Building to Full Release

1.0 is a pretty big number. We don't number our releases on CRUFT and I'm thankful for that now. What we do is update what sprite falls out of the van on transitional screens and name the build after that item.

The last release was the "Deeds" release. Easy to identify. Also a lot easier to remember what was in the build when we try to resurrect learnings.

It has become a fun ritual deciding what sprite will anoint the next build. It's also important because it keeps us from just doing anything, incrementing the build number, and then releasing. We've been pushing out a build a week and we like to keep them pretty meaningful. We have to pick and choose, very judiciously, what we will do at all, ever.

And we have new sprites to choose! We've relieved some development pressure by picking up an amazing artist. Luke has swept in and taken an hefty amount of work off my shoulders. It's not just that the game's art is getting treatment from a professional (though that is huge). The workload itself, the mental cost of switching between spreadsheets and pixels was quite a burden. And then there's the pig...

Old pig. Dope as hell. Painstakingly authored by wife. Full of soul and adorable.

New pig. Interpreted by Luke. Still has all the soul, still adorable. Now this thing is elevated.

Having an artist to tap into plays into meaningful releases. Some of our Steam builds have been sweeping updates to tons of sprites, or backgrounds, or UI. We can have a cadence with different beats in it. Notably, that also means we can work on things under the hood at the same time for another meaningful release the next week. The gears are starting to turn.

We're building momentum.

Step By Step

To bring it on home, our path to a full release of CRUFT on Steam is being built brick by brick, week by week. Things are pretty quiet now in terms of sales. Our wishlist count consistently rises in a healthy manner. The big thing is that we're confident in what the game is. We've put it through it's paces with enough folks that a lot of the questions we had months ago are just vapor.

Presently, we're working on some narrative systems that will improve the overall feel of the game by giving it a bit more personality. Will and I are pretty systems-leaning dudes by nature. We've built a game that absolutely scratches an itch with its systems. We've both known for a while now that the real personality of CRUFT has yet to come to the fore. So that's what we're doing right now. It's time.

We're also building out a new level, which will come out pretty darn soon. More game content, more things to craft, more Cheevos to earn. All that good stuff. That new level has new art all over the place.

Looking forward, we only have one more big feature that we think makes the game feel like it is complete. We're still teasing the details out with that one. We'd like to get a demo up that reflects where the game is now, after all the work that has gone into it since the last demo we put out earlier this year. After that gets in, we will enter a moment of day to day ambiguity. Plenty of polish to do. Plenty of smaller items that just did not fit in when we thought of them. Plenty of deciding on just how essential some minutiae are and sometimes the really little things matter a lot.

We can see the end of the tunnel now though, and that is really nice. Now we just have to make each step count one update at a time.