“Here comes the summer!” I sing, moments before being torched on the surface of an alien planet by the 1000 degree centigrade sunrise.
Speaking of “centigrade,” if you are well versed in counting to ten, you already know what’s coming: that’s right, it’s our update on Milestone 6! This update will be a little different than other ones, as we have been finishing pieces of work in an order which doesn’t necessarily make the game look or feel better in the immediate. We’ll be a little light on showing parts of the game, and a lot heavier on content which will be going into the game, as well as describing where we are and where we’re going in our development cycle.
As we often say, polish is not the focus right now! As you see images or animations of the game, this is just what the game looks like right now, and in many cases the parts that look unfinished are just that: unfinished. We’re happy to show you the foundation, unfinished drywall, and loose wiring of our metaphorical house. Even our numbering scheme is now goofy, since we technically had two short milestones since our last update. Welcome to game development life.
The Big Production
Broadly speaking, our time has been spent with a heavy amount of production, meaning the creation, maintenance, and decision-making about our list of assets and features. Think of it like a packing list for a trip you’re planning, and you’re trying to both plan the trip and source the items at the same time. As mentioned in the last milestone update, I (Dan) have been mostly at the beck and call of the production’s needs, and working to ensure everyone has what they need to continue so our long chain of dependencies keeps up. We’ll have more of a dive into this with our voice acting workflow as an example later.
This last milestone, our goal was to hit what we called our “soft alpha,” which means that we should be able to lock down a subset of assets and features which are done—and the focus is on that locking down, rather than making more things. We are now content-complete for all of our 2D and 3D in-game art, meaning we’ve got all our hand-made creatures, ships, comms screens (with the exception of one final portrait coming this month), and placements (reports from planet surfaces and other space oddities). The last pieces of 2D artwork we’re making are for our Lorebook and standalone in-game things like the intro, outro, or splash/loading screens. There will be a lot of polish to do with how our assets get used—things like ensuring planetside creatures are behaving properly, or tuning animation timings in comms windows, but their actual creation is done.
The final pieces of audiovisual content, like user interface art, sound effects, music, and visual effects, have been created and only need to be iterated or expanded on. As we pass this milestone, we’re focused on the completely missing assets. An explosion visual and sound effect can be not polished or perfect, but there’s something there. We can decide how much polish everything ought to get after alpha, and this will include things like tuning our many planet colors and environments, lighting and color tweaks for different scenes, and polishing our hundreds of procedurally generated space backdrops.
One reason our alpha was “soft” is because we will be needing time to finalize our alien conversations. Some are completely finished and have been for a while, while a few are still just structural placeholders with the real writing still happening. Most are pretty much done and are going to go through some polish passes. All of that said, we have to truly finish the writing before we can record any voice over. We’ll detail some more of that in a later section, as well as talk about the roadmap for what I know we’re all excited for: getting something released.
Before we get there, we want to show a few more of the things we have actually been getting done. Some of this hasn’t been seen (or heard!) before, and one of our more difficult decisions is deciding just how much to trickle out versus keep close to our chest. I’ve actually started a “reveal list” which is just a spreadsheet of things we have shown, things we haven’t shown, and things we want to show at a particular time just to have a plan for the coming months.
We aren’t sure what different people following along will want, like not being spoiled versus knowing all of the intimate and gruesome details of our development, but one thing that we do care about is leaning into transparency. As Mallory joked with me recently on one of our calls, she is used to not even being able to tell anyone the name of the project she’s working on, much less the gritty details. It’s been largely true for me, too. This is the first game that’s been announced at the same time I started working on it!
Shipping Out
We showed two of the backer-created ships last milestone, and we finished the other two this milestone! Their gameplay still has some polish to do, but we wanted to show off our backers’ cool creations.
First up, we have a ship we’ve codenamed the Warp, which is actually a combination of a ship prototype I had built months ago and a unique power the backer designed, with art that they concepted. Because of its aesthetic, this is one of the few ships we built in full 3D. The Warp’s primary ability shoots a beam which does damage proportionally based on the distance to the enemy ship while also doing a knockback, like the reverse of the Chmmr Avatar’s tractor beam. The resulting gameplay rewards you for getting close to the enemy ship, while also letting you use your ability to play keep away. A very fast ship can quickly overpower the Warp, though.
