Dec 19, 2022

CONSCRIPT - JD

CONSCRIPT 2022 Development Recap

Hey everyone! Hope you’ve all had a great 2022. For me, it has been one of the busiest but also most rewarding years of the entire development process!

I don’t have any big new announcements or anything here, but rather I just want to provide a quick recap of all the progress this year - across all parts of development! It has been an absolutely massive year behind the scenes. I’ve not put my foot off the pedal for the entire year. I'll also show off some new development screenshots throughout!

The first half of the year was spent on refinement and content. I took a lot of the feedback from the older 2021 demo seriously and improved on the core mechanics of CONSCRIPT substantially.

Combat was rebalanced, new mechanics were implemented, and there were a bunch of QOL improvements made across the board.

The 2nd half of the year was a tough balance between creating new later game content, and showcasing at various physical events. When you’re a solo dev, you have to wear so many different hats to release a successful game. Between actual development, securing funding opportunities, social media marketing and traveling for events - there’s always so much to be done. It’s very exhausting, but also highly rewarding.

VICSCREEN FUNDING

Very early in the year I was able to secure a development grant from Australian government agency VicScreen! This ensured that I was able to keep working on the game throughout the year in a full-time capacity which I have been very grateful for.

GAMESCOM 2022

In August I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Cologne, Germany to showcase CONSCRIPT and represent the Australian game development scene on the world stage.

I know it probably doesn’t sound like much for most, but when you’ve created something from absolutely nothing, with zero experience in gamedev prior - it’s surreal being able travel overseas to showcase your work.

It was an incredible experience, and I got to meet so many industry veterans and talented indie devs. Hopefully I’ll be back there next year!

VERDUN RESEARCH TRIP

After Gamescom wrapped up in Cologne, I made my way to Verdun, France to fully immerse myself in the place that I had spent years researching for CONSCRIPT. It was inspiring finally being able to walk through the landscape that inspired the game.

A century later, the apocalyptic wastelands have been overgrown with a dense and beautiful verdant forest. It was a strange feeling, walking through somewhere so tranquil yet having a weird feeling that something terrible happened here at one point in history.

Walking through the old overgrown battlefields, you can still make out trench lines and shell craters from more than one hundred years ago.

A lot of the forest was still gated off and inaccessible due to unexploded shells and explosives still buried under ground. It’s crazy that even a century later, the scars of war still mark the land.

Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont were both really interesting visits, that I would highly recommend for any history nerds who ever find themselves visiting Verdun.

Even in the middle of summer, the air inside their tunnels felt so damp and cold. Now imagine being one of the soldiers forced to fight in there for weeks on end, while fending off grenade and flamethrower attacks.

Both of these sites were fairly tourist-y though, which I find always cheapens things to some degree. That’s why my personal highlight was exploring the ruins of Fort Souville which some of you may recognise as an area from the demo.

This fort has been completely left for nature to reclaim and most of the interiors have collapsed.

Fort Souville entrance in 1916:

Fort Souville entrance in CONSCRIPT:

Fort Souville entrance today:

Goes to show that eventually enough time will pass where the scars of war have completely healed and nobody will ever understand what has happened here. I feel like that’s why historical games are so important, because they allow us to travel back in history and get a very small feel for what things might have been like.

Fort Souville entrance in 1916:

Fort Souville entrance in CONSCRIPT:

Fort Souville entrance today:

I feel very lucky to have been able to come here, and a lot of pictures have already been used as reference material for the game. I hope that CONSCRIPT feels even more authentic now that I've explored Verdun myself.

You can check out more photos from my trip in my September Kickstarter devlog here!

2022 GAMEPLAY TRAILER

In case you missed it, here's the new trailer I made back in September!

2022 DEMO UPDATE

In what has become somewhat of a yearly ritual, I updated the CONSCRIPT Steam demo later in the year to include the changes and refinements I had made since the last demo. This version has been the most positively received out of all revisions by far.

A lot of industry people would probably say that offering such a long slice of gameplay for free so early in development is a bad idea in terms of marketing and sales, but I think it has been a necessary part of the development and evolution of the game. If it weren’t for constant feedback that I have been able to gather from these demos, I don’t think the game would be as refined as it currently is.

However, as I move closer to release, I can’t guarantee that the same 1-2 hour demo will remain up during launch - as it would again be a significant gulf in quality and polish compared to the eventual full game. Enough time passes and you start to get a lot of messages and bug reports about issues that are no longer present in the full game which can be somewhat annoying. Demo builds also take a lot of time to develop, polish and publish, which may be time better spent focusing on a successful launch when the time comes.

So If you’d like to check out the CONSCRIPT demo as it is, I’d recommend doing it in the next few months. If I do decide to replace or take it down, I'll let you all know in advance.

PAX 2022

Following Gamescom, I showcased CONSCRIPT at PAX AUS in Melbourne! In PAX 2017 I visited PAX Australia as a consumer when I was only a few months into my game development journey. I saw the indie booths there and promised myself I'd one day be in that position. So I finally got to turn that dream into reality this year!

The CONSCRIPT booth was packed for all three days. Even with three people running the booth, there were no breaks at all. It was intense, but very rewarding.

People waited in line for up to 45 minutes to play the demo, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Moments like this make the years and years of hard work worth it. I hope to be back next year to meet more of you!

That same week I was also invited to speak at Freeplay Parallels 2022 infront of a packed crowd including industry veterans such as Shuhei Yoshida from Playstation! I spoke about my development journey, my inspirations and why I think it's important to explore history though the medium of video games. I'll let you know if the video ever becomes available online.

Even while balancing all of these events and commitments, I still managed to make a lot of progress on the game itself! I’m not ready to announce a release date yet, but just know I am getting closer to the finish line.

I know this game has been in the works for a few years now and some of you may be getting frustrated, but please understand that I’m a one man dev team and working as hard as humanly possible. I look forward to the day where you can all play the full game.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter for more frequent micro updates and new development screenshots. I typically post on Saturdays for #screenshotsaturday.

You can also join the CONSCRIPT Discord server. I'm fairly active on there and always happy to chat with the community.

I only post Steam updates for major announcements or news, and generally leave the smaller things for Twitter and Discord. So be sure to follow me on those channels if you're interested in more frequent posts.

That's it for now!

Have a great holiday period, and a happy new year - I'll see you all next year for what is hopefully the final stretch of development.

Stay safe!