Windswept News

Another quarter has passed and this probably feels like a weird time jump from our last update where I only said World 1 was complete.

Our Side Hustle update a few months back explains in more detail, but all we really have left to do in Windswept now is tiling + styling the stages - so even though we just finished World 1, the rest of the game is going to follow along at a rapid rate, hooray!

It's on that note I can say...

[h2]World 2 is complete and World 3's beta is expected to be ready for testers at the end of September!
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Unbeknownst to our beta testers, 1 stage was excluded because I ran into some personal roadblocks preventing it from being completed on time and many assets were missing from the other stages, when World 3 rolls around there should be a lil something extra to check out (emphasis on should, I dunno what's around the corner these days).



Along with a new set of stages, players got to experience Nippa and Skree for the first time. The floral cliffs beyond the forest are also home to a new sort of enemy - the pips. Pips are mice that can be found everywhere from the highest tree to the lowest depth. Some have cannons, some run and jump over gaps, others float around in balloons and dandelions, they're everywhere!



Much like our last update, this is once again just a quick vibe check to keep you in the loop about the state of Windswept's progress. World 3 is a much smaller world than the first 2 so the quarter ahead is largely going to be spent in the graphics and SFX department - so I'll finish the update with something very unfinished - a peek at World 3's first stage.



Until next time!

What's up gamers, it's been a while!
As you may remember these updates are coming out quarterly from now on so I can focus more of my time on larger chunks of the game.

Our headline act for this update is World 1 which is now fully complete and has now been set aside for some late-development-polish, hooray!


9 of Windswept's 60 stages reside in World 1 and consist mostly of soft-tutorials introducing different mechanics, 1 boss fight and an unlockable extra stage you'll need to beat in order to reach the post-game challenges.


We also introduce Bluppo and Hue with their own dedicated stages!


At the start of March our beta backers received their steam keys and were dropped in an empty room full of warps, each one leading to a stage with no additional context.

Everybody testing has been super supportive and understanding - I opened up a special testing channel in our discord server and a google feedback form as an alternative communication method and both were utilised to great success!

An overlooked part of the development process from a player's perspective is that I need virtually every aspect of the game to be playable in a way that doesn't lead to crashes. Anything that isn't ready for player-interaction needs to be strategically cut out or hastily "fixed up" - It's a time sink and a little bit messy but it keeps attention focused on parts of the game that matter for the test, at the expense of there being the odd crash here and there.

Most issues during this initial test were caused by speedrunners activating the game timer or people activating multiplayer mode, I had ran out of time in the lead-up to the beta and all of the "extra" features found in the options hadn't been tested for a few months, that's the nature of being the project manager, stage designer and programmer -- too many hats, too little time...


These betas serve as mini "practice releases", to improve my ability to anticipate, prevent and resolve gameplay issues promptly.

Virtually all critical issues were resolved within the first couple of days and the minor issues remaining have been carried over to be fixed in time for the next beta release.
When the official full release deadline rolls around I'll hopefully have a few more hands on deck to help me - our publisher will be porting Windswept to different consoles so there should be more eyes available to notice more things! But until then it's just me and sometimes I'll just miss things.


World 2, obviously!
At the time of this post we're wrapping up World 2's development schedule which I hope will be ready for an early June release to our testers.

10 stages are in the works this time around -- 8 regular, 1 boss, 1 unlockable extra.

But that's about all I have to share for now. These quarterly updates probably feel a bit light on info compared to the previous update format, and that's fair. They're more like a vibe check so you can see how development is progressing.

Is there any info you'd like to see in these updates?
Is there anything you've been curious about?
Leave a comment and let me know!

Thanks for reading, see you next time~

Howdy gamers!

This update is super important because it's our first measurable glimpse of how accurate I was with my workload planning + delivery time predictions.

You may recall 6 months ago I said this: In order to focus on the rest of the game I prefer to knock out a bunch of the little extras first. They will be the focus of these early updates as I venture to get them around 90% complete. Fleshing these systems out into something usable this early on means the game can be structured to support them much easier than if I tried to add them at the end of development.

