It happened more quickly than I thought. All of the development loose ends that needed to be tied up are now tied up, and EARL’s Warehouse: The Depot is now dev complete and is ready for extended system testing.
By dev complete, I mean that all coding and map editing is done; the only edits that will happen in those areas now are tuning (gameplay and performance), and bugfixes.
System testing will involve testing the old levels as well as the new, to make sure that no regressions have occurred, and will also involve testing the infrastructure of the game, such as making sure levels get unlocked when they should, and all UI elements do what they should.
Beyond testing, the only other tasks that remain involve finalizing the assets that need to wait until maps are stable and tested, like creating screenshots for the level select thumbnails, creating optimized versions of maps for each level, and determining the times for bronze, silver, and gold for each level.
Right now, I am targeting the release of EARL’s Warehouse: The Depot to coincide with the Ohio Game Dev Expo on September 14. I think I am well on track to get there, and am really looking forward to it.
So, having unexpectedly reached this major milestone with my project today, I am going to reward myself with a few extra hours of downtime, and attack the system testing starting fresh with my next work session.