Mr Weasely & The Arch-Nemesis
Every great story needs a great villain, and RoadHouse Manager, this is Mr Weasely.
Mr Weasely owns the second floor of the traveling trans-dimensional roadhouse you call home. But he has a problem: if your roadhouse is too much fun for patrons, they'll never make it upstairs to his Cocktail Bar on the second floor.
Your failure is Mr Weasely's success! Every night he'll ponder your progress and if need be, will send some of his minions to cause big time trouble in your roadhouse. In this way he's a reactive villian, and the goons become parts of a system of nemesis where they are promoted or dismissed according to their success and failure.
Eventually one goon will be promoted to right-hand wo/man, and this person becomes your... Arch - Nemesis!
This spices things up, in a big way. The full game will feature 10-12 different types of these special trouble makers, each with their own unique gameplay mechanics. You'll have to bounce them out of the roadhouse with extreme haste and prejudice to keep order in the roadhouse.
First Demo Feedback in Edmonton
RoadHouse Manager had a roaring success at our recent first public playtest demo featuring in Edmonton's GameCon. This was an invaluable event for us, and thank you so much to everyone who played the game and gave feedback.
Being the first real play test, the feedback was vitally eye-opening. As a solo dev, I'm too close to the game to really get a sense for what needs work.
On the positive side, I had a ton of compliments for the look of the game. On the needs work side, sliding beers was way (okay, more like way way way) too hard, and the game needs vastly expanded tutorials to explain everything.
So I'm adding taps on the left and right of the bar to address these concerns and slowly ramping up the mechanics in a much slower pace instead of throwing people in deep.
Thanks again for everyone who gave the game a whirl!
Timelines
I thought I'd have the Steam demo out but after the great playtest feedback, I now want to fix all those things before putting the first Internet-public demo out.
In my personal life, I've spent a lot of savings working on this game these last 2 odd years, FT. So I had to take a in-term recent job. This is good as I won't have to figure out coding in the streets, but bad for production, as I'll have greatly reduced time to work on the game.
I've broken down my remaining production to get the revised demo out to about 16 days of work, 2-3 hour sessions. This means that Steam demo will be coming out in July.
The next demo will be the Playtest Demo and anyone who tries the game out and submits feedback will be credited in the official credits! I rely on your feedback to make this the bestest game it can be.
Full game wen?
The tentative release date is going to be after October Next Fest. Most likely mid November, as I'll incorporate the feedback from the updated demo in Next Fest, and wait until the Spooky Halloweenie games have had their moment. I'm also revising the scope of the game so that expanded parts will be in a sequel or DLC so that I can release the first title sooner (next news will be about this!)
As a solo dev who is not doing this for the money, releasing the game in a good state when its done is my main goal. This is balanced out with not taking eternity to release the game.
Thanks for everyone reading this and showing interest in my game. If you think a friend may like this, please tell'em about the game, as I'm practically invisible on Steam these days, and a game's not a game without players. Like you!