(Also the global pandemic might've slowed us down a bit as well.) The Future It took a while, but we feel like we've settled on the right compromise between the two with Earthblade. Prototypes EXOK1–3 taught us a lot, but ultimately we ventured way too far from our comfort zone for them to realistically ever get finished. I've fallen into both traps before, but this time the success of Celeste gave us a lot of runway and we tended to swing too wide. It can also be easy to get stuck in your comfort zone producing lifeless work, particularly when there's a lot of financial pressure. It's tempting as an artist to push yourself too far into the unknown, into a project that's not going to get finished given the constraints of your circumstances (budget, time, motivation, appetite for failure).
The comfort zone is safe and easy, but boring. The unknown is exciting, but scary and difficult. The truth is that we don't know how long it will take, just that it will take as long as it takes (and that it will take a long time).įinding the right project is hard! It has to hit that tiny sweet spot between the unknown and the comfort zone. This time we'll be faster." Now it sounds optimistic to say out loud that Earthblade could be released within 5 short years of Celeste. I was happy to read that, but then I saw the only reply, which was from someone who had evidently followed us since TowerFall because they responded with something like, "Get ready to wait 5 years :/"Īt the time I thought to myself, "No. I think a lot about an exchange I read on a gaming forum (or maybe it was on Reddit), soon after Celeste's release, where a player expressed how excited they were to see what our team would make next. It took us 4 prototypes to find Earthblade, and it's now been over 3 years since Celeste's initial release. In the meantime, now you know the general vibe. When we finally do show it off, be sure to point your feet away from animals and small children, and prepare for your footwear to be blasted clean off your feet. It'll probably be a while before you get more information about Earthblade. But an air of mystery lends itself particularly well to this project, so we've opted to save it all up for a big reveal that will hopefully blow your socks off. While making Celeste, we basically tweeted out whatever interesting-looking thing we were working on day-to-day, when we were in the mood for sharing.
FDIGMASTERS EARTHBLADE HOW TO
We've debated back and forth how to talk about this game during development. We also just wanted to let everyone know the name of the game now that we've settled on one, so that we can all stop calling it EXOK4. We didn't want to reveal much about the game or its story yet, but we think that this well establishes the world and the feeling of being in it. The poster and logo are by Pedro Medeiros, and the music by Lena Raine. The weeks leading up to the playtest become a sprint to put in as much as they can in order to make the most of the new playtest, though Extremely OK Games is clear that this is being done without overtime in an effort to apply "juuuust the right amount of pressure for magic to occur.Earthblade - that's the name of our next game! We‘re also showing off this teaser poster, and a snippet from the game's soundtrack. Thx, bye /BxC0Ob0ZZj- Extremely OK Games April 13, 2022Īccording to the update, the team is currently playtesting Earthblade roughly once a month with friends.
For now though we came into this month with some big changes to the game's foundation and we're gearing up for the sprint to the next playtest." Our hope is that we can make most or all of the game's content this year, and then release in 2023 after some form of (private) beta test, polishing, localization, and of course the dreaded console certification. "All told, it feels like we're close to what we'd call 'full content production mode' on Earthblade. "We suspect that we'll want the playtest frequency to increase as we progress further, as the changes we're making become more granular and a higher feedback interval becomes more valuable to really finetune everything into its final form," states Extremely OK Games' Maddy Thorson in the latest EXOK newsletter.
0 kommentar(er)
