The end of 2022 has been and gone, so it’s now time for another Courier Tale developer blog…

The last quarter of the year was a bit quieter than the previous quarter. However, Courier Tale did exhibit at one event, returning to Perth Games Festival for 2022. Weirdly enough, I was setup in the same spot as last year, but this time with the big Courier Tale banner and wearing a Max shirt. Perth Games Festival is organized by Let’s Make Games, who also organize the Perth edition of Global Game Jam which I used to do in the years leading up to starting developing Courier Tale, so it’s always awesome to return to Perth Games Festival.

As the Perth Games Festival demo had various graphical tweaks, I updated to Steam demo to the same version. If you’ve already played the demo, there’s no need to play again, but if you haven’t played the demo yet, the best version is now available to download on Steam now.

The graphical updates were part of the graphics polishing phase. There’s still a bunch more polishing of the visuals to be done, but it’s good to already see some improvements. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s not another polish pass at some point before the game’s release, but the current tweaks are adding to the visual cohesiveness and populating the world more so.

My last blog’s estimations for release were of course optimistic. I now think Courier Tale’s release is likely to be in the 2nd half of 2023. That’s a good thing as it means more time to polish and test, as well as avoid what could possibly be the most busiest first half of the year for game releases I’ve seen in recent memory. I’m pretty confident in my motto “Delivery in 2023” for Courier Tale, at least for the Windows version. The current plan is to launch on Windows first, then look into Linux, Mac and possibly mobile releases.

At this stage, there are no plans to exhibit Courier Tale at any physical events until after its release later this year. So until then, follow Courier Tale on your favourite spamming social network, play the demo if you haven’t, deliver the Courier Tale news to people you know, and of course, if you haven’t already, wishlist Courier Tale on Steam…

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…

It’s the middle of the year, so it is time for another Courier Tale dev blog…

Since the last blog, I’ve tested a full playthrough of the game. It was missing one side quest and one ending, but overall fully playable. As expected, the game is looking to be about 3-5 hours long depending on if you mainline the game or do a completionist playthrough. Having been the only one to playtest the full game so far, it’s hard to know how accurate that time is, but seeing it is what I originally estimated, while I’m sure some people will take less time and maybe some will take longer, I think on average that will probably be the playtime.

Once the game was a fully playable alpha, focus shifted to polishing and improving the demo. The reason for this is Courier Tale took part in the June 2022 edition of Steam Next Fest. There were over 1000 demos featured in this edition, so it was hard to stand out. Still, it saw Courier Tale almost double its wishlists and a massive increase in demo players (compared to when the demo launched a couple of weeks prior to Next Fest). It’s debatable whether the June edition was the best one to be part of, especially as it was during Summer Games Fest, so media was being flooded with game announcements all over the show, but I’m not sure that it would have made much difference waiting til the October edition.

Now that Steam Next Fest is done, we are officially moving into the polish/beta phase of Courier Tale. The first focus has been controls. I normally test the game with controller or keys, and the demo at Perth Games Festival 2021 was played with a controller. Turns out the game engine I use has pretty bad mouse controls by default, which became apparent to me from feedback after the release of the demo online. I’ve also discovered from researching, that games made in this engine seem to mostly remove mouse control because of how hard it is to get it to work as good as controller or keyboard. I would like to keep mouse control if I can. Not only from an accessibility point of view, but also that more and more I feel like the game has similarities to a point and click adventure, so it would be weird to not have mouse support for a game like that. I’ve managed to solve many of the mouse problems so far with various plugins. A big one was allowing the player to walk with a single click and dash with a double click (thanks to Gimmer for this custom plugin). I think I have everything fixed except one thing now. It’s a major thing so if I can’t get that fixed, I may have to do the same as other similar games and remove mouse controls. Hopefully that won’t be the case, but consistency will be paramount.

While there will be tweaks to be made all throughout the game during the polish phase, the main work will be graphics. It’s hard to know for sure how long this polish phase will take, but at this stage I think it could be anywhere between 3-9 months.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already check out the demo on Steam, wishlist the game and keep an eye out for upcoming events…