Selaco Dev Blog - What is next for Selaco and our Patreon (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Before we begin, it’s important for me to mention that I am exhausted. I wanted to write this blog post a few days ago but I could not bring myself to do it because I am in dire need of a break. Rest assured, this does not mean the game is in a bad state, absolutely not! Things are going great, better than they have ever. Largely because of you, but also because the demo was a hurdle that frightened me for months, and now with that finally out of the way, we can slowly begin working on the full game. But first, I give myself a vacation.

This will be the final impromptu blogpost before things return to normal again. Moving forward, expect Patreon blogs to be full of WIP stuff, new artwork, mechanics and more. We’ve been wrapped up with the demo and have not been able to get a lot of new things done, and I always felt like the development blogs started to suffer from it. We love showing stuff! We know you like it too, so starting next week, you should expect progress that is worth showing again.

After 5 years of hard work, we have finally reached the stage in development where a fully playable build has been shared with the public that showcases a slice of the game. While it only touches the surface of what we have to offer, it’s a good representation of the direction the game is taking. Getting this build ready, man, was not an easy task. The last couple of months have been hard on the team due to all the deadlines and that is something I want to talk about in this blog post.

Before we dive in, I want to take a moment of gratitude and give my thanks to all the backers we currently have. Ever since our big marketing push that took place a few months ago, we have seen a significant increase in the amount of patrons for Selaco and, man, we thank you all so much for this. At this time of writing, we have 319 backers pledging a total of €4100. As I have stated, time and time again in the past, every single cent of this money is spent on the game itself and to ensure that the people involved with the project can cover their expenses while also having leeway to expand the game further. We have reached the point now where we can start looking for an additional developer to assist us with Selaco. In this case, a level designer. Maybe, with a bit of luck, two. But let's take it one step at a time!

In this blog post, I want to dive into a couple of things. Starting with the menu artwork.


Menu Art

This one was hard to miss! If you have played the demo you have without a doubt seen this amazing piece drawn by Arturo Pahua. Let's go through all the different iterations of this piece.

Sketch one




Starting with the idea.

It was never our goal to go with something action packed for this one. Rather, the exact opposite. It should take place after the action and show Selaco being under siege, showcasing the aftermath of a battle that seemingly took place recently. The game is not aiming to be a full-on action game despite action taking the center stage. The game is also about the world, the mystery, and worldbuilding. We needed menu art that people would look at and think ‘’I want to know more about what is happening here, I want to explore this!’’.

The sketch above was the version we decided to work with. Showing Selaco’s exterior, where both Aliens and ACE Security guards have fought over territory. Hovering above Dawn, we can Earth through a crack in the skylight. Albeit earth is burning, abandoned. Telling the player Dawn is currently not on Earth, but also clearly not a spaceship, because there is a sky, right? In a previous blog post we’ve shared more about the setting, so let's not dive back into that again. If you are interested in reading that, click here [https://www.patreon.com/posts/developer-blog-65823378]!

We tried a bunch of different ‘soldier poses’ for Dawn, but never felt like the traditional military pose really worked. Take a look.Some of these sketches show living allies in the background, but we decided against that. We wanted the attack on Selaco to look hopeless and we wanted Dawn to look more vulnerable. So we murdered the friendly soldiers behind her and took her machinegun away to replace it with a sidearm. I think it adds to the image and overall composition.








Now it was time to get to work on lineart. As any artist here knows, these are time consuming. We wanted the entire thing to be drawn by hand, so 3D references were avoided. Getting the perspectives and composition right took some doing, but we pulled it off. I’ll show each iteration below.









With the line-art done, it was time for color.





We didn’t bother with the ‘background’ buildings yet, they were added in the detailing phase.

Almost there..

Here is a WIP Dawn. You're welcome.

