It’s the middle of the year so it’s time for the Q2 2024 Courier Tale Dev Blog…
At the end of March I had finished up some early pre-production work for Studio Kraze’s second game. With that out of the way it was time to focus on finishing Studio Kraze’s first game… Courier Tale. With the base game sorted, I was able to start spending time on additional features. First up was sorting out the collector cards you can collect in the game. There’s 24 all up to collect and there’s a collection screen on your in-game phone menu so you can keep track of what you’ve found for all of those collectors and completionists out there.
Next up another feature for completionists is Steam achievements. There’s currently 10 achievements in the game and thus far they seem to be working, though beta testing on Steam will confirm if they feature in the final game. The Steam achievements will have different icons and names, I have just kept them generic for now to avoid story spoilers before release.
While Courier Tale’s controls are pretty minimal, it is easy to forget that people need to know how to control the game. Courier Tale supports Keyboard or Gamepad controls (sorry no mouse). While there are customizable controller settings in the options menus, I felt it was best to introduce the controls at the beginning of the game. So now when you start a new game, you will see this Default Controls splash screen. Keyboard actually has more key options like WASD for movement, but I wanted to keep this splash simplified and just show one option for Keyboard controls.
On 25 May 2024, I finally declared the game was in Beta. It was a major milestone after multiple years of development. June was spent doing internal beta testing (aka me playtesting the whole game and making any changes or fixes). This very dev blog was a bit later than usual partly because only a week ago I was transferring this website to new hosting, but also because I wanted to reach another huge milestone.
Yesterday the first external playtest happened (aka someone else played Courier Tale from start to finish). It was pretty nerve-racking, but the playthrough was mostly bug-free, with no soft locks/blockers that stopped the player from progressing through the game.
This is really promising, so while there’s more playthroughs to be done by other beta testers in July, if that testing goes well it’s hopefully looking more likely that Courier Tale is getting close to release. So when is Courier Tale releasing? Well I’m not quite ready to announce a release date yet, but hopefully it won’t be long now. I can say I am targeting a Q3 2024 release, so hopefully for the next Dev Blog I write in October, I can be talking about how Courier Tale has released.
But before then, Courier Tale will be featured in two upcoming Steam showcases, which I’ll announce in the coming weeks and also update the Steam demo with the latest tweaks in the lead-up to those events. I’ll also be working on launch marketing including the release date trailer. So yeah it really does feel like I’m coming to the “tail” end of Courier Tale development, and hopefully it will be “delivered” very soon…
As always don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam and follow @couriertale or @studiokraze on your favourite social spam network.