TVR demo done, and what's next?

Last week I distributed the demo for The Velan Reach to a small group of people that indicated an interest in playing it, to have first look and provide some feedback on the game and the setting.

It was a bit nerve wracking on my part as I've seen a few developers fall flat trying either too hard to do something different with their second title, or not hard enough. Well technically it's my third if you count First Contact, but still.

Overall though, those that got back to me after playing seemed happy with it, and it didn't result in any substantial 'back to the drawing board' moments, so that's set my mind at ease a bit.

It's also been a very useful exercise to get The Velan Reach ready to ship, which meant cleaning up unused code, hammering down the UI elements and menus, and make sure there's a working gallery system, an achievement overview, and a menu background carousel, among other things. It also required me to get some work done on the Android version which always needs a bit of extra love, in this case for an option to import and export your preferred configuration (like settings and achievements, and more) because it's a more closed system than the desktop versions, with fewer options for users to dig around by themselves.

So from that perspective, the game is in a good shape. And that leaves the question...

What's next?

As you may recall, the options were to a) release the demo out to the wild, or b) to first wrap up the entirety of Chapter 1 before putting that out.

And after some soul searching, I've decided that, positive as the feedback was, there's just not enough content at this moment to launch, and the best way for this game have some impact is to hold on to the demo and wrap up Chapter 1 fully first. If I have to make a rough guess, that's still another month or two of work? I need to get cracking with writing the outlines for the final scenes to know for sure.

I realize that some of you may have been looking forward to getting your hands on the demo and giving it a try, but I'm really keen on not putting it out to the public just yet. But the full thing is just around the corner, and it'll be the better version to play. Just hang in there a little longer, please.

So, that leaves me with the following...

Plan for the immediate future.

1. Wrap up content for chapter 1 of The Velan Reach (two-ish months?).

2. Set up a store presence (desperately needed to help offset the ever declining number of backers which will likely become more prevalent as Light of my Life gets closer to wrapping up).

3. Launch The Velan Reach, and then get to work on Light of my Life Chapter 10, which will be the penultimate chapter, with one more chapter following that to wrap it all up.

This Wednesday I'll have up a new infographic, and a hopefully clearer look at the scope for this next, short stretch.

If you're on (girl)friend or up, check out a very little, spoiler-free peek of what I've been working on this past week, in a post just below this.