Hit The Button RPG released!
The development process began in summer 2014 when I started making the first working prototype of the concept – with some very ugly placeholder graphics. For various reasons the development faded away from my weekly schedule during the autumn and the project was pretty stopped until summer 2015.
“Luckily” the summer of 2015 had quite bad weather throughout the whole summer so I had a good excuse to stay inside and write some code. Most of the added features were things I was interested in implementing; algorithms to control enemy spawn rates, randomly generated quests and loot. Eventually the game started to feel like it could actually become something worth releasing so I started putting more effort on creating content (new monsters and levels etc.), finalizing the graphics and the flow of the game.
At some point I had a “backlog” written on paper which I considered as “things that need to be done for the game to be releasable”. It was quite satisfying feeling just to know that kind of backlog existed. I’ve scrapped some of my older game projects before because it has felt like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel – like there’s an endless list of unknown things that would need to be done before the game would be ready. Even though I probably made one or two similar “things that need to be done for the game to be releasable” backlogs after finishing the first (Feature creep!), having that kind of backlog gave much confidence to drive the project to the release point.
And that point is now as Hit The Button RPG is available on the App Store.