Spirit Fire Update #19: Development and Timeline Update 🦋

October 7, 2024

Heyooo!

Let’s talk Spirit Fire.

First though, are there any actions necessary from you at this time?

Nope!

Kay.

So much is happening. Where to begin?

Generally speaking, on the game dev front, the weeks since the last update have involved a lot of playtesting and refinement. This of course touches every corner of the game, but there are two areas that are still seeing intriguing movement and legitimate new developments. The first is the skill test system. For a refresher on what these are, and how they work, check out the previous update HERE.

We’ve thought up A LOT of these tests. Which—good for us—but, we don’t *need* a lot of them, we need a reasonable amount. It’s critical that they be compelling, challenging, varied, and that they find the perfect balance between depth and approachability. So, this means we’re testing the snot out of these, honing in on the final set that’ll make the cut.

That being said, one of the things that’s been interesting about this particular corner of the game is that we’ve continued to find new ideas to explore that are *worth* exploring. So, random ramble: it’s not hard to have ideas. This team is full of creative people who mull on these things day and night. These are our shower thoughts. It’s fun to have new ideas, and the supply of them is really quite endless. Part of the job of game design is recognizing the need to get out of the “it’s fun to have new ideas!” place and commit to the right set of ideas. You know—honing. Like grown ups. At a certain point, additional ideas don’t represent progress or innovation, they just represent…more ideas, and you can stall moving laterally forever, having more and more equally worthy ideas when its time to just commit to a path and move forward. This dynamic is something we’re sensitive to and look out for. The unusual thing about this game though, is that we keep finding new ideas that are more than lateral movements, they offer legitimate innovation that is worthy of pursuit. So rather than just being in the trimming stage like we normally would be, we’re still encountering new developments.

From our perspective as designers, this is thrilling. We’re finding that we’re onto something truly unique with this game, and the more we understand this thing we’ve created the more we’re able to tap into its potential and nuances with better and better ideas. This is sort of a revisiting of similar things we shared in the last update, but it’s such a notable and big part of the development of this title that it’s definitely worth mentioning again.

Here are some more examples of skill test spreads that we’ve been experimenting with. Note that everything on these is in the rapid-prototyping stage. All the verbiage and graphics are whipped together quickly, strictly as proof of concept for testing. Once we’ve figured out which of the tests will make it into the game everything will get a new graphic design and writing pass by members of the team who specialize in those things. Again, its weird to be “rapid prototyping” *anything* at this stage of the process, but this is a really unique game and the development process on it has been suitably unique to match.

ROUGH PROOF OF CONCEPT WORK IN PROGRESS. JUDGE WITH KINDNESS.

In addition to general playtesting and skill test development, the biggest thing still being worked on are the realm designs. It is LOTS and lots (and lots) of writing and thread-weaving of how quests flow and unlock in an open world where different parts of the map get revealed or cut off and so forth.

<Switches to first person> Being so writing heavy, this portion of the game falls primarily on me (Tom). And…it’s A LOT. It’s exciting, and I love it, but it’s a lot, and it’s taking absolutely all of my focus, and since it’s the main thing that needs to be completed on the game before we can go to production, the pressure is on. If you’ve noticed that we’re a bit later with this update than we intended, this is why—because I’m also the person who writes these updates. And the question of where to spend my time is something I’m constantly having to juggle. Of course I need to find a way to do both, this is not a justification for the timing of this update, just a share to bring you into the behind-the-scenes of it all!

Anyway, the realm designs are incredibly fun to work on but wildly complex. Here is a blurred screenshot of a really early version of one of the realm designs. To avoid spoilers as much as possible this is a shot from months ago (even blurred we can imagine people deriving things from this) but even back then you can see just how spider-webby the whole thing is. The different boxes you see here are specific cards or story beats, and arrows help us track dependencies between when things become available, what’s unlocking what, when certain conditions can be met, what gates will be open when, and so forth.

If you find this type of thing interesting, perhaps we’ll release non-blurred final versions of these after the game has shipped! Let us know in the comments if that’s something you’d enjoy and if it’s worth our time to put together!

So, what does all of this mean for our production timeline?!

TL:DR is that this game is a big beautiful beast that’s still revealing its secrets and power to us and we’re going to keep giving it the opportunity to do that until we feel like it's in the strongest place it can be. We take timelines very seriously, but our sense of responsibility to deliver the absolute best possible game holds significant pull as well, and in this case we’re prioritizing the final experience you’ll have with the game over the timing. As such we’ve adjusted our road map a bit! The most critical thing on your end is that fulfillment is currently estimated for the first half of next year (it was previously slated for December). There are a lot of other little details in here too if you want a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at what we’re expecting to be working on over the next few months.

