First things first, vote for Retool on Steam Greenlight! With that being said, Retool is around 95% complete. The main things that are left are the weapon meshes, testing and getting Greenlit. For the rest of this month, and next month, I will be continuing with marketing Retool. Hopefully you will see the game out this time next month. Below you can find all the major updates that happened with Retool in March.
Getting Ready for Steam Greenlight
Retool is a 3D hacking puzzle game set on incomplete orbital defense stations that circle around Sinai, home planet of the alien species known as Onix.
After 43 years of war, the Onix triumphed and defeated the humans. The victory came at a cost of destruction to their planet and orbital stations. Instead of repairing it themselves, the Onix used their captured prisoners as slave labor to rebuild their destroyed properties, starting with the stations.
You are Maria, an engineer that was captured in the final weeks of the war. Having hacked your way out of your prison cell on a station, you must escape and return home.
Look ma, new description text of Retool! That was the first thing I did this month. Other than that small update, I had imported some new meshes and tweaked some animations. I then started to create a draft of how I wanted my Greenlight trailer to look. I also was trying to decide on how much to charge for the game. When I originally decided to make a commercial game, I was thinking $10, but now I am thinking that is too high. $5 seems too low. Maybe I should go halfway, like $8.
Retool is Finally On Steam Greenlight
My next update was two weeks later. A lot had happened over the two weeks. First, I created a trailer and finally put the game on Steam Greenlight. Second, the music for Retool was completed. The talented Liz Rainsberry created it and you can listen to a sample of the OST by clicking here. Lastly, the promotional art for Retool was also completed. It was created by the brilliant Kim Parker. You can see the poster below. The main image used for this post is a banner, which was also created by Kim. I now just had to wait for Retool to get greenlit before I could do the final testing and then finally release the game.
Weapon Meshes Nearly Complete, Waiting To Be Greenlit
In the last week of this month, I didn’t do much regarding the development of Retool. It was mainly marketing the game on social media. I was also waiting for the weapon meshes to be completed. I did get an early look at some of the weapon meshes and they looked great in my opinion. They stand out enough from the rest of the level environment so that the player would know what they were without having to inspect them closely. I decided to use the new spare time I had in this week to test out some of the ideas I had. None panned out so far. I also did some small updated with Akuto but that is a story for another post.
Apart from that, I also created a development progress album that highlighted the changes made in Retool from 2014 to today. It was inspired by some post created that week in r/gamedev of developers showing progress in their own games.
