If you haven’t read those articles, let me sum up the basics so that you’ll be able to understand where I’m going with this article:

- A game needs a single, clear goal that is achievable.  So, the goal in Tetris can not be “survival”, because at what point have you survived?  The answer is never – no game end would result in survival, so it’s unachievable.

- In an evergreen skill-based “single-player” game, score is a good way to measure performance, because it can rise perpetually (effectively perpetually, not literally) with the skill of the player

- Scores should be small, preferably under 100, because we need to feel like we own our scores, and human beings are really bad at comprehending numbers well above 100.

- For the same reason as above, the way points are dealt out should be extremely simple and not involve weird behind the scenes math or hidden information.  A good model for score is sports, or European designer boardgames, both of which keep their scores under 100 (often under 10!)

I’m sure some people would like to fight me on some or all of those points, but for now you’ll need to take them for granted to understand the next thing I’m about to explain about scoring in AURO.

The “High Score”

Imagine if you decide to play a game of golf with some friends.  You all go out and play a full course.  Then you tally up the results, and hey, it looks like you had the best score of everyone who was playing!  Great!  Except, wait – the goal was to beat Uncle Ricky’s score from 2007, when he played that one amazing game.  So, since you didn’t do that, actually, you lost.

In sports, we have “the score of the current match”, and we have “the world record”.  The former is what is actually used to determine winners in a game right now.  The latter is, essentially, trivia.  Yet in videogames, this is how we tend to operate.  Some guy hits some amazing score, and it goes up on the scoreboard and stays there, and in order to “win” you have to beat that score, which for many players is nearly as impossible as the logically impossible “survival” goal.

Sure, some more modern score based games will wipe their score board from time to time, or have a “best scores of this week” section, etc, but none of these solve the problem.

The problem is that we’re confusing “world record” and “score of the current game”.

The Solution

I’ve often said that there’s no such thing as a single-player game.  When I say this, I of course am referring to game as in my definition – a contest of decision-making – also known as a “Strategy game” or “competitive game”.  What we need to be doing in score based games is creating “matches”, exactly the same way that Golf is played.  What this means is in a system where the objective is beating a specific target score, it’s inherently competitive.  So this is what we’re doing in AURO.

When you start the game, you’re given three gameplay options:

• STORY BOOK – This is the game’s STORY MODE.  It starts off with a tutorial (skippable), has cutscenes (skippable), and an easier version of the main game, capped off with a final boss fight and more skippable cutscenes.  This will be primarily for introducing players to both the lore and mechanisms of the game.

• QUICK MATCH – This is one of two main ways to play the game, and technically probably the most “legitimate” in that it is the most evergreen.  In this mode, you are auto-matched with another player.  You and he both play a single game of AURO.  In these two games that are played, both players get the same random level generation – same monsters, same scrolls, etc.  After both players have played, their scores are compared and a winner is pronounced.  Possibly this mode might have more wild, somewhat unfair swings in terms of what can possibly appear than other modes, since both players have to deal with it equally.  So maybe on one level, the map is just surrounded by squids.   One level, tons of Brutes all the sudden.  How do you and the other player deal with this?  We’re trying to test a very wide range of skill in this mode.
  When you win in Quick Match mode, you get a WIN, when you lose, you’ll get a LOSS.  Simple as that!  We’ll have leagues and matchmaking and all of the stuff that you expect in a competitive online game.

• TRIALS – This is what most people expect in a “single player” score based game.  In this mode, you try to beat your own high score.  We’ll have numerous “Classes” that you can unlock (ranks, sort of, like Journeyman and Apprentice, but with maybe better names than that) by reaching certain score thresholds.  So if you beat your high score, you pass.  If you don’t beat your high score, you fail.  Sometimes when you pass, you get a PROMOTION!

Now, we’ll still have “world records” so that players can see who has achieved the highest score ever, but this is no longer the primary source of competition.  It’s more like some Baseball stat for some guy that pitched a perfect game – it’s neat and cool to know, but it is not really what baseball is about.

