Greetings explorers!

It’s been a quiet summer devlog-wise, and I owe you an explanation. I got hit hard with multiple different personal problems in the last few months. I kept powering through on the actual development and game-related work, but I have to admit that I had a hard time focusing on communication-related tasks.

I’m not one to dwell on difficulties though, so let’s focus on what matters. The game has continued to progress in some ways, but slowed down a bit in others.

Steam Page and Game Announce

In order to keep making progress on the game despite everything, I sat down and made precise plans, with workload estimations and so on: the full-on serious enterprise-grade project management suite.

 

The political borders shader still needs a bit of work.

 

Apart from that, I spent a lot of time on reworking the UI to make it more appealing and adding political borders to the planets. Thanks to that, the Steam page is mostly done, I just need to fix the political borders shader a bit, make more illustrations, icons and various goods pictures, and we’ll be good to take the perfect game screenshots. With that, the store page will be done.

 

We’re almost there!

 

There is more to the story, though. While planning, I realized that I needed a proper trailer to announce the game and hopefully get some coverage or showcase on IGN or somewhere else. The goal still being to gauge and leverage players’ reception to the game to go to publishers or find alternative funding routes.

The problem with that is: it’s way too early for a gameplay trailer. So I’ve opted for an animated one, in the style of Victoria 3. It’s a good way to showcase the themes and universe without being constrained by the not-yet-implemented game systems.

Fortunately, I know a good editor that is willing to help with that! Unfortunately, with all the troubles, my finances are down so I cannot hire an artist to make the art…

 

Back to the Drawing… Tablet

All is not lost, though, because if you followed the previous dev diaries, I was a graphic designer in a past life! And, although I’m a bit rusty, I can draw. So I’ve dusted off my old Wacom tablet and tried to get back to it!

 

A first try for a Miner character needed to showcase a feedback feature of the game.

 

As you can see, I could use some training and work on the style, especially to produce stuff that is good enough to be featured on big channels. So I found an opportunity to train: I will join this year’s Spooktober game jam. The goal is to make a visual novel in a month.

I’m approaching the scenario like a pen-and-paper RPG game master since I have loads of experience in that field. This exercise will take place in the Uncharted Sectors universe, in an isolated archaeological/research station around ancient Imperial ruins. It’s a great opportunity to work on the game’s lore a bit.

It will force me to produce a lot of art in a short amount of time with no real pressure, so it’s a great training exercise. And I can even try to make reusable assets that will be used in the trailer, Uncharted Sectors itself or the other small games planned around US‘ features.

And who knows, if my entry to the jam is promising and gets positive feedback, I can polish it for a few months and release it to gain experience, credentials to reuse later, or even a bit of money to invest back into the game.

 

Looking Forward

So, I’m still waiting on some bad news in the next weeks, but thankfully most of the storm is over.

To be honest, I’m a bit frustrated to have to take on that artist hat again instead of programming the game, but hey: “sometimes I do what I want to do, the rest of the time I do what I have to.”

All in all, we keep making progress, the Steam page will be up in a few weeks, I’ll make some (hopefully) pretty pictures which will help for marketing, and we’ll be able to resume the big work soon. I’ll keep you updated along the way in the regular schedule.

As usual, don’t hesitate to reply to this email if you have anything to share. And until next time, I wish you a great time!

—

Luc Toupense
Developer of Uncharted Sectors