The hard days continue. What I mean when I refer to these days, I am referring to the struggle of doing things that aren’t fun, doing things that I find difficult and frustrating, things that are hard for me personally. But through these challenges, we persevere. So lets dig into this weeks updates.

54 Games

The fight against admin paperwork is over. Our Steam account is set up and we created the application within SteamWorks.

Finally we are able to work on the Steam store page for Bombseeker and prepare for the game to be public. We are able to create 54 Games as the developer and publisher on that store page. Oh man, does that feel good.

When you first publish a game to the Steam store page, you have to pay $100, fill out a bunch of info about your game, and then submit it for review. It will take a few days from then for the Steam team to review your submission. So where are we in the process? Well I made a bunch of awful looking, and I mean terrible looking placeholder assets and submit it for review. This means that next weeks post, we should be able to link you to the Steam store! Enjoy this example of what’s to come in the Steam store.

With the store page in the near horizon, where are we with the game itself then? Well, we are making a lot of progress, kind of. Most of which was working on assets. Some of which was working on the campaigns. Lets break it down.

Art

For the beta, we wanted to make the art bad intentionally. At some point prior to the full 1.0.0 release, we want to have an artist reskin the entirety of the game. So during the playtests and the beta, we just want it to be bad. However, you might have noticed that we were using assets found from itch.io until now and they didn’t look bad at all. So what did we do?

Well, we intentionally make them uglier. I’m sorry artists for ruining your work. We intentionally made our tilesets completely awful. Take a look.

Our character is now an emo kids from the early 2000’s. That slick black hair is looking good. The tileset for the background is blackened and dull now, removing the vibrance and life that previously existed. And much like the emo phase of the early 2000’s, this is also a cry for help. We really need to team up with an artist an have default assets made for the release version.

Continuing with are beta artwork, we have campaign screens done as well. There will be at least two campaigns for players to work through and we have created navigation screens for those. When you first select play, you will be greeted by the campaign selection screen and the only option you will have is to work through the tutorial.

The tutorial will have a Bombseeker instructor walk you through the basics of your new job.

After the tutorial, you will have access to the Alanther to Prithe campaign, and finishing that will get you access to the Alanther to Craithe campaign.

Levels

Each of these campaigns will have a set number of levels with fixed maps. These maps are meant to be challenging with low replay-ability. However, there will also be the option to play a randomized map from the title page. This map is randomized in size, number of bombs, and number of markers given. Before we can even think about going live with a 1.0.0 release, we must at least give players these two campaigns (11 total levels).

Pricing

One thing that matters to me is that anyone who buys the game feels like it was worth the money spent. So how do you define value? Is it hours spent playing or is it number of levels completed? I don’t know, but its something that we need to think about. Since I’m not planning on having a very high price tag for Bombseeker, I don’t think anyone will complain. There is plenty that is still to be determined.

Adamson Impact Project

We were asked to teach a coding class at a local community center. I know, this is very random in comparison to the topics from this blog post, as well all of the other blog posts, but here we are. During the conversation about teaching this class, it was brought up that the community center doesn’t have access to computers for kids to use. In my mind, this shouldn’t be an issue because you would think that donating computers to the community center would be easy. However, the community center isn’t a 501c3 charitable organization. This means that we can’t convince companies to donate money/equipment using the excuse of it being a tax write off.

Because of this, it is time to dust off an LLC that I’ve kept in my back pocket for years. I created Adamson Impact Project LLC (AIP) with the intent of turning it into a 501c3 during the Covid era. However, that never happened. Better late than never I guess.

The pan at this point is to move forward with AIP as a nonprofit. Once it is established, we can start trying to have companies sponsor laptops (I’ll even put your sticker on it). Once we have a couple laptops, then we will open the class at the community center. It would be really great to teach kids how to program websites, video games, and anything else we can think of.

Conclusion

The Steam store for Bombseeker is on the horizon, the game is getting close to ready for beta (or alpha), and it feels very surreal take set out with a goal of getting a game onto the Steam store and being this close. I don’t think it was until recently that I thought I’d actually achieve this goal. Alongside that project and its momentum is the beginning of AIP and the idea of helping kids learn new skills.

This post started talking about how these have been hard days. While its true that they have been, its also true that the days are getting better. With every day that we push forward, the days feel brighter and we feel better about the progress we are making. Its weeks like this that make me feel good about the future of Rogue Wolf, even if its legacy is just a single video game and teaching a couple kids how to code. That’s enough for me.

Go Forth and Be Awesome