The Warp’s secondary ability and namesake is lifted straight from an old prototype, which allows for the ship to warp back to a previous point in time, restoring its recorded position, orientation, and velocity. We’d like to experiment with other statistics, like restoring crew or removing VUX limpets, but it needs more playtesting first. The fun part of this mechanic is that, while it seems powerful, going back in time is not only gated by energy, but may not even be a good idea depending on where you were. You might put yourself in a worse place than you were before you activated it! We also want to play with how much information is provided to both players about this behavior—like showing a ghostly trail so a player could predict its trajectory if it were to warp back.
Our second ship is called the Spirit, and was made very sweetly in memory of the backer’s departed brother who was a huge fan of The Ur-Quan Masters. Making this ship was a special experience for me, since I got to not just meet the backer and get their own story, but that of his brother. A few “messages from Earth” were written for their brother as well, and we’ll be sharing more of his story in the Lorebook. Our artist concepted the ship based on the idea of a sort of beaten up junker jalopy in space.
The Spirit’s primary power is a very close range circular attack, like a colorful, miniature Kohr-Ah special. The secondary power launches a pair of Ur-Quan Fighter-like drones which start seeking toward an enemy ship after a delay, exploding on impact or after their lifespan. Homing missiles are usually quite powerful, but the Spirit has a little twist to tamp down on them beyond our usual tuning knobs. Occasionally, the Spirit loses power, halting energy regeneration and possibly disabling the thrusters or turning. If the player can manage to jump-start the ship’s power, it will hum back to life. We still have to play around with the power loss mechanic, since it might work better in response to non-random things so players can predict and play around it.
We have all of our captains’ windows completed as of this milestone, too! Robert and Mandy (our 2D artists) had tons of fun with these, and the captains’ windows are one of the charming, direct carry-overs from The Ur-Quan Masters. We’ve made a combination of direct “remasters” for old ships, and imagined new things for all our new ships—and it’s all been possible because you helped us meet the stretch goal.
Know Your Placements
Our universe is more than just ships, creatures, stars, and procedurally generated things. We are creating tons of artwork for telling our story, which we call placements! After aliens tell players about something hidden somewhere on a planet, we want players to be excited when they finally discover it. Most of the things players will find are on planet surfaces, but some of them, like space stations, are floating in space. We’d rather not reveal much of what these things are for, but simply show you some of the work that’s been done because we love sharing.
Just like in The Ur-Quan Masters, some things aren’t giant space objects and will instead be items going into the player’s inventory. While Wimbli’s Trident may or may not be making its return, the player will be encountering a colorful collection of new items in Children of Infinity. What on Earth (or somewhere else) could these things be?
Progression of Note(s)
We’ve been showing at least slices of almost everything as it’s been in production, except for one thing: music. In the future when we have more time, we’d love to do another deep dive on the whole story of the making of the music for Children of Infinity, but for the time being we want to at least tell the short version and share some of our work in progress!
Everyone put your hands, tentacles, and pseudopods together for our amazing composer, Crill! We were directed to him by Eric Berge, one of the original composers from The Ur-Quan Masters, as they had been collaborators in the past and worked together on something you may have even heard before: a lyricized version of the Melnorme theme, POTATOJUICE.
After giving some of their published music a listen and thinking they’d be a great fit, we were able to get in touch with him and start talking about our project and what we’d be looking for. At the same time, one of my friends from a LAN party group I’m part of in southern California suddenly reached out to me and asked if I was behind the project their friend had been asked to compose for. It turned out to be a very small world, as a group of my friends had been long-time friends with Crill too!
At that point, around a year ago this time, he started producing some tracks for us. We prioritized several different types of tracks, like exploration, combat, and communication screens, and he started putting together some different sketches of what it could sound like. In some cases, we wanted something new, and in other cases, we intentionally wanted to remix or reuse parts of Eric Berge’s tracks from The Ur-Quan Masters.
We think the music speaks for itself and we are finally ready to share it, so we’ve put together a sampler platter of some of the tracks in progress for you to hear. We’re keeping the spirit of the tracker music that UQM used, with some of the weird variety from song to song, while also bringing it forward a little into the present, and we’re really happy with the results so far.
We’ll talk a bit more about the scope of our music later, but if you like what you hear, you should definitely check out Crill’s other music! You can hear it on Bandcamp or follow him on Twitch or Bluesky.