The Major Takeaway

And that’s really the major point that I realized.  Getting some freak astronomically high score once isn’t what AURO is really all about.  What we really should care about is “how good is this player at this system in a broad, holistic way”, as measured over many games with many different circumstances that come up.  So, our Quick Match system does that.

I’m really happy that we’ve figured this out before it was too late to implement, because as I’ve said all along, it’s not good enough to do a good score system.  We have to fundamentally change the way people even think about score in videogames.  This shouldn’t be too hard, since people already think the way we’re asking them to think with regards to sports.

Of course, we’ll have other modes in the future, and I really welcome your feedback in terms of what I’ve written above.

Before I get into the game designey stuff, though, but still on the topic of “stuff taking a really long time to do”, how about we take a look at some of what Blake, our lead artist, has been working on.

New AURO Artwork!

To the left and above, you can see the portrait for the Foxy Mama.  She will come onto the screen and taunt poor Auro while she throws rocks at him.  In those situations, you’d see her on the top right, where you normally see your tutor, Quillsh.

Speaking of Quillsh, in the opening and ending cutscenes of the game, you’ll actually see the Quillsh sprite from time to time, animating and flapping around and yelling at you.  Here’s his sprite, all finished up!

I know we go on about it a lot, but it really is true that animating this kind of pixel art takes a really long time.  What’s nice with AURO, though, is that we only have to do one animation per character.  This means we can make each animation really stylish and fun, without having to worry about creating it from 6 different directions or explicitly getting across some specific mechanical function.

One more piece of art – the Cellar tileset.  After looking at the Dungeon tileset for so long, it’s going to be great to get this new tilset into the game soon.  I think we have 3 more tilesets to go, which is actually the biggest chunk of the remaining art workload.  Click to enlarge!

Right now, at the time of this writing, Blake is working on the AURO Title screen / promotional illustration.  It shows Auro being all heroic in front of a fish-eye lens panorama of various characters from the game.  So far, I think it’s like the best work Blake has done yet, and I can’t wait to show it off.

Back to Game Design!

A lot of people might be confused about why it has taken so long to balance and design the abilities in this game, given that there’s so few of them – 9, in total (not counting scroll abilities, which actually, I think we only have 2 or 3 of at the moment for a reason I’ll get into).

It’s funny actually, to go through the list of Dinofarmgames.com posts about AURO.  So many of them are just all about these abilities.  I mean, I’ve never worked on something so hard in all my life.

And it’s not just me, either.  Blake is always really helpful to me in being a sounding board for ideas, as well as coming up with some awesome ideas of his own.  And then on top of that, we’ve had the beta testers for almost a year now, and they are super helpful.  They’ve been with me over at the forums struggling away to come up with some abilities that not only are exciting to use, but also simple, and balanced.

The fact of the matter is that designing content for AURO is really, really hard, because it’s such a simple game in terms of its core rules, and because of the lack of output randomness (stuff like dice rolls and other things that get between your decision and its effects).  And actually, designing content for this system is hard, by design.

It’s dramatically harder to design these abilities, for example, than it was to design abilities for 100 Rogues.  100 Rogues has tons of randomness and other kinds of noise, and for that reason, it’s pretty hard to go wrong when adding new content.  It’s very forgiving, let’s put it that way.

But the downside to a system like that is that there’s a lot of noise, downtime, useless junk, power imbalances, etc.  It’s simply not a very tight experience.  Don’t get me wrong – I still love 100 Rogues.  With that said, though, I think it’s much harder for a new player to learn, and also much quicker to “solve” than AURO will be.

Anyway, long story short, these abilities are tough to design.  But we’re getting there.  Right now I am sitting on a set of 9 abilities that I really like, and I think most of our testers really like.  That brings me to my next section.

Development Gameplan

Like I said, we have established a deadline for gameplay changes to hit on the 20th of this month.  After looking through the list of AURO posts, I see that we’ve said “we’re entering a phase of getting the game finished now” about 12 different times, going back as far as July of last year.  So, I will formally do you a favor and not say that.

