Insider news

Hello friends of Pier Solar.

This is Tulio speaking with some cool news. Finally, 1 year after a big punch when we lost much of our pixel art, we finished the development of all critical pixel art and move on to final graphical touches. Also, after 1 month confined with Fonzie in a "bootcamp" experience I'm very happy to say that the main game programming (so called game scripting) has been completed. With those two steps, the game now moves on to the phase of internal testing, or as I'll call it, final beta stage.

That's a very important mark as it means that the game scope is closed to additions and improvements (oh my God, there were so many). We implemented all the new features that will bring Pier Solar to excellence both as Software and as a game.

First fast run on the game took us more than 10 hours to complete. Mind you, a fast run means game without enemies, without ambient NPCs, without extra chests, just what you need to travel between all cities and all dungeons to complete the game without stopping to learn the story, explore for treasures, etc. We're positive that the game will render at least 30 hours of game play considering the rich environment that has been created on every town and the complexity of the dungeons as the game advances.

Next phases on Pier Solar development will go as follow:

- Play test
- Final Pixel Art insertion
- Bug fixing
- Monster/items/magic calibration
- Bug fixing
- Translated texts input
- Bug fixing
- Battle frequency and difficulty calibration
- Bug fixing
- Items price calibration
- Bug Fixing
- More beta tests
- Bug fixing
- Proof reading of all languages
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- And maybe more bug fixing.
- Release to manufacture
- Shipping

This doesn't mean that the game is full of bugs, on the contrary, it's playing clean from beginning to end. However, players often do the most unexpected actions and that's what we must cover for. We just want to be sure that we'll test the game as much as it takes to get it on commercial grade bug free status. It's really annoying having to wait a little longer for the game to be completed because there is so many tests and re-tests going on, but hey, it's even more annoying to think of the possibility of the player doing something he's not supposed to then save the game and get it locked forever.

We don't want to allow such thing to happen with Pier Solar so we're insisting on this once more: There will be no rush on the release, it must be perfect. This is not like PS3 games that you can release with minor bugs then update it later... once it's written to the ROM chip it's written forever, so we must be sure that it will be perfect. I know it's boring to wait but trust me: You'll thank me later.

Best regards!

My brain is no work good.

Whoo...

Umm...

*Awkward*

Hi everybody! I forgot about this for the second week in a row. That's embarrassing. But here we are! Humbled and ready to provide you with more weekly snippets of the development process.

There are a couple of reasons we've missed these though. First, we're all still working hard on the game but more importantly there have been some exciting developments in the world of Pier Solar and Watermelon. We can't discuss details but rest assured that they are exciting enough to be keeping us up at night.

Here's a hint: We may all be knighted because of it.

Is that a real hint?

Here's a hint: No.

We've also been pretty distracted by E3. Or at least I have. I don't normally discuss non-WM related stuff here but Fumito Ueda's latest is worthy of these hallowed halls. If you don't go out and buy The Last Guardian the moment it comes out I'm going to take you all outside individually and slap you in the teeth.

Slapped. In. The. Teeth.

The Web Master talks Pier Solar

Hi there folks,
It's not often as the web and PR bloke that I get to speak about Pier Solar to its fans. Unlike the rest of the team, I'm not directly involved in development but I do have the perk of seeing inside game progress!

As an insider, I thought I'd give a bit of a fan based prospective of my experiences playing a recent build of the game.

The games initial opening sequences are something you rarely see in Sega Mega Drive / Genesis games in terms of movement. The logos, introduction and title screen sequences have fluid animation and effects that I personally only associate with very late SNES and post 16-bit games.

The game menu has many options and customisations to choose from and by the looks of it a lot of un-lockable items, I'm presently unaware of what these are or how they will be unlocked but it looks like playing hard will reward you with a lot of extra content!

The game itself has come on in leaps and bounds since the initial demo. The demo pales in comparison to what I'm playing on now. Just from walking around in the game, you can really see how the team took every bad word spoken of graphics and really turned it around! Some of the maps are huge! And have puzzles, chests and keys scattered all over the place this game isn't going to be a breeze to complete like the demo!

Battles have some massive sprites for a Mega Drive / Genesis, great monsters with very nice frame rates, magic, weather, some very interesting other graphical feats that I can't really speak about. Pushing hardware was definitely on Fonzie's cards when he was programming!

I'm going to leave my comments there and say I'm glad I pre-ordered before I became a member of the team! I'm extremely confident that this game will certainly make a big mark for itself in the retro community.

Cheers,
Matteus

Internal demo released

Yep guys, the moment is very close. We released an internal demo, our first release candidate. Our team is reviewing the game and based on the reviews some adjustments will be made.

Haha, I hope they take at least one day so I can breath once in a while... ;)

See you soon with more news!

Pier Solar in high demand

Pier Solar has not only gained the attention of many gaming-sites and forums since our new website was launched, it has also has attracted several companies that have expressed their interest in publishing and distributing the game. Although nothing is decided yet, and we are still also considering doing the publishing all by ourselves, this is a great sign and should assure the fans that this game will not only come out, but that we have the chance to deliver the best quality possible.

TRPG's official name: Pier Solar and the Great Architects

It is finally decided! The final name for our project, until now codenamed Tavern RPG or TRPG, is Pier Solar and the Great Architects!

We are also glad to announce that the game has being evolving in a nice pace!

We know that everyone is urging for a demo, we are working on that. Soon we will have news about it and have a link for download, so, stay tunned!