Production Post 10 : End Game

We're about two weeks away from release and it's coming down to the wire. The project is dripping with my blood, sweat, and tears, and I have to just keep working harder and harder in order to deliver that release build in a state I will be satisfied with. I'll have so much time to sleep when I'm dead, so why bother sleeping now?

I would put the main menu at about 60% functionally complete, and 30% polished. The pause menu still breaks minor stuff and doesn't look good. The dragon movement is only mostly finished, but not in a state we can release with. The levels are looking a lot better, but the ghosts need new, better AI, the ocean level needs a lot of visual polish, the splash and boulder crush particle effects are severely lacking, and the wind obstacle particle effect needs some minor tweaking.

One huge area of our game we are missing entirely is prompts to tell the player how to play. We need to make this as soon as humanly possible, one shot, polished, ready for release. We don't have time to iterate on this.

The game needs a LOT more feedback to inform the player what exactly is going on. We need to polish the credits menu. It's too late to make that difficulty curve tool for Zac, so we're going to need to sit down and figure out a decent way to work around that limitation.

Will and I are still pushing heavily for the infinite play mode, which the systems are almost entirely already made for, but I'm going to put that at 50% probability of materializing.

We need to make it so the split orbs get destroyed (with feedback) when they get hit by an obstacle. The Overworld gate animations still aren't finished. We still need to add chapters, A LOT of chapters if we don't have time to make the infinite play mode.

We have a document on how we might optimize the game, but we need to sit down and optimize it. The framerate on mobile is still very not great. Load times are verging on atrocious, with no indications that loading is occurring.

There's still so much to do: these next two weeks are going to be critical. Compounding this with other classes, which are also coming down to the wire, and you get eight very stressed out, very overworked developers. But that's half the fun! We've all worked too hard on this to not come out with a polished, bug-free, beautiful game, and I know we will be able to do it. But wow are these two weeks ever going to push us to our limits.