A quarter of 2024 is already done? Wow, must be time for a Courier Tale dev blog…
The past few months have seen Courier Tale featured in some online Steam showcases. The first showcase was The Storyteller’s Festival 2024 at the end of January. It was great to be selected for this event. It’s actually run by another Australian developer called Two and a Half Studios. This was the perfect sort of showcase for Courier Tale to be part of, seeing it is a story-focused event. It was also the most successful event that Courier Tale has been part of, so I can only hope Courier Tale can be included in the Storyteller’s Festival in 2025.
The next online event Courier Tale participated in was RPG Maker Festival. Courier Tale was part of RPG Maker Festival last year as well, so it was good to be able to return to be involved in it again.
One thing I’ve been doing during these Steam showcases in the past 6 months or so has been live-streaming a video to the Steam page. This video was a demo tour where I detailed the features and influences of the game. Well, now you can watch that video more easily by checking it out on Youtube…
All this promo stuff aside, progress has definitely still been made on Courier Tale. I completed the soundtrack, so hopefully there shouldn’t any more music work to be done other than potentially some tweaks to the master. I have now been working on what I call the “tech polish” phase. There’s a lot to do to finish it off, so I’ve broken this phase into multiple stages. The first stage has been completed which included proofreading all of the dialogue. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an automated process, so it was a very manual task. The other thing completed in this stage was checking map transfers. While most of Courier Tale is a mini semi-open world structure, it is broken up into small single-screen maps, and there’s a lot of them! So making sure the player transfers to the right map and doesn’t break the game is important.
I’m now currently partway through the 2nd stage of the tech polish which has included making sure the right music and sound effects trigger when moving from one map to the next. This stage will also be a semi-playtest stage, checking collisions, graphics layers and once again double checking those map transfers are working properly.
There will be a couple more stages of tech polish after that before finally beginning Beta testing. That will truly be the major milestone once I reach it. How long will it take to get to Beta testing? How long will Beta testing take? When will the game release? I dunno. The usual “within 3-6 months” mantra comes to mind, but certainly with each tech polish stage that is completed, it starts feeling very close.
Granted I could have been a bit further along if it wasn’t for the fact I’ve also been doing some work on Studio Kraze’s next game. I hope to start proper pre-production for that in the 2nd half of 2024 once Courier Tale is released, however, there was some work I needed to do on it now. That work is now complete so I can focus fully on finishing Courier Tale for the coming months.
And speaking of months, that about covers the past few months of Courier Tale development. As always, if you want the latest Courier Tale news, make sure to follow @couriertale on your favourite social spam network, join the Studio Kraze discord and don’t forget to wishlist Courier Tale on Steam…