Highway to Heal News

HEY!
Finally!
After intense months of work, the demo as landed! Stop reading this and just go play it! Also, fill in the feedback form as there's a chance to win a free copy of the game 👀

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2899360/Highway_to_Heal_Demo/

Still reading? M'okay, you're a curious one. Or maybe you played the demo already? In both cases, nice! Because I can tell you a few things you might find interesting or funny.

[h2]Last minute tweaks and fixes[/h2]
Of course it didn't take us a full week to just a press a green "release" button. We were busy fixing bugs and improving things.

A good one that made the cut was a blue silhouette that shows up whenever there is something in front of the ambulance, like the corner of a building or a tree, so that you never lose its sight. This one was in the works for a while but we needed to find a workaround of a bug in Unity to pull it out.



We also added a proper english translation which we hope you'll find as funny as reading the french version of the game. Thomas also improved a bit the minimap so that icons are easier to spot.

[h2]Demo Release Day[/h2]


Who is this? Just a Daniel going berserk on bugs. This was just a couple hours before the release! You might have noticed people in the background. There usually isn't that many people at the office. But this was the evening of the local gamedev gathering.

Since people were coming in, Daniel just gave them the controller instead of testing himself the demo. Obviously people quite easily found a few bugs and Daniel just doesn't like those. So, the demo could have released a few hours earlier with a few not so important bugs, but no, Daniel had to fix them! And so he did.

At about 10pm, he proudly took a beer, went into the middle of the room and used its beer as a bell to get people's attention. You know how loud a beer sounds? Actually, not loud at all. It does do a good splash show though, so people's attention was gathered indeed. After a nice laugh and half a beer expressly drank, Daniel could finally tell everyone : DEMO IS RELEASED! That was fun.

[h2]Upcoming Event[/h2]
As much as the team would love to continue working on the game, adding new missions, implementing new features like the City Hall or just improving things overall, the attention is somewhere else. Indeed, finances are tight and solutions need to be found to finish development in fine conditions.

That's why our attention is instead going to one of our options: our crowdfunding campaign on Ulule! There's still a lot of work to set it up but it should start very soon. Subscribe so that you don't miss the start!


Also, you'll be able to see Thomas and Daniel on a big french game event on Twitch very soon. 👀
We can't wait to tell you more about it.

It's hard to say hello in a different way every single time... But then again, I'm a programmer. So if 10 is an overflow of 9, this means I can restart. Right?

Hello!

As in many parts of Europe, last Monday was a holiday. I tried to work but I'm so tired that I quickly stopped because of how many silly mistakes I was doing. So, in short, this was a smaller week for us. Not to say that it wasn't busy though.

Our Demo Steam Page was validated! You can even wishlist our demo now, haha. I didn't even know such a thing was possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2899360/Highway_to_Heal_Demo

The build of the game is still in Steam's review queue. Hopefully we will release the demo next week. If you want to play early, come ask us a steam key on Discord! (Yes, there are steam keys for demos too. I had no clue either)

[h2]New team member as entered the ring![/h2]
With great joy, moving on, we will have the help of Ophélie, who is doing an internship at our friends Nova-box. She will help us on everything marketing and communication related. You can already notice some of our work on our Discord. It was a bit of a mess and we wanted to updated it for ages. Now we have nice categories so that you can receive messages relevant to you!

She is also helping us, with The Crowdfunding Agency, in setting up our Ulule Campaign. More about that in the coming weeks.

[h2]Feedback form[/h2]
We also finally finished our magnificent feedback form. It will be accessible from the demo so you can quickly tell us what you thought of your enjoyable - or not! - experience. It will take about five minutes of your time and is completely anonymous.



[h2]About the Game itself![/h2]
It's polish time! Not the country, the shiny stuff. We are busy playing the game, discovering things to tweak and make your experience even better. Like adding a small shadow below the icons in the minimap so that they're easier to read or fixing bugs like huhhh... the mouse not working... It's better played with a gamepad anyway!

It was also about cleaning up all the texts of the game so that our translator, Rachel, can do a great job of making an amazing american english version of the texts written by Actezéro.



Nicolas also put the last touches to the characters. It's small details here and there that make the difference between "okay" and "WOW".

[h2]Next Week![/h2]
If all goes well, next week is yours! You'll finally be able to play our little ambulance game. Hopefully, it will surprise you in a few ways.

And we're not even finished. We'd like to update that demo from time to time, to show you the other features of the game that are not there yet. If you're nice, maybe you'll get to save other patients too!

Bien le bonjour à tous !
Which is french to say "hi everyone" in a quite fine manner.
Yes, we're french, if you didn't notice already.

Things are FINALLY shaping up for a release of the demo! The list of small things to fix or tweak before the release is finally slimming down to the point it's acceptable. We can't wait to have you all playing the game and telling us everything you hate or love about it. We know already that we have much work to do on the minimap, you can skip that one, haha.

Because, yes, if you think you've found a bug in a game that a developer doesn't know about, they probably know about it. Why didn't they fix it then? Because they were busy fixing all the other bugs that were WAY worse.


