Dev Log 6 – Crop and Claw

Incremental Progress

The past week has been a lot of backend grind to polish things up, add substance, and fix bugs that are introduced when sneezing in the general direction of the infrastructure. There was an amusing point where the game crashed at arbitrary points, but it turned out to be a minor issue with passing --debug instead of a custom argument for enabling debug into the Godot in-editor runtime.

Trailer Time

As of writing, it is about two and a half months until Crop and Claw’s scheduled release. In reality, that’s a little under two months, due to ideally having a release candidate ready that has no major and easy to encounter oversights. The current trailer that floats around was more of a fodder one early in development to get the Steam page up. Within the oncoming week, a formal trailer is in the works. An NES pixel-art RPG is more difficult to market than many other genres, but the genre and style is a difficult sell in genre in the current day market, so it’s just an unavoidable downside of the process. Ideally, a trailer will be revealed with some extra screenshots and animations on the marketing sites within the next week.

Public Demo

As the base game’s systems are stabilized, and custom items, skills, and monsters can populate the growing maps, a demo is starting to appear possible. In fact, the basic substance of the game’s first segment is implemented. Most of what needs work before it could be publicly released is balancing to not be a terrible grind with unlucky hits instantly killing the player, along with some demo-specific handling to clearly mark the demo end. A few songs need to be written, in the assets department. Writing will need some finalization, with the Japanese translation following. That’s really about it. I cannot fathom when exactly a demo can drop, but it will probably soon after the trailer.

An internal demo will probably drop to a few folks internally, and once it appears stable, a public demo will be released. While feedback will likely appear all around, the ideal place to centralize it will be on Dinoleaf’s forums at https://forum.dinoleaf.com. New accounts will require manual approval, to keep the forum small, but it will be ideal for centralizing official conversation, as social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, etc are too big and noisy to work with. I may write an article about this subject in the near future about modern internet dynamics and how I don’t think it’s entirely different from the pre-2009 internet and before.