Everhood News

Waiting for feedback


I can’t believe two weeks have already passed

We have finished making playtest build and letting some playtesters go through the game

As of writing right now all playtesters haven’t finished yet, mainly because I suspect most of them will play on the weekend, but so far it feels positive as I joined playtesters observing silently.
I’ve been proofreading like crazy these last months but there still seems to show up errors when monitoring some playtesters, but I can assure you it is minor things

I’ve had a lot of help with this aspect and I am sure when final release is coming there will be only minimal errors

Yesterday I figured there is a word called telepathetic which really means you are bad at telepathy while correct intended spelling is telepathic, the word telepathetic really just sounds like a joke but really hard to spot the difference when reading.

We have already made substantial progress on the game even after the build was finished, it is said the best code is written outside of planning and it is true. When we are done with intended features we tend to look for adding that little extra detail that just doesn’t make sense to make, but it is that detail that makes the whole product

In a way I could work on Everhood for another year, but I am determined this will get out on time without feature creeping and mainly because we have promised a date and we are sticking to it, I am confident we got something good

Unless the other playtesters got some horrible news or opinions..

Artwork by: ゴールディ
We have been playtesting and writing a bunch of notes(300+) for big playtesting. Things taken a bit longer but it’s good because we have a lot of time and we are patching up some places with content

This week overall has been lots of work outside the game for me and Jordi as I moved apartment and Jordi went on a three day mountain trip

Personally I am really looking forward to that content lockdown, we have been feature-creeping(adding features not counted in the list) which has caused some issues and breaking in weird places. After july we will at our best stop all sort of feature-creeping which will make testing feel more relaxing.

One of the things we will look into after july is probably getting chinese localization in which is probably going to cause a bunch of problems because of the length of the game, but if we start early hopefully won’t be too stressful

We have to remind ourselves we got something that is already good, we think. Playtesters are after all the true verdict

Just to clarify, not the playtesters opinions, but if they are playing as intended!
Most playtesters opinions aren’t really valid as they cannot see the full picture after just playing the game once or twice

There are so much great artwork I would like to put in these updates, but I try to limit myself with one piece, or two… okay three pieces for this one because such a short update :D


Artwork by: Shalil


Artwork by: LaundryCannon



Wishlist us here so you don't miss any news:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229380/Everhood/

Environment artwork by Mimi

Past devlogs we have been doing announcing updates after the steam release rather than doing more personal devlogs

One important highlight is that one of our discord members PhilipL made a wiki for Everhood
https://everhood.fandom.com/wiki/Everhood_Wiki

I took sometime to go through our previous devlogs and read what we have written and I personally found the ones where I have written down my thoughts at the time being the one interesting or if we hit an important milestone

So I thought I would do it again!

After releasing the new demo on steam we have really gained a lot of new eyes and people in the discord. I told our discord moderator BartTheBart that he could expect an influx of people coming in but couldn’t have expected it would grow up to 900discord members and there is usually some sort of daily discussion, theories, art or wiki’s showing up which really motivates us

Reading through everything has surely impacted the development and brought up discussion between me and Jordi and we are very thankful to see these interactions and expectations of the game which makes us more confident, even if it is potentially only a small “loud” portion.

Two weeks ago we had a blind stream and afterward a Q&A. Unfortunately, none of us recorded it but it was a nice unfiltered casual experience

We have been doing a lot of playtests before and are currently right now undergoing a big haul of the last content making as we are aiming for a content-lockdown at the end of July and after that focusing on just making sure that what we got is as bugfree as possible.

A content-lockdown aka content freeze is essential that we don’t produce more content but just making sure game is playable

We decide to do an early content-lockdown so we can catch as many bugs as possible as our testing capabilities are low because most of the testing is done by me and Jordi and then we monitor playtesters and try to have as stable builds as possible

We are aiming to send out the game to more playtesters that are unmonitored as we are confident the gameplay value is good, we just need to find all the edges cases where the game breaks if players do things in strange-sequences.

Healthwise I am(Chris) not 100% recovered since last year in May, I am not sure when I will feel better, I will most likely have to take a break somewhere after development (one week, one month, idunno!), I am still doing ten times better than what I did before and I only work when I am feeling good, it’s just somedays or sometimes I ain’t working as I used to.
Jordi is chugging along as usual and has been working like a damn trooper making sure that the game takes that extra step to become a great experience for everyone.

I would love to write some awesome anecdotes about how certain development endeavors have worked out but without context, it would be pointless, I know we are going to write some posts about it at some point. All I can say right now is that it is usually me who is setting up encounters and making the battles while Jordi makes sure everything is running smoothly and I have sufficient tools to make it, but once something gets too technical Jordi usually has to take it the entire way and I provide feedback as a playtester and give him art assets while he has full creative control.

I just want to say that he had just created something really cool that is going to be awesome to see if YouTubers or streamers play

Overall I feel that our workload is moderate and we will be able to deliver something not good, but great. We are on a constant lookout for nasty bugs and I hope we get some of them during our bigger upcoming playtesting sessions

Just want to highlight that CakeLullabies and Metroidhat​ who made a Red plushie which is awesome


Also, like to point out that we have three new moderators for the discord channel
PhilipL, Cakelullabies, and Faust!

Stuff will be as usual in the channel but good to have it


Have a great one!


Wishlist us here so you don't miss any news:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229380/Everhood/

To celebrate Steam Game Festival, Everhood developer Chris Nordgren plays Everhood blindfolded but is allowed to read live chat to navigate through levels.

Make sure to join us! Oh boi that won't be easy...

To celebrate the Steam Game Festival, Everhood developers will do a live chat answering all your questions!
Make sure to tune in