Imminence

I’m writing this on January 31, twenty-eight months since I penned the inaugural entry in this dev blog. Gunmetal Arcadia launches in a week! This is probably the last blog post I’m ever gonna write anywhere ever yaaayy!! :D

As I mentioned in my last post at the start of this month, my goal was to have the game 99% done by the start of the year, with only non-gameplay elements like cutscenes and soundtrack left. I knocked all of those out in the first two weeks, with the goal of having my first release candidate (“RC0”) locked down by mid-month.

As often happens, the soundtrack coalesced at the last possible minute, but I’m pretty happy with it. As I indicated previously, I’m reusing nearly all the music from Zero in Gunmetal Arcadia, and I’ve added the same amount of music on top of that, which has given me a ton of material to pick from at runtime. In fact, each type of room (Vanguard outposts, Seeker outposts, shops, challenge rooms, etc.) gets its own unique music in each level of Gunmetal Arcadia.

You can find the Gunmetal Arcadia soundtrack on Bandcamp here: https://piratehearts.bandcamp.com/album/gunmetal-arcadia-ost

Then I took a week off.

In this case, “a week off” meant “building a framework for an editor for NextGame,” so that was fun. Learning C# and expanding the scope of my tools has been a huge part of making Super Win the Game and both Gunmetal Arcadias a reality, so I’m trying to make it a point to not cut any corners there. That means supporting undo/redo for everything, as opposed to only some things (YHtWtG) or nothing at all (Super Win, Gunmetal Arcadia).

My expectation was that I’d come back after a week, play through the game again, find some new bugs or polish issues that absolutely demanded my attention, get those fixed, and repeat until launch day. As it turned out, I’m happy with the build as it is. There are one or two minor things I might address post-launch, but otherwise, I think RC0 might actually be my shipping build and not the known-bad first-pancake-off-the-griddle that it usually is. So that’s interesting.

Unrelated to anything, it’s been a secret goal of mine to hit one hundred thousand words on this blog before shipping, and I just did in that last paragraph. I guess I can stop now.

Buy Gunmetal Arcadia! Available February 7, 2017, for Windows, Mac, and Linux! 👍

itch.io: https://piratehearts.itch.io/gunmetal-arcadia
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/332270
Humble: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/gunmetal-arcadia