20 Feb

NagiQ on Steam

We’ll be releasing our game NagiQ on Steam 🙂 The release date is set for March 5:

NagiQ is a family-friendly, word game. It’s a great game to practice English vocabulary, and you’ll have to think a lot to complete all the 100+ boards of the game. Here’s a trailer with the basic gameplay:

Basic gameplay: Type words and connect the mystic letters.

We’ve added 10 Steam achievements to the game, corresponding to the trophies you get for completing the following actions:

  • Capture 2 mystic letters in a single play.
  • Capture more than 2 mystic letters in a single play.
  • Length of a word greater or equal to 15.
  • Complete a board with an amount of words lower or equal to the number of mystic letters on the board.
  • Complete a board in less than 10 seconds.
  • 20 consecutive boards completed, without exit / reset.
  • 15 consecutive boards completed, without using hints.
  • Score >= 20,000
  • Score >= 100,000
  • Score >= 200,000

Updating NagiQ on Steam

NagiQ is the first game we released, back in 2011. The game was created with Ren’Py, and in hindsight those were really fun development times. In order to integrate Steam achievements I updated the game to use the latest Ren’Py version. In short, these are the changes I had to make:

  • Replaced all calls to renpy.main.save_persistent() with renpy.save_persistent().
  • Disabled some new keymaps added by Ren’Py newer versions. NagiQ is a game based on keyboard input, and thereby we cannot show a Ren’Py menu when a specific keystroke is detected.
  • Extended the list of restricted words. When the first NagiQ was released we noticed that some reviewers of the game went straight to trying to input “foul words.” Perhaps some people find that funny, but we prefer the game not validating words of such kind.
  • To access the game’s dictionary we use a custom 32-bits DLL. I had to modify all the code to load the DLL, and tweak the encoding of the strings passed to the DLL’s functions.
  • Replaced renpy.loader.transfn with renpy.file.
  • I also simplified several levels of the game.

It seems this new build of NagiQ is running fine. So let’s hope everything goes well with its Steam release, on March 5 🙂