The Highlights

- Started working on Sonucido: The Mage
- Learned a lot more about Godot and development in general
- Updated Bring Back The Sun a couple of times

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It‘s the last day of the year and time to reflect on it! I spend a lot of time this year working on Sonucido: The Mage, a Dungeon Crawler RPG, and even though I didn‘t manage to release it (yet), I put a lot of hours into it.

The state of Sonucido

Initially, I wanted to release Sonucido: The Mage before Q4 2021 and would have liked to release it by the end of August. Alas, this didn‘t happen. After a few delays, I decided to push it to 2022.

At the moment, Sonucido: The Mage is an hour long experience. The codebase has almost all key features I need; fighting, talking, walking and more is complete and tested. The save-system is the biggest part which is still missing and some menu stuff. The save-system will be done near the release – it‘s just easier this way since more variables which need to be saved are known by then. I estimated in the 2020 postmortem that Sonucido will be at least ten times as big as Bring Back The Sun in regards to the codebase. Right now, it‘s more than twenty times bigger.

I made a lot of small and big changes to Sonucido and I think the additional time it receives is well-spent. The game will be more varied, interesting and bigger because of it.

One highlight was the Steam Next Fest in June, a digital event where people can download the demo for unreleased games and watch streams with the creators. Many people saw Sonucido and a couple hundred put it on their wishlist. By the end of 2021, I have over 900 wishlists and the demo for the game was downloaded over 5000 times. Next year the wishlist count will have four digits! You can download the demo of Sonucido: The Mage on Steam and Itch!

Everything else

While working on Sonucido, I updated Bring Back The Sun 9 times. Some of those updates were only minor patches but I also released the soundtrack and did two bigger updates, which sharpened the graphics (1.2.0) and added three new challenging levels (1.3.0).

I like how Bring Back The Sun has evolved and many of the rough edges and minor problems are fixed now. I‘m still glad that I made it. It was an important step for me and the game has its own qualities, even though it certainly isn‘t for everyone.

I also played a lot of different games! Didn‘t do this in years and it was a great experience. Legend of Grimrock 2, Age of Decadence, Dungeon Rats, A Legionary‘s Life and Theseus: Journey to Athens were some of the high points!

My fiancee updated the website another time a couple of months ago and it looks even better than the initial update she made!

The future

2022 is the year Sonucido: The Mage will be finished. I don‘t know exactly when but I want to get it out there. There are also other projects that I want to tackle this year and to be honest, I need to earn more money.

That‘s all for now. Thanks guys!

Daniel

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