Manufacturing
As we mentioned in previous updates, we have been finalizing our order counts for all of the Kickstarter goodies we’re manufacturing for everyone who backed for physical rewards! We have a lot of physical items we’re making, and we wanted to show a bit of the process we’ve been going through.
We started by prioritizing our most complicated items, things we might have difficulty manufacturing locally, and things which would have a longer production time—meaning anything that isn’t printed. We started with the pins first, which are just about to have a sample run produced, which involves making a reusable mold. Below you can see some of the CNC imaging showing the shape of our 3D pins (the Kohr-Ah and Chmmr).
While those have a much longer turnaround time, we were able to do test runs for a few of our items. Here we have a 2” and a 3” version of the Free Stars patch. We’re going to be going with the 3” design, but these 2” samples will no doubt be worth thousands of dollars as super-collectors items some day.
Lastly, we have our sticker sheets! We created a few different types from different manufacturers so we could get a sense of which ones we liked the most.
Mandy (the artist making all of these) and I did some QA tests with the stickers comparing their durability, how they looked, and the quality of the material. We peeled and unpeeled them, we stuck them on stuff which went through the dishwasher repeatedly and got scrubbed with soap, and I even left them out in the sun for a few days to see what would happen. We want to do one more test print to see if we prefer glossy or matte coating, and then we’ll be making thousands of these to fulfill our backers’ orders.
Lastly, we have our printed items, like the Lorebook, Star Map, and the thank-you cards Fred and I will be signing. We finished the Star Map before our Kickstarter, so most of our work is going into the Lorebook, which is going to be our most special thing we’re making. We’re filling it with as much “off stage” information as we can, with background information on the characters of Children of Infinity as well as tons of concept art and development stories we know you’ll be excited to have. While our mock-up we put together for the Kickstarter was just an idea, having all of our art assets compiled and done gives us the opportunity to make something real. Here’s a little sneak peek of a couple pages.
We’re manufacturing our printed items last because they’re more than just art, and beyond just the Lorebook, we want to have time to put final touches on them. They will have the shortest turnaround time and are much easier and cost-effective to manufacture nearby at one of our local printing shops. It also helps that we’ll be able to communicate more closely with them based on our needs.
There is a whole budgeting post-mortem to write about our Kickstarter, but one sticker shock which no one could have seen coming was the impact of suddenly rising manufacturing, importing, and shipping costs rippling out from American policy. We assumed we’d have some margin of error when budgeting these things, but some very abrupt changes caused costs to rise dramatically. When sanity checking our duty costs when importing things, we were very fortunate to come across a community member who had expertise in this area and could confirm we were doing things correctly. Thanks, helpful community member, for confirming things are as awful as we thought!
We have to finalize our manufacturing pipeline before we can commit to a hard date, but we expect our physical rewards will be shipping out later this year. For those of you who are late backers on BackerKit who pledged for physical rewards, we won’t be charging your cards until we have that clear date.
One often-asked question is if we’ll be making some of these things available even after our campaign. The simple answer is: we don’t know! It would make a good deal of sense, and if people like what we make, of course we’d want to make more for people. On the other hand, we are a very light crew and need to prioritize finishing our game too, no matter how much fun making ship pins are (and it is fun).
It was kismet that we were able to bring Mandy Draeger to our art team. She has the unique experience of not just making 2D art, but in turning it into stickers, pins, and other swag! Check out some of her other wonderful designs at the shop she runs for Rocket Cat Rescue.
Backer & Kickstarter Tail End
We’ve covered backer-designed things like creatures, ships, and lander skins. We’ve covered physical goods we’re making for our backers. One thing we haven’t talked about in a while are some of the special experiences backers pledged for, like our private playtest and the design tutorial! We haven’t set a strict date for either of these experiences, but for both of them we want to have a more fully-finished game to share with those backers. While we’re happy to just shoot the breeze with someone in our private playtest, we would much rather have our Super Melee experience polished up and ready for a good play session if that’s what someone wants!
At this point, our timing commitments around those will be based on our game’s schedule as it shapes up.
