Development Update #22

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the twenty-second development update for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men.  This update will be fairly brief as there isn't actually a whole lot to go over, other than the fact that, well, yes, the game has in fact been been completed on time and is due to be released tomorrow!  This is quite exciting on its own but there are still a few new features to look at compared to last month.  Let's get started!

The Beast(iary)

This feature was planned a long time ago, but it was never really that important so I just left it for the end.  The end came in July so it was finally time to have a look at it - and I'll let you in on a secret, that message displayed when you click the button in the demo ("Not available in the demo") was actually hiding the fact that the feature wasn't implemented at the time.  The same applied to the achievements menu that I covered in the last update.  Here is what it looks like now:

Each enemy has a unique description giving them some background information, and all of their animations will be displayed in sequence.  Sometimes the information may help you defeat them, other times it will just poke fun at them.  It's quite a small feature but I think it helps make the game feel more polished.

The End(ing)

In the beta there wasn't much of an ending after defeating the final boss, other than some scrolling text.  That has all changed now as I have been hard at work making a much nicer looking one.  Here's a sneak-peak of it:

I'm quite happy with the way this turned out, so I hope you will find this a bit more of an interesting (and satisfying) end to the game as well.

Done At Last

Yep, I can finally say that!  It's quite hard to describe how I feel at the moment.  This is the first real game I've managed to see all the way through to release and I guess I am very pleased with how things have gone.  This last month has been surprisingly stressful as I didn't have much time to work on the game (surprisingly even less than in June) so it was quite nice that there weren't many things to cross off the list this past month.  I hope it proves to be enjoyable for all those who choose to buy and play it but even if it turns out to be a complete commercial failure I won't be too bothered - I have gained a huge amount of experience doing this and I'm also looking forward to giving it another go so I can apply all of the new things I've learned for my next project.

Almost two years ago I made a promise to publish one of these every month until release.  I'm so pleased to say that I was able to keep that promise!  It's unfortunately rare these days for game developers (especially the big ones) to keep promises so I hope those of you who have stuck around since the beginning appreciate this as much as I do.

Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men will be releasing tomorrow, on 6th August 2024.  Once again, a big thank you to all of those who played the demo and the beta, wishlisted the game and gave feedback that made this all possible.  I know I have quite a small audience (as of writing this, hopefully that statement will age like milk!), but I still really appreciate the audience I have had so far.

See you tomorrow for the release announcement, and thanks for reading!