Which also brings me to the issue of a release date.  I already mentioned last month that the May 1 deadline wasn’t looking so good.  It is definitely true that we are not making that deadline.  However, we have increased the tempo of our work schedules recently, because we need this game to be out soon much more than you readers do, believe it or not!

So, I’m not going to give a release date right now but we’re shooting for June or July.  Certainly the game must be out by August, since we might be doing something special around that time that we’d like the game to be out for (more news on that later).

Anyway, that’s probably enough rambling for now.  Things are going well, and we appreciate your patience.  As always, please feel free to visit us on the forums and the chat, where intense debates about the abilities are taking place every day.

Counters

We’ve been doing some work in AURO recently that I think is pretty interesting, and I wanted to share it with you.

Firstly, the biggest thing that has been happening from a game design perspective is that the system of counters is starting to solidify and become clear.  People often think about an ecology of counters – a “rock, paper, scissors” – in multiplayer strategy games.  In Starcraft, for instance, Wraiths counter Guardians, and Guardians counter Marines, and Marines counter Wraiths (roughly, no arguments about this example, please!).

In my experience, single-player games don’t usually have a system like this.  Even in highly replayable games such as abstracts like Tetris, roguelikes like Shiren the Wanderer, or so-called 4x Strategy games like Civilization, this kind of a thing doesn’t really exist.

In AURO, there’s a system where different monsters are added throughout the game.  Each individual game will have a different make-up of what monsters you see.  Here’s the list of counters (specific information GUARANTEED to change, but you get the idea):

Character Select

We’ve realized something about “extra characters” for AURO‘s main gameplay mode.  Namely, that we’re not going to do them.

Kickstarter users – fear not!  We’re still going to have extra playable characters, but we’ll be doing them a bit differently.  Allow me to explain.

AURO is this really tight system where each monster and ability type counter each other out.  It’s kind of like this little balanced eco-system.  The problem with throwing a new asymmetrical character into that ecosystem is that it inherently imbalances the system.  We’ve tried a number of different character concepts and it always biases the character towards one ability type, or, if we make it so mild/uninteresting that it doesn’t, it’s just not worth doing.

So that’s the thing.  We could do extra characters, but only if they were so mildly different that it wouldn’t be exciting.  Factor in that extra characters would still have to be balanced against AURO in order to get the same high scores, and it’s just not worth the effort.

INSTEAD, what we want to do is add Character-based variants.  So, on the main screen, there will be the normal game, where you play as AURO.  However, there’s also a list of other gameplay modes.  One mode is like, Argo’s Adventure, or something, where not only is Argo different, but the entire world eco-system is tweaked to make Argo’s gameplay as good and interesting as possible on its own.  And we can add more of those.

In addition to this, we can still allow other playable classes that are nothing more than a cosmetic avatar.  So again, Kickstarter guys, don’t worry – your Player Class likeness is going to be playable in the main game (at least visually) and it will have a game mode devoted to it.  I hope that people understand our motivations for this!  (Post a comment if you don’t).

Other News

Make sure to go check out our FANCY NEW FORUMS!  And let us know what you think of them.

Tons of art updates, like we’ve finished the logo.  The game is now running mostly great on devices and we’ve got an Apple developer account set-up and ready to go.  As expected, the release is probably going to get pushed back.  It’s already march 10, and I’d be lying if I said that I still thought we could make the May 1 release date… but you never know.  Right now I’d say tentatively by the end of May might be possible, though.

Anyway, without further adieu, here’s the new logo!  Go lead artist Blake Reynolds!

Updated Hud!

This past month, Blake finally finished the updated (final) HUD artwork.  There will still be little effects and stuff, as well as icons on abilities, text on top, etc – but for the most part, this is the HUD!  It’s probably the 20th major overhaul since we really started back in late 2011.

Also, you can see the timid King Omiron there on the top right.  Let us know what you think of this art!

Device Testing!