Production Snapshot: Writing Lockdown Workflow
As described earlier, the most critical set of assets we’re working on finishing up right now is our writing. That’s because even after we finish the writing, there are many other steps we need to take involving other people outside the team. Once the conversation is fully written, then we can record the audio. Once we record the audio, then we can slice and process the audio. Once the audio is processed, then we can actually call that conversation finished.
What does it mean to finish our writing for a conversation, though? It’s important that we not only have actual writing in all the spots we intend, but we also have to make sure it makes sense in the game. This is part of our own, internal playtest process. While we’ve had our overall narrative structure clear for a long time, we learn new things once we actually put all the parts together. It’s important to play the alien conversation. Imagining ourselves as a player, we might want to make sure some things receive more time and attention, or we’ll see how maybe some parts have too much valence and drown out other more critical pieces. There is also a whole role-playing element to the player’s voice—there might be situations where the alien has said enough to communicate a plot point or objective, but we want to let the player have some fun with additional, expressive conversation choices.
Adding voice acting to the game is an additional pressure to really finalize things in our schedule. If we had the license to change anything we wanted later, making minor changes would feel safer. Now, though, we really have to make sure the words are right because someone is going to record them, and then we’re going to process them! It’s one thing to have to redo some of our own work, but it’s a much bigger logistical challenge to change voice lines since we have to coordinate with another person. We call that kind of additional recording “pickup sessions,” and we can do them, but it’s always tricky.
At this point, we have four characters we consider signed off on and ready to record. One has even already had their recording finished. As for the rest, we’ve staggered their sign-off dates over the next two months, placing characters we think will undergo more revision and changes toward the end, with characters who might already be done but just need a final sign-off toward the front. We can always sign off on someone early, but the purpose is to give us time and also allow us to predict when we will have our finished voice assets.
We will talk a bit later about our thinking on when and how we release our game, but you can see that there is a real amount of time necessary for each step in the process, and by choosing to take additional time in one step, we run the risk of causing a chain of delays at a minimum, or lose the ability to get work done at a maximum.
Last but not least: I have been flooded with voice acting auditions! If you sent one in, don’t worry, I got it. I can’t respond to all of them just yet because of the schedule above, and there’s a dependency jigsaw puzzle of peoples’ availability and our budget. As we progress and fill in some of the holes, I’ll be reaching out. If we do fill in the whole puzzle, then I’ll be in touch to let you know the window has closed.
By the Numbers
I wanted to share a bit of data from our production flow. We just use it to help us work, but to outside parties might be exciting as far as building expectations, intrigue, or other primal emotions! Plus, at some point we’re going to have to write some really nice marketing copy for our game, so this helps us get some practice.
One of the questions we scratch our heads over a lot and we are asked often is: how big is the game? This could mean so many things, but people usually think of expected playtime. The true answer is, we’re not sure yet! We need to playtest it more and polish the pacing, and the play time almost becomes one of the last things to tune when we see what is taking too long and what players get into that we can give them more time to enjoy.
However, we do know how many bits and pieces are part of our game, and while we can’t answer how big the whole is, we wanted to start sharing some of the parts we’ve itemized. Think of it like a production shopping list! Our game contains the following:
- 38 unique playable ships and 39 captains’ windows (the mismatch can be a source of your intrigue!)
- 26 comms screens
- 27 characters with voices
- 30 planetside creatures
- 36 tracks of music (at least! this will almost certainly be greater)
We could have forgotten, but that might be the first time we announced some of those stats! We’ve talked about stars, planets, and procedurally generated things before, but not so much the hand-made pieces. Enjoy and speculate away!
What’s Next?
We’re running all of these production pipelines focused on finishing things intentionally! One of the reasons we ran this Kickstarter was to raise funds so that we could hire help to create those things. In the evolution of our project and our team, we’re wrapping up the current content phase in two significant ways. First, we want to finish the content so we can put it all in the game. Second, our game does have a budget, and we have crested past the point where we can afford to create more things.
In some of our previous updates after the Kickstarter finished, we mentioned some of the new members who had come on to join our production. As I write this now, most of those people are either done or are wrapping up their stint with us—not because we want them to go away, but because we actually have no more work for them to do or can’t afford to keep them even if we did! Mallory and our writers are staying on a little longer to finish their work, but our hired, full-time art help is wrapping up.
