Alpha 0.32 - What's New? (A Reflection on A Town Uncovered) (Patreon)

What's up peeps and peepets.

Happy New Year to you all, hope everyone had a great December holidays! Sorry, it's been a while since the last 'what's new' update. I want to take this time to reflect on where we are so far with A Town Uncovered, and discuss our goals for the game for 2021. Just FYI, I might rant and or go personal but this'll be the one time in 12 months that I'll allow myself this.

A personal reflection on 2020:

2020 was a fucking asshole.

Even though last year would be ranked as one of the worst years in history, I can say that the team felt lucky that because of Patreon and the fact that we already work from home, we were lucky to be able to keep going throughout the pandemic. It doesn't mean our mentality didn't take a beating, I personally went through many lows throughout the isolation and often it made sitting down and working difficult. 

My life literally consisted of nothing but A Town Uncovered again and for those who've followed this project since or near the beginning, you know the era where I had overworked myself every single day to kick the project off the ground and keep it at sprinting speed. It lead to many burn outs and affected my personal life. I didn't want that and I didn't allow it but often I felt guilty for not working when I literally had nothing else to do. I had this subconscious pressure I put on myself because of how people around me were becoming unemployed whilst I was here with a job.

Anyway, I did my best to work when I had to work and rested when I needed to. I gave myself permission to tread 2020 with care knowing how awful everyone is feeling and how awful the world is becoming. As much as I love the creation I made, I did not want my life to revolve around sitting in front of my PC working on it just because I'm able and have no where else to be, that's a workaholic.

My personal goals for 2021:

I can only hope this year would be good, not just better than 2020 but an actual good year full of opportunities and happiness not just for me but for everyone. Year after year of game development, I'm becoming better at balancing my life and can only strive for being more consistent and disciplined.

My personal goal for game dev is simply that; to be more consistent. Whether that'd be in each release or in my daily work day. And I hope you all are willing to stick around for this year because besides my personal goals, we have some awesome plans for A Town Uncovered starting with the upcoming update!

A reflection of A Town Uncovered in 2020:

Honestly, I'm at the point where I don't even remember what was done this year and where the line is between 2020 and any years before that. But the highlight of the year was definitely being able to launch the game to Steam. I wanna thank TinyHat Studios with helping with that and making it a reality.

I'm a firm believer in supporting content creators properly whether they're digital artists, musicians, youtubers, models, etc. But I also understand that not everyone is financially able to do so, I was never one to have a lot of money growing up. Steam really allowed an option to tick the boxes for supporting the game long-term whilst being affordable, especially with the Steam sales. And that was what I was most happy about providing you all.

Besides Steam, we really focused hard on the main story and wanted to drive a lot of energy into that. We have finally figured out the entire story and now working on completing each scene step by step. 2021 will be no different in that regard except that storyline will be 3x more streamline and less stressful to work on.

Our goal for A Town Uncovered in 2021:

We will continue to work on the main story and on occasional the side stories of Lashley and whoever we decide on after her.

Looking at the scenes for both storylines, we decided that it's time we added more locations to cater to these scenes and to allow ourselves more flexibility on where to take things literally and figuratively. Restricting ourselves to what's already on the main map would be difficult moving forward and plus, this addition to the town is what all of us needed, as developers and players.

I am currently working on the uptown section of our town and in the picture provided, you can already see 3 new locations. A few sections have a ? because we do not have an idea on what to put there yet. It won't all be added or at least not all will be rendered for Alpha 0.32 but most of the work will be done.

Our goal is straightforward: keep going with what we're doing. We don't have new features we want to implement, the biggest thing really is the town expansion but only because the storylines call for it. And we hope you'll stick with us for it all or at least visit back every once in a while.

Final words:

All this is because of you sexy people. This game would've ended after waking up Jane in the morning if it weren't for your love and support for the town and the characters. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the A Team Uncovered, we love you all.

Oh, and just to remind you, this Alpha 0.32 version will be released on to Steam as well around the same time the $5+ Patrons receive it on Patreon. Expect the Early Accesses to start early February.

Until next update, GeeSeki out!