Hello and welcome to Version 1.0 of the HIGHPOINT site and dev blog!
It’s been a long time coming! We’re thrilled to finally have a “home” on the web that we can share with folks, and an outlet for writing longer-form posts about the things we’re doing and thinking about while developing the game. This project has always been a blast to work on, and now with the site online, it’s suddenly gotten even better!
While Twitter and Instagram will continue to be our go-to outlets for general or higher-level updates about the project, this blog is where we’ll be able to dive deep into some of the specific subjects that are relevant to our current stage of development, or to those stages that are still a ways off but are nonetheless on the horizon for us. Also, game development is a never-ending learning process, and we’d love the opportunity to share what we’re learning with other devs who might discover this blog someday. Plus, we hope that writing about the game, especially in terms of elements of its “design”, will help us further sharpen our vision of where we’re headed. (They say writing about something requires you to think about it in a different way. Others say writing is its own reward. Either way, we’re on board, so let’s get on with it already!)
Most of all, we hope this blog will help us share our overflowing excitement for the project with everyone kind enough to stop by and read about it. We truly are so thrilled to be making this game. It brings us joy every time we play it, and the only thing better than that is seeing the joy that other people experience when they try it themselves!
The following is just an initial idea of some of the stuff we’d like to write about in the near future. At least a couple of these articles would be centered around our recent showing at MAGFest 2020 in Maryland, simply because of how earth-shatteringly inspiring and educational that event was for us.
- Showing HIGHPOINT at MAGFest 2020 — how incredible the event was, especially how we got to meet and, for the first time, publicly share the game with so many cool people!
- How we Prepared for MAGFest (our Very First Show) — this one may take the form of a “guide” for devs in the future who may be going to MAGFest as first-timers like we were. (We learned a ton and want to share what we learned!)
- Improving How the Game Communicates to Players — this article would cover a subject that we’re always thinking about, and that is: How can we make it clearer to players what is happening in the game at all times, especially through improved intuitiveness and visual feedback? We can’t promise any definitive answers on the subject (are there any?), but we’ll gladly talk about what we’re doing to help become better at this ourselves.
Those are just a few of our initial ideas, but there will surely be plenty more for us to write about throughout the upcoming months. We may also consider posting an occasional tutorial article that would describe how we achieved something that we’re proud of in Unreal Engine 4. Time will tell!
Thanks for stopping by and reading our first dev blog post! Stay tuned for more!
If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to receive e-mail notifications when we publish new entries here on the blog. By doing so, you might also receive invitations to (!!) play the game with us (!!) during development playtests in the not-too-distant future. Plus, there are other advantages: when we finally launch our Discord server, e-mail subscribers will be the first to get an invitation to join us there, hang out, and chat!
We also encourage you to follow our Twitter and Instagram accounts! We post something new at least once a week, and that rate is increasing all the time! Check it out and enjoy!
Thank you again! More to come soon! ❤️
—The Highpoint Team