Our voyage begins...

Over the last couple of weeks the six of us have been journeying through a sea of seemingly never-ending tasks as we set about perfecting RoBoats: Legacy, making our first official trailer, and tallying up our food rations to see if we could so much as survive to the end of our voyage.

Starvation aside, we finished the sprint with a completed trailer, a ready to release game demo and a squeaky clean scrum board (and we totally didn’t push the sprint deadline back three times...).

Let’s sail back to the beginning.

It all started with our acceptance into the Tranzfuser competition, an opportunity that has allowed us to begin working as an official studio, present at EGX in September and compete for some real life treasure - woooo! And so, after many hushed celebrations, we slithered back into the dev cave and began plotting the next few weeks.

Preparing to release RoBoats: Legacy

We were three months into development and actually pretty chuffed with what we’d managed to create. We had a neat little game loop and people (mainly our friends and family) seemed to enjoy playing it. So we dropped our anchor and came to a consensus; what better way to start off this new development period than by releasing our original project as a demo?

However, the difference between being mid-development and having a polished demo is that one’s played by your loving friends who care about your feelings, and the other gets ripped to shreds by the not so loving monsters otherwise known as strangers.

It also struck us that this demo would represent us for at least the next three months, so we had to make sure it was ship-shape!

Suddenly we were hit by a tsunami of new tasks: implementing AI boat play, making more intuitive mobile UI, creating better power-up activation, the list went on. Things that seemed like minor, temporary issues, or features to be added later down the line, all suddenly needed to be fixed and added right away.

At times it kind of felt like there was a gigantanormous sea creature looming over our tiny little boat, endlessly tormenting us until we finally escaped into shallow waters.

Nevertheless (but alwaysthemore), we finished all our tasks and slayed the mighty creature of terror. I kid. Troy’s still alive. I promise.

Making a trailer

Now, making the trailer was a whole nother story, and what follows is the short tale of naivety, heartbreak, and magic that comes with making a trailer.

It started off pretty simply; a few discussions, a few storyboard drafts, a few emails to actors. Making a trailer was easy!

… How wrong we were.

All of a sudden, disaster struck as one by one our actors declined and cancelled, and we found ourselves half an hour before we were scheduled to start filming with no actors, no lighting, and a broken game-code. Thankfully, if you’ve watched our trailer you will know that all was not lost, and with a little bit of programming magic, the wonder of colour-grading, and the help of our trusty friends and very own film-crew, we managed to overcome our problems and proceeded to film the typical goofiness of a standard playtest.

Finally, after many, many iterations and edits we scrapped together a trailer we were proud of and continued on our voyage through the sea of never-ending tasks.

The end.