Developer diaries #8 - September 2022

Entry 8

As soon as I came back from vacation, everyone was motivated and the project started again at full speed. So, I can already say that the goal of the previous month – to regain the lost inertia – has been accomplished!
The first thing I did was to quality check the Dracoyan work done during the summer. All the Augurs’ OWs have been published on Deviantart, as well as a few others.
Among the other achievements:
– Aerouna was revamped by KiriariSan (with a little help from Eysselia for the face)
– Tintignac’s teenagers have been finished
– The sprites of the ancient Volcarona have been redone and revealed
– And the Keltios elemental starters have finally been finished and illustrated with the project colors (the Grass-type one was a bit of a challenge, but the result is as good as it gets).


September 24: A milestone reached:

This is a day to mark with a white stone, because after three months of delay on the planned schedule, the last OW (the one of the teenagers) has been achieved! This means that all the graphic assets of Tintignac (except for the interior tiles which will be done on a just-in-time basis) are finished!

At the same time, the to-do lists have been updated and new objectives corresponding to the third city of the game have been set. Barring any last-minute additions, we have that the game will have 23 original regional forms, 43 Fakemons and 11 new Mega Evolutions.


Loss of members or retirement

Nevertheless, the superb activity at the beginning of the month gave way to 5 departures or “breaks”:
• After 6 months of total inactivity, I can no longer consider Frillecho as a team member, but only as a temporary contributor. Especially since she was only active for... 3 weeks! (Even if it was 3 wonderful weeks.) This is of course reversible if she comes back to life (and it will be fast considering the quality of her skills).
• SplittingJaws has been hired to do concept art for a professional video game, so he told me that he will hardly have time to draw for Sacred Phoenix. That said, congratulations on your official job as a reward for your talents!
• It’s been 5 months since Pipevanes was last seen. He warned me that his job last April would not allow him to compose two themes per month anymore, but he thought he would still have time to do one every two months. I asked him again.
• As for Galax, no news for 3 months. I have just re-launched him too. If he doesn’t give any sign of life, Sacred Phoenix would officially have no musician left and it would become a recruitment to do (even if the music is not a limiting factor).
• Finally, Cataclyptic asked me to take a break because of not having been able to draw a bandit adapted to Keltios’ art direction despite three attempts. I can understand his demotivation and I can only pray that this is only temporary.

At the moment, only 4 of us are still active among the official team members: Eysselia, Dracoyan, Thunungu and me. Among the Phoenix Aspirants, I can add Millie who makes her contributions at her own pace (she could be promoted in 3 months), KiriariSan who also progresses at her own pace as well as MikuGoya who helped a little in pixel art.

Concerning the spontaneous application received the previous month, it was a false hope: as soon as it was accepted, the person recruited completely disappeared from the networks.

It’s quite strange to see that in reality, there are few people really involved, but that’s enough for us (for the moment), because all the rest is on my shoulders.


Coding

And now I come to the point that blocks me: a huge work in progress! Indeed, for the Tintignac demo, I must imperatively:
• Finish switching all the databases to my custom format (for the Pokémon database – by far the most ambitious – just coding the 50 or so databases in the game will be enough for the next demo).
• Code the crafting menu (which implies to finish the related game design and graphic resources).

Since I don’t have any coder in my team, I’m the only one who can manage this. Everything is on my shoulders.


A word about communication

To relieve me of some tasks (especially those related to communication), I would like to find a community manager. Putting the project in front of the public takes me a lot of time. Just the publication of a Deviation takes me at least 1 hour (because of the announcements and the publicity I have to do around it).
Keeping a communication allows me to maintain a “gas net” in terms of visibility and to show that the project is still alive (3 months of no news is enough for people to think that the project is abandoned).


This month’s goals

It is very simple: try to finish the two big coding projects as efficiently as possible, i.e., the database migration and the crafting menu.
I don’t know how long it will take me. I hope I can finish by December 23rd and thus update the public demo, but it will be difficult. One thing is for sure: I won’t make any progress on the scenario until the databases are finished.

As for the rest of the team’s goals, it’s officially “go at your own pace” because all the Tintignac-related tasks have been completed and there’s nothing urgent left. Nevertheless, I have set the goal to make about 10 more NPCs (artworks and pixel art) required for the third city of the game within 6 months (estimated time to finish the Tintignac demo and thus start the staging of the next part of the scenario).