Margin Notes 8 : The Kindling
- Daniel Langley
- Feb 28
- 4 min read
Things have been busy behind the scenes at Book 27 Games with this month being dedicated to wrapping up pre-production for ASSIAH and getting ready to switch gears to full scale production and development of the games initial systems. With February coming to a close there’s been lots of progress made in establishing the foundations of development for the road ahead as well as some fun and interesting facts about The Way To Life.
Let’s get into it!
~ THE WAY TO LIFE | KINDLING ~
I’m incredibly proud of the work that we put into this project and it served as an excellent springboard into ASSIAH by teaching us lots about finishing a game and getting it on Steam for sale.
The Way To Life has sold 18 copies so far! Which, for a poorly marketed indie game about a monk traversing through an ancient desert I think is pretty good! Most of those sales came from the US, which was expected, and about half of them are definitely from folks I know personally. I see you guys. You all rock. But there’s something really neat about seeing the game sell in other countries as well, even if it is only one unit sold.
It’s really cool to know that someone in these other countries got to see the game we worked really hard on, and I hope they got enjoyment out of it like we did when making it. Little stats like this, while not very impressive on the surface, is like a little kindling to the fire that keeps the game dev process moving forward. So a big thank you to everyone who bought and played the game!
The Way To Life is available for purchase on Steam. You can follow the link below to get to the store page.
~ ASSIAH | PRE-PRODUCTION PROGRESS REPORT ~
For ASSIAH there has been tons that has happened this month. Firstly, the game design document got a massive overhaul adding over 120 new items to the entire document, each item including details and descriptions of systems for the game. Basically, this month was in part spent fleshing out the GDD and making sure that there was as little ambiguity in our design goals as possible.
Naturally we can’t share those details here, but with everything more or less detailed out as best as possible we’re as ready as we can be for the development ahead of us. Things in the GDD will change as time goes on, some stuff will likely be reduced or cut entirely, other things may be added. Development is fluid after all, but our hope is that the GDD works to reduce the unknowns so that we aren’t caught off guard by something down the line when it’s more difficult to be agile and adjust the game plan.
What we can show, however, is a little sneak peak of the storyboards and cutscenes for ASSIAH! If you’ve followed me on X you’ll have possibly already seen these but here is a little glimpse at what we have in store for the games cinematics.
Naturally some important stuff is edited out but these pages show a little sneak peak at what ASSIAH has in store. The keen eyed may even be able to hazard a guess at the length of the cutscenes. Something about minutes per page, I think.
On top of that the dialogue sheets have been written out for all the major and minor characters with bark sheets for both friendly and enemy NPC’s being put together as well.
Additionally to the storyboard and GDD being updated I also implemented a vital mechanic to any first person shooter. Behold…the crouch.
I spent ages last year in my test environment for ASSIAH trying to get crouch to work (context: I’m brand new to programming. Bonafide “art guy” here using blueprints to make everything and trying to learn C++, so simple things are super difficult). Finally, this week I managed to get the crouch working entirely because of the help of @rileyb3d on X. He posts youtube tutorials for Unreal Engine as well as dev logs for his own projects and he has the most precise and easy to follow crouch tutorial. I seriously tried so many different solutions, and rileyb3d’s was the most straightforward solution I’d seen. If you’re looking for tutorials on Unreal Engine his channel is definitely worth checking out!
|| rileyb3d YouTube channel ||
~ ASSIAH: KNIGHT ~
And an update on the prologue comic! ASSIAH: Knight has seen nearly all of its pages sketched out and a majority of them inked as well. Above is a sneak peak at what that looks like! It’s super exciting to see this comic come together and I’m really looking forward to being able to share more of the narrative with you.
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Thanks for reading this month’s Margin Notes!
The Way To Life has been out for a month and ASSIAH is seeing lots of progress behind the scenes. Next month we jump into building the foundation systems for things like player movement and the weapon sandbox.
Final shoutout to The Way To Life , you can pick up a copy and check out our first mini-game following the link below. All purchase help Book 27 Games fund ASSIAH development.
You can also sign up for email notifications whenever a new Margin Notes post goes live via the home page!
Cheers!
-DannyMac
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