If pre-production was determining the sites where we wanted to mine and setting up facilities, and production was the quarrying process, now we’re about to take all of our rough stones and start cutting, polishing, and setting them in jewelry. At this point, we’re going to be winding back down to how we handled our pre-production process: working as a very small team.
One thing that is hard to explain, much less believe, is just how gigantic this game is compared to the size of our team! Even when we were at our “biggest” with a total of six full-time contributors, it required a lot of production effort to just manage everyone’s contributions. We reached really high and really wide by focusing on supporting our temporary staff. For the next phase, we narrow down and go deep.
The question we all want to answer is, “When is the game coming out?” It’s probably come up in every one of our updates, including the one prior where we asked, “What is the game coming out?” Our last full-time artist, Mandy, will be wrapping up with us this July, and at that point we can actually take a deep breath, and start to really consider the work that remains and how we want to approach it. The only sure thing we can say relates to our writing assets and schedule: we will need until September to finish our voice overs.
This gets into some of the personal stuff for me which I’ll talk a bit about in the next section, but when I talk about our small team and our production overhead, I’m talking largely about my own efforts, which are about enabling the team to make progress. Once those responsibilities subside, I will be back into one of my other roles: the manual labor of finishing features, polishing things, and fixing bugs. At this point, until I know how quickly that process goes when I have my hands free again, it’s too hard to estimate when we’ll be able to finish up.
The upside of this, and part of our plan all along, is that our operating costs for our limited crew will diminish back to our pre-production levels. As I enjoyed reading all of the responses from our community, one of the frequently-occurring ones is “Take your time!” Often I would think, “Sure, but on whose dime?” We’re finally coming to a point where we actually can make those kinds of decisions because we aren’t funding a giant (relative to our team size) production, and Fred and I can decide what would be best.
What would be best is going to be what will produce the best possible game.
We’ve discussed it a bit in the past, but one of the big puzzles to solve as we get ready for releasing something is how we can get some playtesting done. We have our very small internal team of volunteer contributors who we can likely wrangle into playing, but figuring out how to open the game up to a larger set of players to actually help us playtest will make the biggest impact on our end product. Can we playtest the game without voice over? Absolutely! Do we want to release the game without voice over? Probably not. Are there parts of the game that don’t require voice over? Yes! Super Melee as a standalone thing has crossed our minds many times, and there are no alien conversations there.
Our next update will likely focus on this plan, including what we’re thinking for how, when, and what we will release. To recap, the only thing we’re pretty sure of for our releases is that we’re focusing on the English versions of the Steam and GOG versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux as well as the Switch first. Localization and the PS5 and Xbox versions will be a step afterward.
A Longer-than-Usual Personal Note
This takes us to my closing notes. I referenced having my hands free because a lot of this upcoming work is on me, at this point, apart from the narrative pieces which Mallory and her team are taking to completion. This is actually my favorite part of every project, and I am looking forward to pivoting my role back into where I started: doing a lot of manual labor and polishing to make sure our work is as great and shiny as it can be. Running our big production-sized team involves me all the time, and there isn’t a back-up to help cover for me when I’m not around or trying to polish something for the game. I had to drop all of that to support the team!
This means some things didn’t happen as fast as we had hoped. It doesn’t mean they won’t get done—it just means we couldn’t do as many things in parallel. I couldn’t do as many things in parallel for this very demanding project, and the last couple months included some additional demands on me. What I’m going to share is truly personal. As this is a small team with a big project, I hope you can appreciate how much of the project is in a small set of hands and how intertwined our lives become with working on our game. It’s why even this update is coming a few weeks later than we wanted.
On May 13th, my bird Topal passed away. Unlike with Buhar, his sister, who passed suddenly, I at least knew Topal’s passing was coming. Since about February, I started making regular trips to the vet to monitor him and was giving him end-of-life care. I gave him medication twice a day, which he hated. Three times a week, I would give him subcutaneous injections with the help of my partner who learned to hold him for me so I could insert the needle on his tiny leg. He really hated that. This was just a small part of his fifteen years with me, but it was a daily stressor and was quite devastating to me when he finally passed. He was a longtime friend and a frequent voice on our live streams, and I will miss him dearly.