Well, here we are!

The focus of this update will be around what I've done, what's still left to do and what that means for our release schedules - both in terms of private betas for those eligible, our demo for game expos and our eventual public release.

Let's start the recap...

Progress: 95%
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
I was able to knock out the majority of this system on the first pass through. The remaining 5% can't be done until Windswept is feature-complete because trying to affect elements of the game that don't exist yet isn't feasible. I'm no magician!

Progress: 80%
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
One giant dependency associated with randomizer mode is having a fully-finished game so I can properly test the aspects of the mode that shuffle stage orders and whatnot. I got as much as I could done now but the final parts and balancing of this probably won't be happening until after every stage in Windswept is made.

Progress: 100%
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
All options I had planned to make are fully functional and feature-complete! I'm not closed off to the idea of adding more but I think what exists here covers the majority of use cases.


Progress: 75%





Functionally, the most important part of each minigame is the [Title -> Game Mechanics -> Win/Lose -> Repeat] loop. All aspects of this loop are complete for each minigame. All that's left is to finalise the stage designs which need a bunch of environments/biomes to be made. We'll treat the remaining minigames as regular stages moving forward since they technically are.


Progress: 95%

You can cash all those hard-earned Moon Coins in to unlock the door, access the special stages & all the goodies inside. Each world has its own Hut you can open up so the final 5% involves designing a dedicated screen for each area. It won't be all green and forested everywhere you go! Just like the minigames this part is dependent on the creation of environment art first.


Progress: 100%

There's so much packed into this small space. Laamp occupies two stalls and flies back and forth between them. You can make every light fixture move, boost through the arcade stools, the works.


Progress: 50%

This feature is functional but it's missing a crucial piece of the puzzle - the overworld. Without the overworld you can't select which stage to enter + which coin to search for. This is just a demonstration of how it looks after you've made that selection. Honestly, the hard work here is done and I love how silly Laamp acts through this whole interaction.


Progress: 90%

Compression kinda killed the quality of this gif but oh well! Everything is here except for one crucial piece of info - I won't know how many songs will be in the game until I get closer to the end of development. Sometimes recycling a song just fits a stage vibe better than something new so there'll be a bit of trial and error in that sense. Regardless, the jukebox is a fully functional menu that plays music and that's all it needs to be.

I wanted to keep with the Laamp theming so the song progress bar is a lil vine that a lil laamp moth munches through from start to end.


Progress: 70%

You're gonna have to wait a bit longer to see this one in action fully! Functionally it's similar to the Jukebox - it fulfills its intended purpose, but until I can finalise the number of characters in Windswept the empty-looking menu and prices are just placeholders (I also wanna keep the character roster on the down-low). I've still got a week left of this year so I'll spend that time getting this menu finished up.


Progress: 90%

It shouldn't surprise you at this point, but obviously the scoreboard progress won't reach 100% until there's a game state to trigger the achievement (I can't beat a game that isn't done!)

Still, it's is fully functional and comes complete with the ability to show/rehide trials. Column 1 is for Story, Column 2 for Collectibles, Column 3 for Arcade and the remaining 3 columns are silly miscellaneous challenges I thought would add a new dimension to the regular gameplay. All up, that's 30 achievements!

Game Platforms that support achievements (such as Steam, Playstation, etc), will have a couple of extra secret ones. The scoreboard is specific to each save file and the secret achievements require performing special actions from a new save so including them in-game would have made completing any one board impossible. I didn't want achievements to be separated from save files ~because of reasons~ so hopefully it's no big deal to any of you.


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But anyway, that's a lot of side stuff! 10 things in 6 months, where 1 thing is 5 minigames. I also added 5 rideable animal buddies, made 3 stages, made a bunch of performance optimizations and a whole lot more.

I feel much more confident about the road ahead - everything mentioned here so far has been very programming heavy. Lots of writing, testing, head-scratching and googling.

2024 is going to be much more relaxed because most of the game is functional and all that's left is to slap some pretty graphics over the top. Marketing department is finally gonna get some content!