Aaaaaand DONE! If you are interested in a fully uncompressed image of this artwork without logo’s smacked on top, you can download it here:

This one is quite a journey and I’m very pleased with the results! Can’t wait for the next big piece to be made closer to release!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12hUxKMzkJLyQ5u8jivO8drtfueoYDPL0/view?usp=sharing


The Deadlines

Oh man, the deadlines… Long-time backers have probably been fully aware of the current development phase we’re going through. Or rather, the phase we just ended (Yay!). We launched the Patreon Demo almost 3 months ago and I was planning to take a break after that. A few days off to get my bearings together. However, that break was a bad idea because the Preview Event was also right around the corner and we had to properly polish up a new level for it. We could delay it because nothing was set in stone as far as deadlines are concerned, but with Nextfest coming up, we felt it was crucial to get some hype surrounding the game. We needed someone big to talk about us, and GmanLives, JarekTheGamingDragon and IcarusLives were interested. I passed on my time-out and went back to work.

The preview build was especially exhausting. I could feel a burnout approaching, especially knowing the route ahead was not going to allow me to take any further breaks. All the art assets were already made by the art team, so they could just continue what they’ve always been doing; create things for the game with no real time pressure. For me it was the exact opposite. My backlog for the preview build was gigantic. I had to wrap up two new enemy types (Crawler Mines and Enforcers) which were still very much in a glorified prototype phase, rewrite Sentry Guns which play a large role in the Preview Level and the levels (2-2 and 2-3) were still not matching our quality standards. I needed to haul ass and we barely managed to get things ready in time.

Preview done. Maybe now I can take a break? When is Nextfest again? Next month!? Well damn, we better get started! The past month I’ve had zero enjoyment working on Selaco, which is the complete opposite of how it usually goes. I love this project so much, but this whole development phase has been the most stressful and exhausting thing I have ever done in my life. I wish it was an exaggeration, but I strongly believe I have never worked this hard in my entire life. Going to bed at 4-5AM, waking up at 10-11AM just to head back to work in an instant for nearly 2 or 3 months. We’re not going to get a second chance at a first impression, so we had to stick to landing. After many years of hard work, this is it. There’s no way I’m going to launch a demo that is bad.

After weeks of hard work, we did it. Roughly a week before launch we managed to complete the demo and sent it over to our backers for testing. To our surprise, it went surprisingly well. There were no real big issues to speak of other than some annoyances that needed to be ironed out. This did me good, but we weren’t there yet. We had some last minute ideas we quickly wanted to add. ‘’Remember shareware games? Why don't we add one of those splash screens?’’

I pitched the idea to Silvia, and she managed to bring us this 2 days later:

Sketches





Final version



I liked this idea for a number of reasons! The primary reason? The demo does not show a whole lot beyond the basics of Selaco. It shows combat and exploration, but we need to ensure that we have more to offer. So we showed a screenshot featuring a new weapon and a mysterious unidentified creature in the distance, an upgrade screen, a level that doesn’t look very sci-fi , and a screenshot showing a different enemy type. We wanted to show the Mech, but he was not ready enough for the game so we had to pass on that. This is a great way of triggering nostalgia, because I’m sure everyone who played games in the 90’s has seen one of these screens before, but also allows us to tell people ‘’There’s so much more!’’ before ending the demo.

Nextfest was approaching in one day. Time to make the final adjustments. We did lots of testing and ironed out some last minute issues. No problems here.

2 hours before the demo launch we did another round of tests, and holy shit, problems left and right. There was a mysterious bug where, after obtaining the Blue Key in 1-3, dozens of engineers would spawn throughout the map making it almost impossible for a casual player to survive. This happened because I was tweaking the level by adding some new last minute effects which, accidentally, shared the same TID (Thing ID’s are used as an identifier for scripts) as the Engineer Spawning script. Causing them to spawn all over the place. So we fixed that.

Another problem arrived. One of the devs encountered a bug where Siegers became ‘ghosts’ and could not be killed. They were fully capable of killing the player, but you could not do anything to do them. We tried to replicate it, but we could not. “I’m sure it was a fluke, we cannot delay this thing any further”. It’s a bug that has not been fixed to this day and has unfortunately been reported by one player so far. I’m sure there are a few more but did not report the issue. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was time to launch the demo with a bug that frightened us. It has never happened before, so we just hoped the bug was always there and was just very hard to replicate. So.. It was time. Time to enter the Steamworks page and hit the green ‘RELEASE DEMO…’ button.


