Hi everyone! I’ve been a bit quiet lately while working on some pretty big changes behind the scenes, but I’m finally ready to share them with you. The main news is:
Scrabdackle is divided into 3 narrative acts, which each give the player a main goal to work towards, a bunch of new regions to explore in any order you like, and a ‘capstone’ final region that you can access once you’ve made enough overall progress. Each one is pretty huge - I'm expecting a first playthrough of all three acts to land in the 40-50 total hour range at this point. My publisher and I have decided to release Scrabdackle with the Act 1 content first, then update it with Act 2 content when that's ready, and then Act 3 content to conclude the full game (all as one game on Steam - it's not DLC or anything). More on what that means in the next section, I'll stay with explaining the 'acts' for now! Completing a given act brings you to a new narrative plateau going in to the next one, as each act builds on previous ones in both story and gameplay: Act 2 adds to Act 1’s map, and Act 3 does again, with later shortcuts connecting back to earlier areas you may have once thought were dead-ends in earlier Acts, and with later spells allowing for new traversal and combat options in earlier parts of the game. Characters from Act 1 might have more to say later in the game about the events of Act 2, or you may find new quests or content in older regions related to new discoveries you’ve made. You can also leave some Act 1 content for later, and come back to approach it with more spells and resources from later Acts. Act 1: The Way Back Home takes Blue back to their academy to find out why a dark wizard attacked it, and covers about 10 regions and 9 bosses. It takes somewhere between 12-15 hours to complete all the main content on a blind first playthrough, and up to 17-18 if you’re looking to find every secret and finish every sidequest. And some other neat stats like: Act 1 has about an hour and a half of music, and about 65k words of dialogue + in-character journal entries. It’s a big game - here’s a little breakdown! This act division is how the game has always been structured - we’re just choosing to release it episodically to match those divisions rather than all at once, because after some discussion, everyone involved thinks it’s going to make for the best overall player experience. Basically, we’re trying to treat it less like a whole season of television being dropped at once, and more like releasing an episode at a time with some room to breathe and mull on new understandings and story developments in between. (It also means getting to play through large parts of the game years earlier than you would otherwise! Which is something I’m really excited to share.)
We’ll be launching Scrabdackle in early access on Steam, with the first third of the game’s content. Roughly a year afterwards (this is a loose target, mind you!) we’ll add Act 2 to the game, and eventually after that, Act 3 and the finale in a final content patch that will take the game out of Early Access. No future content is going to be restricted to DLC or anything like that. Basically, you still only buy the game once - you just get Acts 1 and 2 early, in this model. In terms of how this affects the full game’s release date - mooostly it doesn’t. There’s extra work I need to be doing for marketing, but a lot of the release-readiness tasks are getting moved from before launching Act 3 to before Act 1, so dev-tasks-wise it’s more just shuffling existing timings around rather than adding time.
When’s the release date? Or when will you be able to say?
We’re looking at late-ish this calendar year, but not announcing until we’re fully sure. There’s always room for unexpected delays in gamedev, and that’s an order of magnitude riskier with a single point of failure / bottleneck (that’s me). If any kind of personal emergency happens, for instance, things have to totally go on hold as no one can really run with the ball without me. So we’ll let you know closer-to! Will the game be releasing anywhere other than Steam?
Not during Early Access. For the Act 3 “1.0 update,” that could in theory change, but that decision is a ways down the line. What languages will Scrabdackle be localized to?
For now, just English - the large amount of writing in the game means the cost to localize a single language is pretty high, so that’s going to be something we let sales justify or not. I’m not opening the door to community localization efforts at this time, but potentially I could revisit that if we still can’t finance a professional one after we hit 1.0 (although it’s presently not my preference). Will the demo be updating for the Act 1 release?
Dunno yet! The release build has a ton of optimizations, bugfixes, and quality of life changes that the current demo build doesn’t, and I’d really like to update the demo before then so that it also gets these improvements, but it’s not a sure thing. At the end of the day, the launch is my primary focus, and that just might not leave enough time for a demo update. At whatever future point I do update the demo, though, I should (I hope!) be able to keep it up-to-date with various subsequent improvements from that point on. What’s the price going to be?
We’ve got a working ballpark, but I’d rather not set any expectations until that gets locked in. I’ll let you know later down the line! Will there be a way to purchase the soundtrack?
Yes! But TBD on the specifics, for now. I’m a Kickstarter backer - how does this affect my rewards?
Nothing should be impacted other than some delivery timelines moving forward, but there’s more info here in the most recent campaign update! (Also, thanks again for backing!) How’s development been going? It’s been a bit!
I haven’t updated here recently, yeah! Largely I’ve just been trucking away at making a (shockingly) large game on my own, but I write a big development update for the Kickstarter campaign every season, and I write about what I’m working on pretty continuously on the Scrabdackle discord server! here’s where the KS updates are - the most recent one starts by echoing most of this Steam post, but the back half talks more about ongoing and upcoming development. I really want this to succeed - how can I get more involved?
The main thing that helps is spreading the word, but! In the past, we’ve set up a sort of ‘rally group’ of voluntary supporters on the Discord to mobilize the community for help with things like the 2021 Kickstarter, and if you’re interested in that, then joining the Discord server would be amazing!
Okay, so yes, the Act 1 release plan was the focus of this announcement - but since LudoNarraCon is starting today, and as Scrabdackle is an official selection, I wanted to do something else for that, too! During LNC, there will be a looping pre-recorded video on the store page of me playing through the Duck Castle content, which is outside the bounds of the demo. If you’re trying to stay spoiler-blind, you can scroll down and not pay it any mind, but if you want to see some more of how the game’s looking right now, it’s about 75 minutes from the start of the recording to the end, after I’ve beaten the boss and poked around for some post-boss secrets in the dungeon. This is my first time doing this sort of thing, so it’s a bit experimental and I erred on the side of simple, but if it’s interesting I had some other ideas for different types of videos and/or commentary that I could try putting on the store page in the future! (Also, check out the LudoNarraCon page if you haven’t, it’s really cool and loaded with neat narrative games!) All right, that’s it for now! Interested to hear any thoughts, questions, and feedback you might have about all this, but overall it’s a change I’m really excited about, and I hope you are too!