In the early days I used to stream a lot of stage development on my Twitch Channel - I plan to bring streams back again woo! If that sounds interesting feel free to drop a follow and say hi! I'm really looking forward to streaming development again because that's when all the silly bugs show up.

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As you might expect, 2024 will be our final push to get Windswept developed so it can be ported and localized in time for a mid-2025 release. The schedule for these updates will now be quarterly instead of monthly. Stage & environment design is hard to talk about at length without just revealing everything and I want to keep some parts of the game a secret, y'know?

A quarterly update means I can focus on development for a longer period. Writing updates is time consuming, as is making a video, cutting it, etc. I usually write these a month in advance just so I'm not scrambling to get something out in time, having a longer time buffer couldn't hurt.

The other reason is because I think they'll be more impactful at that frequency. The monthlies have been bombarding you with something new every time. Things are gonna get quite samey from here onward. All stages, all the time!

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Anyway, that's a wrap!

If you're still reading, thanks a bunch for your time and attention! Tell me what your favourite/least favourite type of platformer stage is! Personally, I don't like arid desert-type stages because I get enough of that in my daily Australian life.

Tell me yours!

Given the sheer quantity of games releasing on Steam these days, having a neat little elevator pitch for your game can be vital in helping it stand out. For example, if I get an email saying a game is like "Obra Dinn meets such and such" or "Into The Breach but a deckbuilder", that's like personal catnip to me, and can be a handy indicator of whether I should investigate further - maybe watch a gameplay trailer for it, say, or see if it's got a demo. Case in point: this is exactly how I stumbled upon the upcoming Donkey Kong Country-esque platformer Windswept last week, although instead of an email, I saw it on the growing "Your game is too much like..." thread over on Xwitter - which is definitely worth a browse if you have very niche interests in need of a good scratch.

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Howdy gamers and welcome to the Kickstarter November Update!

If you don't follow me on Twitter (you should), I mentioned November is my birth month. I've spent most of the time taking my foot off the pedal to chill for a bit (feel free to comment happy birthday - it was a week ago though so it's whatever!)

You know where I'm going with this - it's time for a relatively short update for a slow-ish month!

Most of the time was spent cleaning up existing systems, it's hard to make that sound interesting but let's give it a go...


Transitions add so much to a game when used effectively - Windswept had a couple but they were very rigid in their execution, so I needed a better solution.



The old transition system was sort of like the gif above, where the fade-in to fade-out were a fixed duration and the game just sorta waited for it to finish before continuing. The new system lets me determine the duration and specifics of every step in the process. If I want the screen to stay black until another system tells it to proceed, I can now!



Additionally, I can specify different graphics to cut out of the blackness. I can also lock-on to a specific target to draw more focus to it. This will come in handy for Laamp's coin search service and any other situation I need to move your eyes to another part of the screen more naturally.





Support for achievements is baked right into the game for situations where the platform hosting Windswept doesn't support them natively. The goal will be to have pixel art icons that can be reused for Steam's achievement icons. I'm particularly fond of the memorable icons used in Yoshi's Island to give players a clear understanding of what each stage is without having to play it. Be sure to give Woodspixl_ all of your energy, this job rests with her!


Lemme be real for a sec, professional music and sound is expensive and that part of development was one of the main contributors to why I came to Kickstarter in the first place. With Windswept being my first commercial project, I was faced with a lot of tricky decisions while using my own personal finances in the early days.

95% of the music & sound in our demo was made to help tie the project together in preparation for the KS campaign. The campaign's level of success would go on to determine the number of sounds produced and the amount of times music would repeat throughout the game.

All that to say FatBard have added their first contributions to the game in over a year! Here's a brief showcase of some things they've done since returning.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There's still a bit of balancing to do and whatnot but overall it's breathing new life into the project at a time when I really need it to. Motivation is at an all-time high until the bill arrives!

As the year's coming to a close I'm trying to cram in everything I need to before entering the final phase of development - the content!

I think next month's update is gonna be quite big, so long as I'm able to deliver on what I set out to do! Guess we'll have to wait until then, byeeeeeee!