The other big news is that we’ve been testing the game on devices now.  Up until recently, we were exporting the game only to Flash, where it could be easily accessed on the web.  This made testing super easy and efficient, which is great.  However, AURO is not designed to be a Flash game, it’s a mobile game!  So, Andrew has been working really hard on getting the game working on both iOS and Android – which is supposed to be super-easy with Haxe, the language AURO is coded in.  It’s certainly far easier than having to re-code the game from scratch (which is what Wes Paugh, the Fusion Reactions coder behind 100 Rogues has had to do to get that game on OUYA / Android), but it’s still been pretty bumpy.

But the game is now almost totally playable and smooth on both my iPad 2 and my Droid 3 phone.  It’s great to see the game on the devices, and finally get to test some of the UI theory stuff out, such as “you never have to click on an individual tile, only the 6 directional quadrants” UI design rule.  The game really feels good to play – I personally cannot wait to be able to just play it without worrying about little bugs and balance issues.

What’s Next?

We’re going to be starting another big round of testing – perhaps Beta Phase 3 – in about a week or so.  We’ll be sending out some invites at that time to people with iOS and Android devices.  Particularly on the Android front – since there are so many different kinds of hardware – we’re going to need some rigorous testing.  So, that’s just what we’ll do.

We’re still shooting for a May 1 release date, which, as far as I can tell, should be doable.  Stay tuned for more!

About a month ago, we sort of “finished working on gameplay” and moved onto adding other features such as Story Mode and Character Select and now even the Tutorial.  That’s all planned out and now partially implemented;  in fact, the opening cutscene is basically done!  Pretty exciting.

Since then, I’ve also went back and dove into the gameplay again, making some major improvements, particularly to the Fire tree.  Fire has been particularly difficult to get right because of its “direct damagey” nature, but I think I might be onto something this time.

We’ve also updated our schedule, from here to release.  We now are at a point where we’re just about 100% certain exactly what features will make it to release day.  With all that in mind, we’ve determined that we can have the game out on Android by May 1.  Hopefully we can have it out on iOS no later than a month after, but that will be contingent mostly on backend technical stuff.

Finally, we’ve also determined that we need to launch with 2 extra character classes.  One will be the evil Prince Argo, and one will be a secret unannounced character.  After launch, we’ll get started on all the backer’s NPCs and PCs.  Will be exciting.

Also hey, here’s a screenshot of Auro in a mode that we use that lets us see most of the level at once, just for debugging purposes.  We thought it’d be cool to see that, so here you go!  Keep in mind some of those monsters, such as the SQUID, have temporary artwork.

If you’re interested in participating in the Beta, shoot us an email!  We have some room for a couple new testers.

The last post here at dinofarmgames was just about exactly one month ago, and at that time I was embroiled in a bit of a crisis regarding the abilities.  Things just weren’t working, they weren’t balanced, and worst of all, many of the abilities just weren’t interesting.  There’s always this lingering fear in the back of your mind when you’re developing something original, and things aren’t working:  maybe this idea is just fundamentally flawed!  Oh, no!

But, we kept hammering and hammering away at it, and I think that now, it’s looking pretty good.  I have to really thank a new wave of testers we got from over at fantasystrike.com, guys like Carlos(aka specs), Vivafringe, Banewlf, link6616 and several others.  To quickly give back a bit to that great community:  everyone should go check out the games at Fantasy Strike!  They’re free to play, really fun (especially Puzzle Strike, probably my favorite deck-building game), and designed by one of the world’s leading bad-dudes of game design, David Sirlin.  Their community is full of thoughtful people, too who really contributed so much to this Beta.  So thanks again to them.

Oh, also, check out our new Jelly sprite!

The Abilities Have Landed (For Now)

AURO’s special tactical abilities are the core of the gameplay, and so it’s critical that we get them useful, balanced, and interesting.  At this point, I think I can say that we’re pretty much there.  The three trees seem decently balanced at all levels of play, they have their own identities, and most importantly, I think we’ve managed to preserve what’s exciting about them.  Ice Floe is slippery madness, Air is the nimble bouncing ninja, and Fire is chaotic death everywhere.