Oh, that warrants clarification—what you’re seeing in this road map graphic is a prettied-up version of one of our internal management tools. The time blocks shown represent when we will be *working on something*, not necessarily when it will be presented to the public, if that makes sense. So this can’t really be used as an outline of “due dates”, but it does give you a nice look at what we’re working on and when.

Check it out:

If you have any questions about this please shoot us an email at groundcontrol@orangenebula.com! We do our best to monitor the comments section and social and Discord and all that, but nothing is as reliable as a good old fashioned email!

One of the next phases of development is broader playtesting with the online community on Tabletop Simulator! If this is something that you think you might want to be part of, please check out the application below!

LINK TO APPLICATION HERE

Please note that playtesting is NOT for everyone. In fact, we’d argue that it’s not for most people. It’s definitely not a pathway to testing a game or trying it early. Please read the application in full before signing up!

Okay, as is the case every day, any minute I’m not actively working on this game I feel an intense sense of pressure to get back to it. So, I’m going to do that. But, before I slip out of here, let’s hit on a few other peripheral details about this campaign!

Timing of Updates:

A quick note on the cadence of updates! With the current workload on this game being so writing heavy, we want to adjust expectations on the timing of updates (a writing intensive task) to match what we’re actually able to do. As much as we’d love to deliver the monthly update we’ve historically delivered, we’re finding that what we’d LIKE to do and what we’re ABLE to do aren’t the same thing right now. Not if we want to keep moving the game forwards at the rate we want.

For the past few months our instinct has been to try to figure out HOW to meet that monthly-update expectation without negatively impacting things that are more important to most backers, like getting the game done. So, pressure has gone into trying to figure out how to meet the expectation, and stressing it, rather than doing what we should have done, which is just be realistic about the circumstances, accept them as our reality, and just share that with you so expectations can be set accordingly.

So with that in mind, we humbly request that Update Expectations be adjusted from “monthly” to “as close to monthly as possible, but generally speaking updates land when there’s something significant you need to know, or when it’s been long enough that no update would feel irresponsible. O-Neb loves and respects me, and will never go dark on me.” 🫡 ❤️

Thank you so much for appreciating that we’re a very small team working very hard and doing our best. Please know that our heart is to be worthy of your trust. We're not perfect, and there are very few of us, so there are always going to be little wrinkles that need ironing out, but we hope those things can be part of the relationship between you and our team, where you can see our humanity in those things and, in some weird way, find trust there, because the thing that you're trusting isn't that we're going to somehow be perfect, but you're trusting that we're very hardworking well-intentioned people that want very deeply to take care of you and deliver a wonderful experience that treats you with respect and appreciation and that we're always going to be fighting to deliver on that. We appreciate you very very much. We hope that’s abundantly clear. If not, please email us and we’ll tell you all about it at length. :-) We promise that we’re always here, available to talk to, and we will never ever go dark on you.

New Game Announcement: Vestige

We have recently announced an upcoming new title: Vestige™. We bring this up here not as promotion, but to address a question that will almost certainly come up, on whether the existence of that game affects the development of Spirit Fire.

The short answer is a comforting “no, it doesn’t.” Spirit Fire has developed to the point that a few of us are still working crazy long overtime hours on it, but the rest of the team no longer has any role to play in its development. So, off they go to work on the next thing, lest they sit around with nothing to do and we quickly go out of business paying them to do nothing.

To be perfectly candid, knowing how to talk about this topic is one of the weirder pressure points of this job. There is always part of us that feels like we need to keep the other titles in progress a complete secret until we deliver on whatever came first (in this case, Spirit Fire) out of fear that the community will worry we aren’t honoring your support or working hard enough on those things. We don’t ever want the existence of another project to hurt you by implying this one doesn’t have the attention it deserves. But, the fact is, it DOES have the attention it deserves, and fear isn’t what we want dictating our movements. Also, you’re smart. We trust you to get it. These are passion projects for us, and we pour all of ourselves into them, but it’s also our job, and we take our responsibilities to you very seriously. Please know that we make all our choices of how we’re spending our time with great mindfulness and respect.

If you want to chat about this, please reach out! We’re right here, plugging away. And thank you, truly, for knowing our heart and trusting that we have your best interests at heart and are absolutely working our tails off to make Spirit Fire worthy of your passionate interest.

The next of our Spirit Fire video overviews is up and ready for your absorption! This one takes a closer look at the REST phase of the game, something that we’re very excited about and that is getting extremely positive responses in our playtesting.

Check that out here:

More guides are underway for closer looks at all the game’s different mechanical nooks and crannies. Stay tuned to future updates (or subscribe to our YouTube channel) to see each of those as they release!

And PLEASE let us know in the comments what intrigues you most about this REST phase of the game. Does this generate any ideas in you that we should keep in mind for future development of this part of the game?