A CHANGE OF DIRECTION – FEBRUARY 2015
Hey AG fans! After the Game Jam we’ve actually managed to get away with a quieter than usual month, but in terms of where we’re heading it’s been fairly dramatic.
DEVELOPMENT
We’ve taken the executive decision to temporarily put The Requiem Network on hold.
Are we doing this purely so we can feel like an AAA game studio by issuing a vague publishing date promise then retracting it? Partly.
In reality there are few reasons. The first being that eternal struggle, money. We feel quite strongly that The Requiem Network is going to be a great game, and we really want to dedicate resources to making it a success. Sadly at the moment we just don’t have those resources, and when we say resources, we mean money.
Money for what? Well there are actually quite a lot of overheads involved in being an indie-game studio, they’re not excessive but in order to fully commit to producing a fill length game we’d like to have them covered as soon as possible so we can dedicate ourselves to The Requiem Network, which we want to push to more platforms as well (which again, requires more money).
The second reason is that we’re still stretching our legs, so we’d like to get an idea of our game production capabilities before committing to a fully-fledged game. Really we’re only pushing production back by six months or so, so all things considered we still should be able to publish the Requiem Network during the latter part of 2016 or early 2017.
So, we’ve decided we’re going to develop the concept of the game we made at the Global Game Jam a bit further, and we’re hoping to release Jenny Was Alive Once (now just a development title) just before the summer of this year onto Android based mobile devices and the Android console OUYA.
To anybody who got a Requiem Network 2016 tattoo, we can only apologise.
JENNY WAS ALIVE ONCE – “THE FULL VERSION”
So what’s in store for the full version of JWAO? It’s probably going to change quite a bit. We’d like to implement a lot of features the Game Jam version didn’t get, the main one being the storyline (a crucial part of any Aura Games game).
Ultimately JWAO is intended to be a small game mainly aimed at mobile gamers which focuses primarily on difficulty rather than an epic length. We want develop upon the eerie prototype we made at the Game Jam and deliver the same kind of feel and atmosphere together with a basic but in depth storyline.
The game is intended to be around 20 levels long and will span across seven environments of similar graphics to the alpha. The game should not take too long for us to build so we should have something to share with you fairly soon. Then as long as JWAO is successful, hopefully we’ll be able to put the profits from that game into our next game, and produce the product we really want to. If the game does well then we may well move to put it on the Steam network, but this involves running a Steam Greenlight campaign, which requires some form of mass public backing, so we’ll be sticking to Android based systems initially.
A lot of people at the jam loved the difficulty of JWAO, and we really want to take that further. JWAO won’t be a long game but completing it is not going to be straightforward. Really we’re looking to build a short game that that provides good gameplay.
Well that’s really everything for this month; most of it has been making decisions about the direction of our first game. We think it’s the right move, the Requiem Network will be a more polished and respected game with more financial and fan based backing. Stay tuned to our social media pages for more details on our game progress and as always if you want to get in touch you can reach us on Facebook, Twitter or at support@auragames.co.uk.
