2022 Valley of Shadow Recap

/

Happy 2023! Devlogs have become rarer and rarer over the past year, so the least I can do is a recap of the entire year to let you know where we are in development.

What follows is a list of the big things we've accomplished in 2022.

Conventions & Festivals

We exhibited at MAGFest, PAX East, and Tiny Teams last year. They were all great experiences for different reasons.

MAGFest is always just a blast to attend, but also gets us some of the best feedback on our demo. We showcase the entire demo there, which is 30-60 minutes of gameplay (the same demo that's on our Steam page). We paid close attention to everyone who played the game, and had over 4 pages full of actionable notes afterward. Some of the most important pieces have already been implemented in our demo, with lots more added to our bugs list and backlog. Unfortunately, we won't be attending MAGFest this year, but we hope to next year!

PAX was a wild ride, and got a lot more eyes on the game than ever before. We also made some great connections and had a few cool opportunities - more on that in the Interviews section below.

Tiny Teams really blew us away in terms of new people trying out the game. It was a vastly different experience from in-person conventions with a lot less interaction with players, but we were honored to participate and definitely hope to do so again in the future. It was our first digital festival, and it really opened our eyes to how good they can be.

Interviews

We were lucky enough to be interviewed on 2 different occasions.

Hank Jacobs from Gamerant interviewed Anthony, which resulted in 3 different articles on their site. They really get into the meat of what makes the game special:

Jared from Indie Game International interviewed me (Nick) for the podcast. It has an emphasis on game design & the technical aspects of development:

Development

We've genuinely been hard at work developing, and there's rarely a day that goes by without a git commit from either Anthony or myself. There's tons of minutia I could get into, but I'm going to stay high level here:

Chapter 2, the "Temple of Force", is story complete. It's fully playable from start to finish with full voiceovers and puzzles. We've had several playtesters run through it already, and their feedback has been extremely helpful. There are still a few iterations we need to do - on both story and puzzles - but it feels great to have a version 1 to start editing.

Chapter 4, the final chapter, is fleshed out. For the first time since we started working on Valley of Shadow, we finally have the entire game fleshed out from start to end. By "fleshed out" I mean we know exactly what all the scenes are going to be, what the story beats are, and roughly what the puzzles are. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, but now we actually have an idea of the full scope of the project.

Before this, we knew what the first 3 chapters were (Temples of Light, Force, and Fire), and what the ending of the game was, but we never knew exactly what bridged those together. Now we do, and I won't spoil what it is here, but we are working full speed on getting it all implemented. Our plan is to have it all in a playable form ASAP so we can start iterating on it and finishing up the game. We are still hoping for a 2023 release, but as there is still some design work that has to be done, I don't feel comfortable coming up with an actual release date quite yet.

That is 2022 in a nutshell! Our emphasis in 2023 is on finishing the game, or getting as close as possible to that. As a result, we're taking a break from conventions for the next few months, which unfortunately means passing on MAGFest and PAX. It sucks, but we think it's in the best interest of the game.

Thanks for reading!