Now, during this past month (which actually felt more like 3 months;  I was surprised to see that it had only been a month since that last post), there have been probably a dozen times when I thought the abilities had landed, when they still had a way to go.  So, it’s possible that we still have some major surgery to do, but I think for now it will mostly be a turning of knobs.  We also still have to add a couple more monsters, such as the SQUID (who actually serves an important purpose of being an anti-monster-funneling monster), which also will bring the game together.  And I still am not sure what to do with the Liches…

But anyway, here’s the abilities that we’ve landed on, after dozens of different approaches, going back to old versions, tweaking, and other madness:

THE FIRE TREE

Fire Staff – Auro’s staff bursts into flame.  His pushback normal-attacks, which normally won’t push a monster back if there’s another monster behind him, now turn monsters into missiles that kill other monsters in their way.  Further, when he does knock a monster back, that monster leaves a trail of flame.  As though that weren’t cool enough, when Auro’s staff is ablaze, he can walk through a blaze without harm!

Rocket – Auro charges two tiles in a direction, killing anything (except Heavy monsters) in his path!  Cooler yet, if he lands in a flame, he can charge again for free!

Explode – Auro sends all adjacent monsters careening outwards two tiles in every direction.  Also, he can use this power to expel flames further out, multiplying them.

THE AIR TREE

Jump – Auro bounds through the air two tiles in a direction, sailing over any monsters on the way.  He can also land on top of a monster head or pillar to jump again for free.  Jumping on monsters leaves them in a strong wind current, causing them to float motionless.  Hitting them out of the current sends them flying twice as far as normal.

Rush – Move one tile in a direction, pushing a monster back if there’s one in your way, and leaving a current behind you.  Might sound dull, but it’s incredibly useful since abilities don’t take a turn to use!

Gale – Howling winds push all monsters on-screen one tile in a direction, leaving Currents behind them.

THE ICE TREE

Floe – Leave a diamond-shape of slippery ice-tiles in an area.  Monsters will slide across this, and you can send them flying off to their doom.

Chill – Freeze a single adjacent monster.  You can then push around the frozen ice block which will leave trails of Floe!

Abomination – Become a terrifying ice-beast!  Monsters all run from you in fear!  Instantly crush any monsters you touch, and better yet, you can move over Floe without passing turns!

What’s Next?  Non-Gameplay Stuff

We’ve involved a large wave of new testers now.  Basically everyone who contributed to our successful Kickstarter should have gotten an email about their invitation to the Beta, which we hope will kick the forum activity into a higher gear.  It’s always really inspiring to know that there are people waiting to play the next exciting build of your game, and to get feedback on it right away.

In terms of implementation, what I’m actually excited about is the prospect of moving away from core gameplay.  For nearly two full years now, we’ve been focused entirely on getting this gameplay to be sound.  Now, it basically is sound, and so we can start putting resources elsewhere.  Here’s just some of the things we’ll be hitting up next:

• Andrew has been working on some metrics stuff, which will be really useful.  This would also include a feature to save replays, which would also be helpful for us.
• I’ve started designing the interactions for the tutorial, which is of course vitally important for a game as weird as ours
• I’ve also started really getting down to the writing of the in-game dialogue for Story Mode.  It’s a lot of fun, and Blake has been helping a lot in keeping the characters in-character.
• In addition to filling out our monster roster, Blake has been finishing up the new logo, and I think he’s about to get started on rendering our new HUD.  Exciting!

So, these are the kinds of things we’ll be working on now.  That’s not to say that gameplay won’t continually be modified, tweaked, and possibly even surgery-ed if it proves necessary.  It just means that we’ll be letting that kind of dwell for a bit, while we

We’ll be exhibiting the beta at a small New Jersey IGDA event in two weeks.  This will be our first time showing people the game in person like that – scary!  Anyhow, that’s what’s been going on down at the Dinofarm!