(That's not a bug btw, that's just an ambulance needing a few repairs)

Anyway, let's talk about Highway to Heal!

[h2]The list![/h2]
As I said, there's tons of small fixes that we have to do for the release. To give you a glimpse of all these many small things that together take a ton of time, I'm going to cook you a list of what has been recently done:

• Showing left/right/up/down on the joystick icons for playstation controllers
  
• Showing left/right/up/down on the joystick icons for nintendo switch controllers
  
• Ensuring UI fits in a 16/10 screen (steam deck)
  
• Cropping characters to see them better when they're in small dialogs while driving
  
• Updating old UI elements to fit the latest style
  
• Ensuring we did not forget anyone in the credits screen
  
• Ensuring we can actually finish the demo and just don't end up with nothing to do
  
• Making the pause menu actually decent to look at
  
• Loading the proper language on game's startup
  
• Adding Discord & Steam Rich Presence
  
• Updating the design of the end of mission screen and animating it
  
• Checking all the texts before sending them for final translation
  
• Integrating the high quality versions of the songs
  
• Adding all the cover art for each radio track
  
• Updating the Steam pages
  
• Ensuring the Steam client properly starts the game
  
• Small bugfix
  
• Small bugfixes
  
• More small bugfixes
  
• ...
  

And I skipped many things that are actually hard to explain, ahah!

None of that is actually super exciting to do... And all of it is important!

We're now waiting on Steam's validation of demo page, then validation of the demo build. Until then, we will integrate the final translation once it's ready, do a final check and probably fix a few things. And then... Then... YOU PLAY! 🎉

Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! It has been a busy week!
...
Wait, wrong show.

Hello everyone, so much happened since last friday. I don't know where to start!

[h2]Spawn Festival[/h2]

As stated in the previous devlog, we had a table at the Spawn Festival in Angoulême, France. Thank you if you joined us, we had a blast! With two computers on premises, people didn't have to wait much to play. From what we could gather, players greatly enjoyed the driving, the funny vehicles, caring for their patients. Overall, they were pretty impressed by the refreshing proposition that is Highway to Heal.

[h2]Demo Progress[/h2]
When you think of making a video game, you think of game feel, level design, visual effects, great music... What you don't necessarily think of, while being very important, is... menus! Well, unless your making a management game of course. Which we don't, by the way.



Look at this ambulance. It can't wait to have you play it!

So yes, one of the reasons people can already play the game at public events and you can't, is because we are there to guide them between the unfinished bits. We now have a working and not too ugly pause menu too. We are also putting the final touches to the progression system so that you can replay missions and try to score them better.

We also spent quite some time fixing bugs here and there, improving the user experience in some parts of the game that still don't work exactly we would like them to. Especially, we noticed people having trouble using our mini-map so we are working on that too.

[h2]Key Art[/h2]
Finally, our new key art , with the new name, as landed! And it's amazing, right? It will be up on Steam very soon.



[h2]Surprises[/h2]
This wasn't laid out in the order of events of the week. There is one I skipped. A big one. But one I can't talk about yet. Soon! I can say that you can expect to see us in a very very cool setting. Guess in the comments! 🥖

Also, we spent some time chatting with some new partners that will help us on our... crowdfunding campaign! Last october, as you might recall, we won the silver prize of La Game Cup. The prize was composed of several parts including a participation in a crowdfunding campaign. This will happen on a french and super cute platform called Ulule! Who doesn't love owls?



👉 Sign up if you'd like to join in👈

[h2]Next Week[/h2]
We still have a ton of work, very minor stuff but so many of them... We can't wait to have you playing the game!

See you then and take good care!

Hi there!

As you might have noticed, our weekly devlog skipped a beat! Indeed, last week, as announced on our social networks, there was no news because we were too tired from a very busy week. What happened? Well, mostly we got on TURBO mode to ship a playable build with everything we really wanted people to try at a "playtest" evening gathering at our coworking space. A beautiful space shared with our friends from Nova-box, Ctrl Freak and Zaka Services.



After having a couple of friends try the game the day before, we already had plenty of notes on our whiteboards. We fixed and tweaked the game to almost all of their feedback, before the evening. But we were sure people will bring up a lot of stuff to our attention. Playtesting is a very important part of game development as development is often a big tunnel that you enter with great ideas and get out with no idea if they actually work or not. The biggest problem being that you know way too much about how all of it works and you really can't be sure if people will "get it" right away.



The evening went great! People could play the first three missions of the game and they liked it a lot! Especially the multi-tasking situations, the drive feeling, the visuals, etc. Of course we can and will continue to improve things. We already addressed most of what tricked people a few times. We also have a couple features that are not implemented yet, like the City Town Hall, that will help people get around easier and faster.

If you want to play the game and are in Angoulême, see you tomorrow at Spawn Festival!



Otherwise, just wait a couple of weeks - probably - for us to finish a few things and you'll be able to play at home the demo of Highway to Heal! See you next week!