State of the build and a production update from Liam!

MAY 10TH: KICKSTARTER DEV LOG

Note: These posts were written for the Kickstarter campaign that ran April-May. Some information may be outdated or incorrect.
Always read the latest updates to be up to date on Malys!

HELLO exorcists and a demon-cursed day to you all!

I’m Liam, one of the co-founders of Summerfall Studios, and my role on Malys is as Project Director and Producer. Functionally what this means is it’s my job to make sure that Dave’s vision for the project gets executed, and that we’re able to actually ship a game by the end of the project. If it sounds boring, that’s because sometimes, it is! But it’s also SUPER rewarding, because I get to help shape how the project comes together, and I’m usually the first person who gets to see new things go in. 

I thought I’d write an update explaining where the project is now, what’s going on, and what’s coming up – as well as ask you all a question that will be helpful for us as we move forward.

Where is the project right now?

A lot of our structural and core systems are in, and you can fully make your way through a region right now! 

Things like the ability to buy things, upgrading cards, the curio system, etc. are all implemented, but need work (eg. right now, there’s a bug with purchasing cards where you can’t actually see what card you’re buying, as it only displays a generic one). We can give players cards after an exorcism, but the system doesn’t support other kinds of rewards yet. You can see plenty of VFX reactions for things the player and demons can do, but they don’t always appear in the right order, because the underlying system needs more functionality so that Andrew (our tech artist expert) can put things into the right order and change the timing. 

It’s a weird place to be in a project - that moment where things are starting to come together and you’re starting to see “the game,” but everything feels like it’s not quite there yet, or there are bugs that stop it from working exactly as intended, or features are only partially implemented. 

Sometimes it can feel like one step forward, two steps back - we implemented a new card! Oh no, the card doesn’t work because it highlighted a bug with another system. Demons are now finally able to siphon health from hosts to power their attacks! Whoops, there’s no way for Andrew to trigger the correct VFX because we can’t differentiate different types of damage right now, and we need to rework the damage system to make sure that (and many other things) are possible. 

On the plus side, SO much is done, and functionally speaking we are now moving into the “content creation” phase - where all of the card and demon designs that Zala and Ethan have been working on for months are finally going into the game, ready for testing and iteration. It’s a super exciting time, where it feels like every day the scope for what we can do with card behaviour is increasing, and new cards are going in every few days. 

IGNORE THAT IT SAYS WEAKEN. WEAKEN IS NOW SHACKLE. (Trust us, it makes way more sense for the ability!)

Overall, things are progressing really well! We’re stressed about timelines, about things breaking, about not being able to get everything done that we want to get done. But we’re also very close to Malys finally feeling like a game you can actually play, as a cohesive collection of individual features coming together. 

In other words - like every other game I’ve ever worked on! 

What is the current priority for the project?

Right now we are focused on getting another playtesting build together, so we can start to get feedback from user testing on all of the work we’ve just been doing. This isn’t a build that can go out to backers yet unfortunately, but for us to pull in specific people, record their experiences with the game, and learn from where they succeed and fail at understanding our systems and gameplay feedback. What do they find easy to understand? What is difficult to understand? What do they find interesting, what do they find boring?

User testing is a critical component of any good project, and ends with a lot of small tweaks (and sometimes large iterations) to make things feel better for players. 

Especially now that things are starting to come together, it’s critical that we get feedback from people who aren’t ourselves, who aren’t “in” the systems, to see how we can make things better.

We’re pretty confident of a lot of our design, but the first few times for any new iteration of a project where you throw it in front of a player for the first time is nervewracking as hell.

Hopefully, once we’ve got things in order, we’ll get a good mix of constructive feedback and validation for what we’ve been doing! (More likely, it’ll just be a lot of “I don’t understand how this works,” and we’ll all feel bad for a day or two as we figure out how to solve that problem. Such is the way.) 

What are we concerned about right now?

One of the most interesting/useful questions that it’s my job to ask is where the risks are in the project, and what the team is worried about. 

One of the big concerns right now is user testing - making sure we get feedback at the right times to improve things, which is what we’re working on right now.

Another is that the engineering team has a lot of work to do, and not a lot of time to do it in (even if the Kickstarter succeeds!) – meaning we’re having a lot of conversations about priority and order of work. What is absolutely necessary for a first release? What can be pushed into later updates? Always tough questions.

And of course, on every project I’ve ever worked on, at this point in the timeline– heading towards the pointy end – we all start to stress about how good our work is. Will the game be fun enough?? Will people understand what we’re making? Will it just totally suck?!

Because we spend every day “in it,” it becomes increasingly difficult to see the forest for the trees, and all we see are the bugs, the problems, the ways in which we aren’t meeting our own high expectations. 

But as Ben just wrote, after an hour or so -

“It's so good! I’m definitely feeling like we're able to enter flow state a lot more easily, the battles feel tense, the music is so good, the mood so delicious, the writing so lovely! I genuinely felt excited to read the storylet, get into the expose phase and thought to myself "I cant wait to find out what demon this is, I wanna see the art!" like a damn gacha game hahah! We're making something cool folks!”

When we get to sit back and look at what we’re making, it’s always special. 

Liam