It’s 3/4 time for 2022, so here’s a new Courier Tale Dev Blog…
September saw Courier Tale exhibiting at two events, so polishing the demo and preparing for those events was a focus of the months leading up to that month. Most changes to the demo were unlikely to be noticed by most people, but the Steam demo was updated to match the version shown at these events.
One part of preparing for these events was sorting some marketing elements. I finally printed a big pull-up banner. It’s pretty cool. It features a 1.3 metre Max, which between the large, almost life-size Max and the greyscale nature of the artwork, I think it’s bold and stands out at an event.
The other marketing side of things was doing up some merchandise. There’s Courier Tale shirts because hey, I needed shirts to wear at events. There’s postcards (and greeting cards) because hey, Courier Tale seems like a game that has something in common with postcards. There were also Max stickers and character sticker sheets. I wasn’t 100% happy with the printing of the stickers. When I was looking into merchandise options, I was looking into what would be environmentally friendly avenues. I decided to give print-on-demand a go. While that seemed to be fine for the shirts and cards, the stickers had a few issues. So I decided to remove the stickers from sale online. The stickers still look cool, so I will be selling the remaining stickers from the batch I ordered at future events for cheap. You can order the shirt and cards online still from the merch page on the Courier Tale website.
The first event was a new one called Pixel Expo, an animation and gaming convention at Perth Convention Centre. The shirts didn’t arrive in time, but the banner did. The event was sold out, so I tried out a two-computer demo setup for this event…
The next event was only two weeks later, an AR and VR focused gaming conference/festival called XRWA at WA Museum. While the event has a mixed reality focus, there were traditional video games including a showcase that featured big Australian indie games like Cult of The Lamb as well as international games like A Short Hike, which is one of the influences for Courier Tale. This was a free, two day event and seemed to draw a lot of audience from the visitors of the museum. Pretty unique venue to demo the game in, and my Courier Tale shirt did arrive in time for XRWA..
There’s one more event coming up that Courier Tale will be at in November. That will be the last event for the year, and possibly the last event before the release of Courier Tale. Being in the polish phase right now, the current focus is on graphics, but there are also a bunch of other things to do like sound fx and such. Ideally, the polishing would be finished by the end of the year, with playtesting and release in Q1 2023. Time is not always ideal though, so we’ll see how we go, but that is the target for now.
As usual, if you haven’t already, check out the demo on Steam, wishlist the game and keep an eye out for future Courier Tale news…