Finally, Brick Rick: Graveyard Shift has been released!
The initial import to the git repo was on October 1st 2020, and I tend to do that as soon as possible because my backup is git! If the latest pure development commit was on February 2nd 2021, that was around 4 months.
Look at this!
As I mentioned here, the physical edition delayed things, and last Saturday I finally made the game public.
So far the reception has been excellent, I’m happy!
Some reactions:
- Full interview, where we talk about both Brick Ricks and game design (in Spanish)
- David ‘mamehaze’ Haywood (MAME developer) streams the game (and finds a bug!)
- The announcement on Twitter got 115 RTs and over 38K impressions, so that’s something!
This is the first long-play that I know of –warning: spoilers–. A quote from the review:
It is tough to come up with something new when it comes to platform games, but this one seems to be rather special for the Spectrum scene. It is a huge and challenging game where you will need to play tactical to defeat the different type of monsters.
The final score is 90%, which is pretty good.
Releasing software is always stressful, there’s no much difference to what I do in my day job, but it wasn’t too bad. Two early bugs that were easy to fix, and it looks like that will be it.
May be software is rarely bug-free, but I call it success if there are no known bugs!
I’ve been thinking how I can unit-test a big part of the code, and my next project hopefully will be verified in a better way, instead of relaying on manual testing only –oh, my games are always very well tested and yet!–. In fact on all my recent projects I’ve settled in a structure that splits logic and presentation (update vs draw), so it sounds possible; and at very least writing the tests will force me to have a deeper look at the code, meaning: less mistakes.
Anyway, go an grab the game. It is fun! And if you have the real hardware and fancy collecting, you can treat yourself with a TFW8b 499 copy.