Timbertales my first LibGDX game – Getting back to development!

Timbertales my first LibGDX game – Getting back to development!

Hey everyone,

in the last blog post I told you a bit about going back to old projects or start something new. I decided to go back to an old project. Since my budget is running super low and I can’t survive as indie game developer much longer – I had to make decisions and one of those were: Bringing Timbertales to the quality it deserves!

Added drop shadows and new idle animations

The quality of Timbertales

Timbertales was my first game project and I invested a lot into that game. It is based on a very complex server infrastructure and all the code is written with the libGDX framework. That means I haven’t used any game engine and had to write massive amounts of code. This makes the maintainability even harder and I wish it was achieved with Godot nowadays 🙂

Nevertheless the code isn’t bad at all it just takes so much more time to patch and change things if you have to do it all by code instead of an easy GUI editor. Timbertales were released in a no where near perfect state back in 2017. I had to rush myself because of the lack of money. The start wasn’t very successful and so I didn’t put much more effort in a project which took me more than a year of development time.

New water and shader for it

What has been changed so far?

I started last week to get back the project of course I had to get back into the code and understand things I have written years before, but it was kind of easy to pick up. As first step I started to improve some visual stuff and released a patch on last Friday you can find the complete patch log here: https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791459405092/announcements/detail/1717498690224730223

It is overwhelming how much I learned in the time and so I come up with a lot of changes and very different view than two years ago. My plan is to improve the visuals to make the game more appealing to a possible audience. Afterwards I would like to improve the store page on Steam and put up some new graphic assets like screenshots and trailer to push the sales. My goal is to get more community feedback and release a patch very week. That said tomorrow will hit another patch. Timbertales is also on sale at the moment, if you are interested in the game.

What are the next changes?

This week I also focused on tweaking, fixing bugs and improve the visual quality in general, but there were also a lot of thinking ongoing in which direction the development will move. There will be big game play changes upcoming. I also want to improve the balancing and add another story campaign, but first of all there is small little problem with the budget.