Valley of Shadow Devlog #7
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Hello old friend. Nick here, and I’m back with yet another devlog. In this one I’ll talk about our newly-adopted Agile development approach, the work we’ve accomplished over the past few months, and what we plan to accomplish in the near future. Let’s get started!
Agile Production
Hooray for project management!
If you’re familiar with game development, it should come as no shock that our planned release date for Valley of Shadow has been pushed back on multiple occasions. When we first presented at conventions, back before there was even a global pandemic, we told people we planned on releasing “in a year or two.” If you watch our Steam trailer in its entirety, you’ll see that it ends with “Coming 2022” and a website URL that doesn’t even exist anymore (but it redirects you, don’t worry). I’m sure there’s a few other examples floating around that I can’t remember right now.
The approach we’ve taken to making the game is atypical in that we’ve been “discovering” what the game is the entire time we’ve been making it; the current game is completely different from the first version of the game. For more on that, see Anthony’s blog post from 2019, and just know that it has undergone a few more major iterations since then. This “discover-as-we-develop” approach is the main culprit behind our release date constantly being adjusted.
Well, earlier this year, Anthony and I decided that enough was enough. We want to slap a release date on the game as soon as possible - without sacrificing the quality of the game, of course. And that’s where Agile Development comes in. But there’s a rub - a few of them, in fact; we’ve tried Agile in the past, and we still have never come up with an accurate release date. Why is that?
After much self-reflection, I think the reason we’ve tried Agile in the past and failed is two-fold:
We weren’t ready for structured work. This is the “discover-as-we-develop” I was talking about. We hadn’t finished designing the game, so how could we possibly hope to fit the work that remained into any kind of neat structure, let alone a neat-enough structure to calculate a release date?
I took on all the project planning myself. I fancy myself a project manager, but I know how annoyed others can get at the tedious overhead involved, so previously I’ve taken on all the project planning myself while keeping Anthony away from it - for his own good, or so I thought. But in doing so I was shooting myself in the project-manager-foot.
I firmly believe these are the reasons that our previous attempts at instating a production schedule have failed. So this time, I’ve taken them into account. I can’t say for sure whether it’s a complete success, but so far we’ve accomplished three month-long sprints and are undergoing our fourth, so it’s already been more successful than before. Here’s how I’ve adjusted:
We are focusing on design work first. I still don’t consider the game “fully designed”, and until it is I don’t feel comfortable setting a firm release date. So first and foremost, our sprints are focused on finishing the design of the game. We are even postponing important bug fixes and new things we really want to get into existing builds, so that we can focus on getting an exact picture of the game as a whole. Primarily, the remaining design work is finishing the script and creating the remaining puzzles.
We are both equally involved in project planning. I do as much of the tedious setup work as I can, but am no longer attempting to choose sprint priorities on my own. We now sit in multi-hour Sprint Planning & Review/Retro meetings and suss out the most important things to work on together. If you’re a scrum master, you’re probably shaking your head right now, because that’s how things are supposed to work. No wonder the previous sprints failed! And believe me, I know. I screwed up.
Like I said, things have been going very well since I’ve made these adjustments. We are regularly hitting our stated sprint goals, which is not only good for driving toward the project’s completion, but also for our psyches! I could drone on more about our methodology - and mayhaps I will in a separate blog post - but for now, let’s talk about some of what we’ve accomplished in these recent sprints!
Development Progress
This shady factory worker isn’t the only one toiling lately
So enough talk about how we’re getting things done - what did we get done?
I’m glad you asked. We recently completed one of the biggest milestones to date: The final chapter of the game, Chapter 4, is fully hooked up. That means we can boot the game up (in-editor) at the beginning of Chapter 4, and walk all the way to the end of it, to the point at which the end credits will roll. This is a huge milestone for me personally, because it represents the light at the end of the development tunnel. There are a few puzzles that are still missing, and some of the script remains to be written, but those are being completed hot on the heels of hooking it up fully.
We released a new Chapter 2 beta build to our testers on Discord (please join us if you want to test!). This build includes two new cinematic sequences and four new Force Missile puzzles, which utilize a new mechanic added just for them. We’ve already gotten some valuable feedback on this build and are currently working on a fresh build to address some of its issues.
We released a new public Chapter 1 build on Steam, v0.5! That build has a whole slew of new features and improvements, so be sure to check them all out on the Steam page.
We were extremely grateful to be interviewed by Lev Fleetwood on her Twitch Stream at the beginning of the month. It’s almost two hours long and we cover a lot of topics, so if long-form interviews are your jam please check it out!
We’ve also been stepping up our marketing game by regularly participating in Screenshot Saturdays and in general becoming more proactive about sharing the game. We’ve got plans for other things beyond devlogs and screenshot saturdays, but marketing is a big wild animal so we are still wrapping our heads around all of it.
Upcoming Progress
All this talk of Agile and Project Management is great and all, but it’s just fluff unless we can use it to actually map out our future work. While we’re not at a point yet to set a firm release date, we do have a roadmap for the next few months (the current sprint included):
Update Chapter 2 beta build with fixes discovered by playtesters
Finish Chapter 4 script
Finish Chapter 4 puzzles
Record, edit, and insert voiceovers for Chapter 3
Begin Chapter 3 playtesting
If the next devlog doesn’t include at least some of these as having been completed, then I’ve done something very very wrong.
That’s it for this devlog! If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading, and please let me know if there’s any specific topic that I touched on that you’d like to see more details on! I’m itching to get back into blog-writing, and would love to write about things people are actually interested in.