I’ve been having another crisis of conscience regarding some of the abilities, though, so it seems like a good time to do another.

State of the Abilities

I’ve taken to calling Auro’s magical tactical spells “abilities” recently, instead of “disciplines” which I had been using for awhile.  Probably, I’ll just end up using the word “spells” because it’s the most clear option.  Anyway, we’ve been getting a lot of really good feedback from our testers, and the recently launched beta only helped the matter.

From everyone’s response, as well as my own copious testing, here’s the current consensus:  the game is fun enough as it is, but there are a few key problems.  Namely, some of the abilities are just… kind of crappy.  All of the abilities have some great kernel of an idea to them, and it takes a lot of playtesting and tweaking to find out of that idea actually works or not.  I think that we reached that point with a number of the abilities possibly as long as a month or two ago, but I think I was also hoping that implementing more functionality would make them come together.  Well, we implemented, and it didn’t help!

Some examples of problems were:

• Abomination (Ice T3) didn’t have the killing power it should (instead it’s just a “clear the room” move with a huge cooldown)
• Chill (Ice T2) doesn’t feel good to use, is confusing and kind of un-exciting
• Currents (created by Air abilities) are placed in unproductive ways and just aren’t that powerful or interesting
• Fire in general just isn’t fire-ish enough, kind of flat.  I’ve been very afraid of it becoming too powerful, I think
• Ice in general is not becoming the “construction set” area-builder that I’ve always wanted it to be
• Air is also missing its identity, largely because it doesn’t have a really useful “independent actor thing” (like Flames for fire and Blocks/Floe for ice)

There’s quite a few more.  In short, though, I just really had to start from the ground up and get down some abilities.  So I started making one of my triangle charts.   In making this chart, I realized one of my problems:  my chart had been the wrong shape all along.  Actually, over the years (yes, AURO has been in the works for *years* now), I’ve tried a number of shapes.  Most recently, I was trying a triangle.  Makes sense, right?  There’s three trees, and they’d each fit into one corner of the triangle.

Tonight, I realized that that was the wrong way to think of it.  Each “pro” quality, such as being good at killing, needs to have a con side as well.  So the opposite of “killing” would be something like “creating more monsters” or possibly “buffing monsters”.  I’m reminded of Robin Walker, of Valve Software, talking about how when designing the TF2 classes, the weaknesses were even more important than the strengths.

It’s not easy to determine what the basic core strengths and weaknesses of abilities are in this game, but I think I’ve done it.  The strengths of the abilities are:

• Killing:  Does this ability help you kill monsters?  Example:  Meteor!
• Mobility:  Does this ability help you move around the map quickly or give you more movement options?  Example:  Jump!
• Control:  Does this ability allow you to restrict enemy movement or move monsters?  Example:  Floe!

From that, we also get the three negative qualities.

• Hurting Auro:  Does this ability have the potential to hurt Auro?  Example:  Flame!
• Immobilizing Auro:  Does this ability reduce Auro’s movement options and possibly even trap him in?  Example:  Chill!
• Chaos:  Does this ability cause some random or hard-to-predict effects to occur?  Example:  Flame!

So with that in mind, there should be 6 sides, not 3 (a hex!). I also realized that it would make much more sense to have each tree take on two of the good qualities, and those two good qualities straddle one bad quality.  This seems like a really good way to balance the trees out and to be able to hold onto a bad quality while designing.

While making this chart, I realized some other problems with this entire layout style.  Where do I put Floe?  Floe is kind of a balanced ability, that has killing power, mobility, AND control – at least a little of all three.  This kind of a layout doesn’t allow me to express that.  So, I tried something entirely different.  (Note:  I also swapped around who gets what traits).

The Ability Value Chart

Instead of a visual hex map, I would now use a numeric chart, with positive and negative integers representing the level of value that an ability has in different ways.  Check it out:

The colored areas are the areas that this tree should focus on.  Now, you can see that Fire is sort of all over the place.  It has high numbers in all categories, bu the downside is that it has a ton of… well, downsides.  Fire is spreading all over the place and burning poor Auro around every turn!  Notice that the totals on the far right aren’t all exactly equal.  Firstly, as long as they’re close this is OK because the values themselves are totally rough abstractions anyway and probably aren’t 100% correct.  Secondly, we always have knobs to tweak, such as cooldowns and durations and such.

