Arcana Forge Demo Devlog: Crunching

My original goal about one year ago was to have the features you currently see in the 1.02v Demo for a showcase of the game on 5/16/2025. A good amount of gems to play with and three fights: one normal, one elite, and one boss enemy. You can see many features and changes added between this demo and the previous version.

But 2 weeks ago, the game played almost exactly like the previous version, just with updated art assets, UI, and some small QOL changes. The new gems, enemies, reward system, loading, and other features were developed in just 2 weeks.

I personally really wanted to push for these features to showcase some core gameplay elements at this showcase, since without these features, it would be a nice-looking game, but ultimately fail to convey what kind of game it is due to its lack of actual gameplay depth.

So I did some classic game industry crunch in order to get the game into a really good playable state. I spent just about every day for the past 2 weeks implementing a new feature or fixing old ones.

But what is actually the cause of this crunch time? Why didn't some of these features get added before the date?

The reality for me was that 1. There were other features that were also important to have, and 2. Managing my time better to reach the goal.

For point 1. I think this is probably true across most game development cycles, which is that there were simply other features that were higher on the priority list. While the game wouldn't have that much depth without the added gameplay features, it also wouldn't have played as well or have had the same level of polish it did if I didn't implement the art and UI logic. I had already created some basic fabrications for some of the new gems and enemies, as can be seen in previous versions, so I believed that it would take less time to develop these features since the framework was already mostly implemented. Overall, I would say it was more correct to focus on making sure the experience would be mostly smooth when the experience was added into the game, which brings us to point 2.

As the only programmer for this year's development of this game, I had to implement everything myself. I was happy with simply adding one major feature every week or 2 weeks, depending on whether said feature needed more polish. However, as the date got closer, it was clear to me that I couldn't keep going at the same pace as I was earlier in the year. Which is what led to the crunch. This is where having some to actually manage the project a bit more would have been helpful (which was technically me as the lead game designer). At some point during the development of the game, a list of missing features and a timetable would have put in perspective how many features I really needed to add in order to have a healthier game development cycle instead of having a large crunch period of work.

Timetables and milestones are important, and it would be wise to have someone keep tabs/update these in order to keep the game on track and to prevent the dreaded crunch as that deadline creeps closer.