Game Complete
These are busy days indeed, and another milestone has been reached — the game is complete. All gnorps, upgrades, talents, inspirations, the ending, etc. are in the game. Now it is time to apply the final layer of polish, and implementing some more achievements.
9th Dec, 23
Gnorp is releasing on the 14th of December, and I am incredibly excited.
The ending I very recently finished up the ending. I am extremely pleased with how it turned out. It is very gnorp, in all senses of the word. It encapsulates what the game is about, and I hope you will see it for yourself. Perhaps you are thinking "I would like a teaser". No.
Achievements Achievements are in progress as well. My philosophy for the achievements are to provide a mix of progression achievements and challenge achievements.
Balance and polish The final gameplay-related task remains: Ensuring that the game is fun and feels good to play across the duration of playing it. I'm tweaking and adjusting, making changes across the board. It's a pretty enjoyable process, where I can finally, finally sit back and have fun with the game (before quickly moving on to make more adjustments).
Something that I discovered while going working on the balance and polish, is that the game is surprisingly challenging. I've attempted to put myself in the shoes of a new player, and the mental model that you have to construct in order to be an S-tier gnorp player is quite complex. That is the question that I am trying to answer: How do I ensure that the complexity of the game does not stand in the way of the player's enjoyment? I believe I am on the right track in this regard — I am clarifying tooltips and ensuring that there are no negative surprises when making purchases. I also want to ensure that talents feel impactful, and that the player is appropriately rewarded when making good decisions.
The release There's only a few days until release. It'll be a busy week, but I am confident that this will be the best video game featuring gnorps damaging a rock, which spills forth shards that the gnorps collect in an increasingly intense manner thanks to game modifiers, such as talents and upgrades, that has ever existed, and will ever exist.
Gnorp.