This restriction really helped me in my design work a lot, and I think that more designers should do this kind of stuff to help them organize their thoughts.  Breaking a game’s actions into useful categories is really the only way to make sure that they retain their identity.

This also helped me come up with some really cool new abilities.  For one, since I know now that the Air tree should have a lot of chaos associated with it, I can now ask the question “how”?  My answer is to change how currents work.  Currents now move about randomly, they don’t paralyze monsters (they can still move, act, or do whatever if they’re on a Current, including walk off the current), they move a monster with them if they move and one is on top of them (that’s the big one), for starters.  Also, you can Jump onto them even if they’re over water (although you have to jump right back off, as if you were jumping on a Pillar).  Gale now produces a bunch of Currents randomly when used.  Rush creates a current in front of you, instead of behind you.  Finally – and this is an experimental rule I’m not certain about – but if Auro walks onto a current, the current dissipates and gives AURO a bonus to his AIR ability cooldowns.

I also came up with an Ice ability that I think is just freaking fantastic.  The new T2 is still called Chill (for now), but what it does is turn all Floes into Ice Blocks, and Ice Blocks into Floes.  It also has a very short cooldown.  In my testing, this ability is awesome.

More stuff to come.  We’re probably not going to make our 2012 deadline, it’s looking like, but hopefully late Jan.  Important thing is that AURO is the best when it does come out!  Thanks for reading!

I want to remind the testers and any media people that we are not prepared to show the game to the greater public yet, as a huge number of key assets (like HUD artwork) are still missing, and of course, the gameplay is still rough.

Thanks very much for everyone who’s participating.

Over there on the sidebar, plink down your email address and you’ll be whisked away to a world of magic splendor.  Did I just say “magic splendor”?  Okay, well that settles it:  you’re signing up right now!

On another note, AURO‘s coming along well and the Beta invites will be going out soon!

Now, we’re still going to get the game on every platform we possibly can, but we’ve realized that it would be a bad idea to launch all of them at the exact same time.  Some releases will be staggered by a month or so, because it’s imperative that the game is running in great shape on all platforms.  Some platforms – Android and PC specifically – are bound to have a little more work to do with regards to making sure the game’s working on everyone’s unique devices, but it won’t be too bad.  A big part of what we’ll be doing in our Beta phase is getting responses from people with different hardware.

That brings me to the Beta.  When’s it going to happen?  Well, we just got out, about a week ago, of a huge “great redesign in the sky” phase, where we made our codebase roughly 1000 times more awesome and robust.  This was Andrew’s idea, as the code was starting to get really hairy, being that it’s now about a year old and the game having had changed so much.  It set us back a lot;  where we had 8 or 9 monsters before and all three skill trees implemented, now we’ve got about 5 monsters implemented and two skill trees implemented.  However, working with this new codebase is incredibly easy.  Andrew is doing a phenomenal job on it, and I think how solid this game feels in terms of the software is going to be a real selling point.

But anyway, what does that mean for the Beta?  Well, we’re shooting to get into the beta early November.  That means 3-4 weeks from now!  So, you Kickstarter supporters, expect a message from us about this within the next month!

Once we enter into Beta, gameplay will be approaching a “finished” point.  From there, it will only be a matter of testing and tuning and making sure it’s working as intended, balanced, and exciting.  From there, we have to add other functionality, such as Story Mode, Tutorial, and online leaderboards (which we’re doing some really cool stuff with;  stay tuned for more on that).

Also, we’ve got our first shippable Player Class (besides Auro, of course) designed and most of his art finished.  That will be very exciting.

So, all in all, things are going.  You can expect closed Beta to start within a month, and the game to be released within three.  We’re really looking forward to getting it out there.