Ranger Quest is almost here

I had been quiet. Too quiet. Life kept the evenings full, and the blog went still.

Long Drop came out in December 2022. It was the first game I took to market, and it made me want to make more, but the hours were the hard part. Slakkedis Studio is a part-time thing. I am a software engineer during the day, so new games happen in the evenings and on weekends.

Ranger what now?

About eight months before this post, I started Ranger Quest, a mobile roguelite defense game. There are a lot of roguelites. This one mattered because it was the start of a longer stretch of making games, and a test of what I could finish.

Inspired by old-school design, Ranger Quest can be played to completion without a forced ad, and it has no in-app purchases.

You gain influence, unlock heroes with different skills and passive traits, level them to 100, and craft items in the Forge. Bosses and later worlds were the plan from the start.

Unity, then Godot

It started as an experiment I thought would take three or four months. It took about twice that to get stable and testable. Two months in, the Unity pricing change landed. Under that model this game was not going to ship, so I ported it to Godot. The port took a few weeks and came with its own rough edges, and the workflows got much faster. Ranger Quest is a Godot game.

Balancing was the job at the time, with an iOS release planned after Google Play. It had come a long way, and it was close.

When?

The Google Play date I was aiming at was the end of May 2024. iOS was underway and was going to land later that year.

The first world is the Goblin Glades, with four heroes. The Dark Forest was the world I planned to keep building after launch.

If you want something to play while you wait, Long Drop is the earlier game. Notes for press are on the Ranger Quest press kit.

See Ranger Quest