In June, just in time for my birthday, I came down with Covid. Unlike the previous stints I had with Covid where I’d get knocked down and then get right back up within a week, this one actually plagued me with symptoms for over three weeks. I have had to fall asleep in the middle of the day, I have been unable to exercise (usually about 10 hours of my week), and my mind has been so addled that it has often been hard to even work at all. With deadlines coming up and contractors I only have a limited amount of time with, you can imagine the stress! I thought I’d catch up from the four days I took off during the initial infection, but there I was, weeks later, still trying to recover. When I asked my doctor about it, he said “Think of it like recovering from a concussion: you’ll feel confused by what isn’t happening day to day, but you’ll improve week by week”. Fortunately, I have not had a concussion, but the frustration that I cannot do what I ought to be able to do and knew I used to be able to do is exactly how I feel. As I write this, a whole month later, I can say I am finally better.
On another team, one person’s bumps in the road may just be someone else’s work to pick up. On this project, there is no other person! I don’t have a back-up Dan who is doing the same kind of work and can fill in. This is the same for everyone working on the game in their domain. Apart from these unforeseen hiccups, we wouldn’t have it any other way, though. This is a very personal project in every sense. And people are, well… human!
Made by People, for People
It’s nice to be human, though. One of the interesting experiences I’ve gotten through backer communications is seeing how surprised people are to hear from me. I’ve noted it before, but it continues to surprise me (and them!). I think it’s emblematic of what’s going on in the world that people are actually shocked to talk with a real human, and, moreso, that they are treated like a real human! Sometimes people will send support emails in very, ahem… colorful language, sometimes in quite a demanding tone. I’m not offended! I can tell they are used to cutting through the noise of corporate machinery in the hopes of talking to a real person. There is no “support department” here. There isn’t a ticketing system. I don’t have a form response I copy from. There’s no chatbot. I’m just a person on the other side of the Internet like you, and so are the people working with us. I value every interaction, even if it’s just an email with someone!
It’s a reminder that people—especially in technology settings—don’t always get that experience. It makes me think that people have just gotten used to being dehumanized, told by so many things in the world that they don’t matter. But you do matter! Our game matters too, otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading this, having supported our work. There’s a direct correlation! If you, the player of our game, didn’t matter, then why would we bother making a game for you? This isn’t for me or for us (the developers). This is for you, a person who matters because our game was made with the intent of you enjoying it. It shouldn’t feel remarkable, but it is when we point it out.
Why is it remarkable? It feels sorely missing right now. Speaking from my American point of view living through current events, it feels like our humanity has been sacrificed in the pursuit of profit. The amount of control, funding, and messaging being concentrated for no other reason than generating revenue is not only deeply disturbing, but also insulting to our collective well-being as people creating community, life, and joy. If a person’s value to society is just the profit they make, what does that even say about how we treat people? I can’t even leave my home without seeing a bus stop billboard which proudly claims “stop hiring humans”. Yes, I know it’s just real-life clickbait to get attention, but if your marketing involves a race to the bottom to demean people, what, exactly, are you selling and promoting?
If the only thing that matters is the bottom line, why bother applying your humanity—your most valuable and unique asset—to anything? This reductive treatment isn’t a new phenomenon, but it is coming to a head in America. It’s beyond sad and distressing, and I am seeing how it takes a toll on our collective well being. Of course people I’m communicating with sound stressed. They probably are. We all are.
I’m not sure we can heal the world even if we wanted to, and I’m not sure how that will be resolved. We feel it’s important to do the work we can do, which is in our game. It’s a statement of our values which we want passed on to you. For me, this game and being able to do it in the open with all of you is a celebration of our humanity and what we feel is calling upon the best in everyone.
We want players who pick up our game to feel they matter, they are welcome, and they are included. Right now, we need you to know that you matter, in spite of the many flashing lights surrounding all of us which might be saying otherwise. Especially if you feel like you are one of the “othered” people with a scary spotlight shining on you. You don’t deserve that, and you’re more than that to the people around you.
I want to again take a moment to thank our Patreon community for continuing to support us after our Kickstarter in return for essentially nothing. Everything you’re contributing goes to supporting our work and our game. If what I wrote above is about how much you all matter to us, getting your direct support certainly makes us feel important to you. We continue to have no obligations to any investors, and we are committed to making the best game possible without strings attached or deleterious choices made to maximize profits.
Please join us on Discord, Bluesky, and Reddit to be a part of the community. You can still support us on Patreon as well. All of it means a lot to us.