ironing out any bugs that might remain in the game.
Whew! I thought I’d never finish. I went to bed last night thinking that I had only a 3-4 hours left to finish up and instead it ended up taking the entire day and into the wee hours of the night before I finished things up. I managed to have fun actually playing through it even though I’ve got the whole thing practically memorized so just think how fun it’ll be if you haven’t spent every waking hour for the last few months thinking about it!
The title pretty much says it all. Breath of Death VII will enter official playtesting for testing & debugging at http://creators.xna.com tomorrow, 4/7/2010. Maybe as soon as in a few hours if I decide to stay up all night finishing the game up. I’ll post when it’s done.
As you might have surmised from our lack of updates lately, we’ve been working hard on getting Breath of Death VII ready. We didn’t make our March deadline, but we’re awfully close. Today, I spent most of my time going through dungeons, fighting monsters, and adjusting ability and enemy stats so that everything’s properly balanced. I also did a good amount of debugging. Some of the more amusing bugs I fixed today include:
A character’s stun spell had 100% success rate against monsters that are immune to stun.
Escaping a battle results in entering random battles with every step you take thereafter.
The game allowing the player to use multi-character unite techniques with a character even though that character was already doing another unite technique that turn with a different character.
Most of these bugs have been very easy to fix – just add a line of code here, an extra clause here, or switch a < sign to a > sign – but it’s given me a newfound appreciation for just how much goes into creating an RPG and making sure everything is working as it should.
In any case, the game is getting very close to the point of being ready to submit to playtesting. 2-3 weeks after that, the game should be finished and available on XBox Live for all to try. I’ll keep you all posted.
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