The Demo Launch

To say this was frightening would be an understatement. My hands were shaking, I was starting to sweat, I could barely type messages properly to my team because of how nervous I was for this demo to land.

‘’Can you guys see the download link yet?’’, to which everybody responded “No”. Did we do something wrong? Is the demo not appearing for us? No, I just forgot to click a tiny stupid checkmark. I was so nervous that I could not even read the instructions correctly, which is what I am already awful at even when calm. I ticked the box and hit ‘Save’.





And it was up. Now we wait..


The ‘Aftermath’

After launching the demo we were actively scouring the internet to see activity. Obviously, the first few minutes are dead silent. There isn’t much to say, so me, being a very impatient developer, felt like the demo had already flopped. No idea why I would think such a thing, I probably could not think straight. Surely we will ignite activity in a few minutes. And then it happened!

Hooray, the Steam Forums started getting activity. Some praise, some critiques, and a couple of rotten apples who felt the need to be a little too harsh with their opinion and decided to just insult us (which have been dealt with in the way of a certain ban hammer).

I wanted to take a vacation after the demo launch, but it was clear there were some issues. People had difficulties with the difficulty (haha) and were fully convinced there were some balancing issues, especially since the jump from Commander (difficulty 3) to Captain (difficulty 4) was bigger than it had any right to be, as well as some minor technical issues that needed to be ironed out. So, you guessed it, vacation delayed once more! Let's fix the critiques and launch a quick patch this friday. We delivered the patch, monitored activity and noticed people felt like it was much improved. You know what that means, right?


Vacation

This is where we are now. After all the hard work, all the hours, all the blood, sweat and tears, I have finally decided to take a break and take it easy for a week, maybe even two, we’ll see. The team will continue to work on the game which makes me feel awful because usually I’m there to work alongside them, but being able to just relax is a nice change of pace. And, contrary to how I usually feel, I think I deserve it this time. Everybody knows what they can do so I am not needed outside of approving things and helping brainstorm; which is fine, that’s one of my favorite things to do anyway!


The future of Patreon

Now that the demo is out there, the ‘’Early Access to the Demo’’ award is no longer relevant. Same with Admiral, “Pre-demo” hasn’t been a thing for a while now. After my vacation we are going to have a discussion on what to do with the outdated reward tiers

Rest assured, the new rewards will absolutely be worth your time. You have done great things for us, so we will return the favor.


Conclusion

There’s a lot more that I want to say. I could ramble on and on about how hard this week has been for me. How, after so many years, it’s hard having to deal with being in a ‘spotlight’ all of a sudden where the game is being played. People were always talking about Selaco this week, Twitter and general internet activity was rather high at all times. It made me feel vulnerable and quite scared whenever I saw that a user mentioned us on Twitter, or when hitting ‘’Search’’ on Google. Steam Forums we’re especially a nightmare. Many good critiques were given, and I am fine with those, but I would be lying if I did not feel personally insulted time and time again by how some people word their critiques. As a developer, I should learn to understand that not everybody is good at giving critiques, and I should also get used to the idea that the larger the community becomes, the more frequently we will get “attacked”, because rotten apples tend to speak up more often than the players who like your work.

It’s been a tough phase for Selaco. Highly productive, very rewarding and it paved the way forward. Now, I am glad to be taking off for a while and getting my bearings back together.

Thank you for reading this. I know it’s not the most structured blog post we’ve ever done, but it feels good to get things off my chest.

If you are not extending your Patreon in July, this will probably be the last blog post you will be able to read from us. So, thanks for joining us on this journey and for helping us out in some way!

For everyone else, we see you in 2 weeks with a traditional blog post showing new stuff that excites us. But for now, I have to pour my drink and raise a glass to each and every patron here. Talk to you when I get back! <3

Wesley de Waart