Raven Errant Releases Early September

 

Raven Errant will release on Friday the 4th of September 2026, to be precise. At 8:14pm British Summer Time (GMT+1), or just after midday on the US Pacific Coast. It is releasing in Early Access, with half the warband factions complete (up tot he 11th Century) for heady price of  THREE US bucks (-10% launch discount).

And here is the official Release Trailer that is on the Steam Store Page.

One thing that I noticed about the Steam Review system this time around, is that they have really tightened up on the "All Ages Content". In the past a bit of claret getting splashed about, or a red decal on the ground (yes I had to age restrict images with red decals) didn't matter so much as long as it wasn't gratuitous. Also in game images might not always have been from the player's point of view, but they were in game, but not anymore - and "devcam" screenshots are now not allowed, only what the customer sees when they play it.

Valve were also very keen on the Early Access description being as nebuluous as possible, so I to remove my planned development roadmap from it and replace that with "I plan to increase the number of available teams/factions" without actually mentioning what they will be. Which I guess is fair enough as they need to cover themselves from "store page said X is coming and X never happened, gib refund 2 years later plz". With all these tweaks my Store Page went through a couple of cycles before getting passed as fit for human consumption.

My game build also had a a review knockback, but most of that was completely self-inflicted as my brain appeared to have melted at some point and was expecting in-game auto-generated save files to synch with Steam Cloud Saves, which of course need to synch before game launch. The solution was to include blank *.sav file in the build (and if you're saving outside of the steamApp folder? Then not sure.) and once uploaded to the depot, set the depot build vdf file to "FileExclusion" to *.sav files or else it will replace the End User's save file and that would be catastrophe.

Of course it wasn't always like this, and back in Ye Olden Steamwerks Dayes you had to manually synch all the data, which was good in a way because I could have Steamworks synch whilst my game's startup screens were loaded. However now it is all automated and preloads between the End User launching the app from the Steam Client, and the Steam actually launching the game. This creates a number of seconds of the splash screen display and nothing else happening - to the point that I have put a disclaimer on my splash screen to warn the User that "Steamworks is loading - please wait". 

August ends, and with September, Meteorological Autumn begins! Note this isn't real Autumn which happens on the Autumnal Equinox late September, this is just some Weather Forecaster trying to make the seasons an even split of months.

So we shall see if Raven Errant manages to acquire more sets of viewers eyes upon release, remembering the Monsters Loot Swag barely made 10% of it's allotted one million front page views over it's full release Visibility Rounds during 30 days. 

Time to re-read up on how to do Launch Day Store Page Streams.

Raven Errant

Coming Soon™

 "Raven Errant" is the name of my new game, who's development I have been showcasing on this blog for the last 12 months. It's a third person hack and slash were roaming bands of raiders move about campsites looking for loot and plunder, often from each other. 

The player starts off wearing a pair of comedy boxer shorts with a love heart print, and steals the clothes off corpses, flogs them in exchange for XP, and then upgrades their stats to equip better clothing, armour and weapons.

The player can enlist in these roving warbands - if they will have then, or they can  wander alone, picking off stragglers and leveling up to become a one man master of battle. There are some good reasons for enlisting, firstly safety in numbers, ask any school of fish, but also that if you follow a team around you get rewarded with free XP, making stat upgrading a little less of a hardship.

Friendly Carolingians are friendly

 Raven Errant will be launching as an Early Access title soon™, initially featuring 8 Raiding Parties which is around half the planned number, and in chronological order is from around the 5th Century (Avars) and up to the 11th Century (Normans). When complete there will be twice the number of Warbands and much more equipment, armour and weaponry will be available.

Raven Errant is currently waiting in review on Steam, so the Store Page is not live yet, but will hopefully be available in a week or so. 

User Ergonomics 2026

Cute Feet

 Flaming June was particularly flaming, at least that's what the troglodytes of the MSM would want us to believe. At one point I found my father wearing a Christmas Jumper in the hope of staving off hypothermia ... admittedly that was only a single and abbarent occaision, and it has mostly been "PIGGING HOT".

So, ignoring straining CPU/GPU fans, we have still been productive on the development front.

This has mostly been about a continuation of enlistment with the AI raiding parties, and interfacing information of what the hecking doolalies the NPC are doing, so the player does not feel random embafflement as they just follow the Ai around blindly.

 This has all been part of upgrading the ergonomics, aka user comfort, of having an actual human bean, interfacing with the whole game environment, and not expecting them to be telepathic as to what my actual intentions were when designing the game. This has naturally been more of pain in the bottom than expected, and taken longer than desired due to faffing with GUIs.

There has also been some faffing with testing engine upgrades, due to Sony, that massive billion dollarooney corporation having created the model format the game engine relies on, somewhat ignoring it's own creation over the years, leading to Blender 3D dropping the exporter plugin recently. This has resulted in FBX becoming the dominant format, and a whole lot of engine rewriting to make certain that it actually works as intended.

 So after a month of mostly record breaking sweatiness, interspaced with a small period of freezing bloody cold, we have come to the stage of having to create the final parts of the User Interface, so the squidgy human (at least we hope it's going to be human but you can't tell these days) can actually get the game to work as the designer intended.

Next up, some branding images, and the long processes of a Steam submission, hoping that I have remembered all of the things required to pass said Steam submission process.