Hey everyone Simran Whitham one of the directors and community manager here at Tri-Heart Interactive I was just to give you all an update on what has happened over the last few months and where things currently stand with the team.
Around the beginning of the quarantine within the United Kingdom, we began exiting final additions and development on Otterman and began entering the polishing and QA stages of the project where we basically look at what things within the single-player mode and co-op modes could be tweaked, and improved upon and then constant testing of the PC, Xbox and Switch builds of the game tweaking and improving on all the content that would be within the launched product of the game before submitting to Steam and Xbox/Nintendo LOT check.
LOT check is a process in which developers must submit their games to a platform holder and then they review it and once you pass the checks you are then free to launch the game on the platform.
We had a few technical issues with this process around April time but are happy to say we passed this process which was a huge morale boost and hurdle for the team to get past this big monster.
Upon passing LOT check we then began doubling down on our optimisation, polishing and porting efforts which to avoid text of technical terms basically we were focusing our efforts on making the game as technically stable, performance-friendly, bug-free, and basically the best it can possibly be.
With the Nintendo Switch build of the game, much optimization has been conducted by our art lead Chris Taylor as he's been as the Switch has the least amount of processing power to be able to handle all the art textures and assets we had in the game such as shadows and lighting when compared to the Xbox or high/low-end PC's so a lot of Chris's efforts were spent making the Switch build of the game as stable as possible as removing art quality naturally results in less pretty looking visuals compared to other platforms which was something we simply could not accept so after weeks of work the lord himself Chris has managed to get TOE looking amazing on the platform.
Our lead programmer Dan Williams has been leading the technical polish of the game both local and single-player mode finding those horrible little experience ruining annoyance bugs and kicking them out the game and polishing and tightening as much as he can.
Myself and our other community team members Dan Sheridan and Caroline Watson have been focused on outreach, press and building up our reach for the game for when our big announcements and release date come to help the game reach as many sales as possible so the team can eat food and have roof's over our heads.
And Kieran the creative director for TOE has been working on our business side of the studio, launch date ads we'll be running and communications with Nintendo's and Xbox's LOT check teams and a million others business related things.
At the moment we're just now negotiating with the platform holders about some stuff regarding a special announcement we will be doing in the near future but just wanted to give you all an overview of what has been happening since the beginning of the pandemic.
Not much has changed for the team and we're still making amazing progress we're just not in the same room as each other but that hasn't stopped us ;)