many thanks to the lovely @ahugevriska, @hypeswap, and @sanctferum, i now bring you the full upd8!
So it’s been a while. There are a lot of reasons for our silence, and honestly it’s a whole tangle of stuff that maybe one day we’ll get into. But right now the good news is we’re in a stage of development where we can start sharing some things and are committed to talking with you more frequently.
We know you’re eager to find out something, anything, so let’s cut to the chase - yes, Act 2 is in active development. While we don’t want to start throwing out release dates until we’re a little further along, we’re happy to say that the script, art and design work is nearly complete, and programming is underway.
You might gather from the above description that Hiveswap development is a little unusual. Let’s just say we learned a lot of lessons during development of Act 1. For Act 2 we have built a staggered development process where the script and design come first, followed by the art. Then our programming team will put it all together while the writing, design and art teams move on to Act 3. Once we have all the Act 2 content and programming together, we will move into a play-testing and iteration phase before release.
This approach is working much better for us but one downside of this approach is that there isn’t much gameplay footage to show for most of the development. We can’t show you any gameplay yet but we would like to share a few snippets…
We will have more to share on Act 2 soon and we want to share it with you first. For our next update we’d like to invite you to submit questions about Act 2 via this google form and we will aim to answer as many of them as possible in the update.
You may also have seen that we will be attending LudoNarraCon this weekend, a digital convention for narrative games that is taking place on Steam from May 10-13. We will be “exhibiting” at the event and streaming on the Hiveswap Steam store page.
We do want to let you know in advance that we will not be sharing any further info on Act 2 during the stream beyond what we have posted above. Any new info on Act 2 will be delivered here first, when it’s ready.
That said, we would be thrilled if you can join un for LudoNarraCon. The Hiveswap development team will be playing Act 1, chatting about the story, Homestuck as an inspiration, and channeling their inner 90′s teenager! The Friendsim team will also be taking part in the stream and we will be making a demo of Act 1 available for the duration of the convention.
The indie game label Fellow Traveller is running the convention, and we’re really excited to be taking part alongside so many great developers like Inkle and Weather Factory.
Thanks again for your patience and support. We’re so happy to be back talking about Act 2 and can’t wait to share more info soon.
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