Today is October! The IGF deadline is in a few weeks. I don’t know if we will submit Even the Ocean. I have thought about it a bit, I do not know if we will submit . It seems premature. And I don’t really know how we would phrase such a demo…an advantage with Anodyne was the immediately strange nature of the areas. We don’t have that with Even the Ocean, the world is more “realistic” (though still fantastical). The interesting nature of the world, I think, doesn’t come together until you’ve seen it all, though on an aesthetic and gameplay level each area should be pleasing. However, there’s the “Even” part of the game which could be an interesting contrast if we got that into the demo, but that needs a lot of work. Er, basically I don’t think we’ll bother.
Jon and I think it’s best if we finish The Ocean first, then move onto Even. This might be a while, but, it’s important that both games come out at the same time as the same binary.
—
Anyways, I’ve decided to do the Anodyne postmortem in a series of parts. Because one post would be horrible and too big and I would never finish it (just like a game! hahaha! rpgs! )
I want to ctrl-T out of this post so bad but..
Part -1,-2,…: Discussion of the main development phases (March 2012 – January 2013). Thoughts on process of design, music, gameplay, art direction, communication, evolution of the game.
Part 0: Release (this post) – bug testing, the days before, of, and after release.
Part 1,2,…: Post-release (iOS, Pirate bay, getting greenlit, Steam, Japanese version, Android)
Part F: Financial . This won’t happen for a few months (sorry) because we uh, have something that will be changing the financial data quite a bit, soon.
ANODYNE POSTMORTEM: PART 0.1:
Bug Testing, the days surrounding release, initial reception.
I guess a lot of this is journal-y in nature and perhaps not the most interesting game-development wise.
PRE-RELEASE
In January I decided to do bug-testing on a larger scale. I got some friends to help out. My friend Etan had been testing throughout development and caught a lot of stuff, so that was very useful! There were a lot of friends from Twitter willing to help. Luckily, reception to the game was positive. The first person to completely finish the game, AFAIK, was poe of Six Sided Sanctuary. so that was interesting! Bug fixing was, as you might guess, unpleasant – there were some nasty bugs with the dust and moving between screens (ugh!) but,….they got fixed. There’s still a bunch of tiny issues in the game, but I’M NEVER GOING TO FIX THEM! Because…I’m afraid I might just break something.
Apparently around the end of January I decided we would release on Feb 4th, a Monday. …I was sending out Fastspring codes the day before. I remember botching something up with release (make sure your damn release codes work! just get a humble widget, they’re easy to get now – and use that. don’t fuss with bmtmicro or fastspring)
We were to launch on GamersGate, Desura, and FastSpring..
THE DAY OF RELEASE
This was 2013-2-4. I wonder what Jon’s side of things were. Anyways, it had snowed recently and it was warm enough where everything was totally melty. The day before I remember my close friend telling me she was in the hospital. I think she may be my closest friend from college, so this was uh, a bit of shocking news for me the day before release. Anyways, I woke up early on the 4th, released the game, tweeted, blah….walked in the shitty weather in my crappy boots through puddles and visited my friend. I sat in the hospital Au Bon Pain afterward and ate a cookie while refreshing my Twitter feed. I don’t remember anything else about the day except that, oh, I think there was something Anodyne related on the front page of /r/gaming for a while…and I think we sold like 200 copies the first day.
Which uh, isn’t enough to live on obviously, but was an okay start. An e-mail I sent that day, I seemed pretty excited.
I guess things went better than expected at that point, but, of course, in the coming weeks, even better things would be happening! (We were still struggling on Greenlight…)
After
ambient-melodic 