Witch Hunt status update

A long time has passed since the last update on the blog. Often times I would just post a quick image on twitter or instagram and neglect the blog. I’ll try and increase the frequency of the blog posts in the future.
So, what happened since the summer of 2018? First of all, the title of the game will remain Witch Hunt. Even though I still think that Uncanny Nights was a unique title that also kind of fit the content of the game, I never really got used to it. It’s also a little hard to pronounce I think. As a consequence I had to change the logo I had a freelancer make for the game. My graphic editing skills were just enough to accomplish that:

What else? The game itself is essentially done now. I implemented the cut scenes between the first and second dungeon, NPCs, converstations, the final boss battle and the cut scenes for the ending. Overall I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Now basically the polishing phase starts.
After that I took a break from developing and started to look at the game more from a marketing perspective. I made a plan of all the things I need: a trailer, a landing page, a beta testing program with a questionnaire, a new demo, new screenshots and a way to subscribe to an e-mail newsletter to contact people who showed interest in the game again when the game actually gets released. That’s a lot of work. How far have I come? I finished the trailer, registered a new domain for the game and also implemented about half of the landing page. Setup of the e-mail newsletter is also in the works. I’m quite satisfied with the progress.
So the next steps will be:
- Test-play the entire game, write down all bugs or issues
- Fix potential bugs
- Create a new, shorter demo
- Create a beta testing questionnaire
- Add the new demo and the beta testing program to the landing page
- Publish the landing page and post in into relevant forums, subreddits and social media
After the release of the landing page, hopefully some people come forward to play the beta. While the beta test will be ongoing, I’ll polish the game and fix potential bugs. After that I’ll prepare the launch by setting up store pages on the common distribution platforms. Candidates are: Steam, GameJolt, Itch.io and Kartridge.
That’s all for now. I’ll update when I get at least one or two more things done from the list above. Bye!