Using my powerful new “how-many-days” tool in conjunction with this blog’s archives, I got into the task of getting an estimate of the effort invested in the NovaMundi family of projects, so here’s another one of these periodical look into the past of the NovaMundi project, this time with numbers.
Part 1 – Expedition (Java)
NovaMundi’s direct predecessor is Expedition, the old one from 2009 born from a 7DRL challenge, dead when I tried to add rain animations. I could write a lot about that one which sadly never got a proper ending. For now it’s just going to be the numbers:
| Year | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Days of Work | 15 | 51 | 69 | 5 | 1 | 2 |
Total: 143 days of my life
The tally kind of matches the last manually tracker day counter, 66 days at November 1, 2010, amazing.
Voyage
Small side note, while looking for these numbers, I figured the repos I have are missing the work done in 2017 for the so-called “Voyage” project, which is sad. I’ll need to find them. I think it was possibly one week of work.
Part 2 – Echoes of the Emerald Jungle
The evolution of ExpeditionZ
I decided to merge together this trail of development, even if when I started the development of the Unity version of Expedition, late 2018, I had little idea of what game I wanted to make (ouch!) I was just as clueless as when the original Expedition finished, and all I knew is I wanted to make a very open simulator of the Age of Exploration with some Age of Empires elements thrown in. That’s the demo I briefly presented on GDC for the first time on 2018, and then in full pitch form in 2019.
However, as both me and the project grew older, and after a lot of trial and error, advise from friends, reading the room, I ended up pushing it into a much more defined direction: in the end it was about runs focused on exploring smaller portions of the “New World”, with much more clearly defined goals. That’s also when the NovaMundi name came to be, put together with the “Echoes of the Emerald Jungle” subtitle.
So I’m going to count all that discovery as a single project, which we presented info about at Tokyo Game Show 2020 (sadly in a virtual fashion, due to covid), but never saw the light of the day to the public following the transformation into NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén.
Using the blog archives, I managed to pinpoint the moment when this transition happened. It wasn’t simple since after my reaction to our Steam Page launch (which bounced back with some people very enthusiastically attacking the game and us personally as “glorifying the conquest”) it took me some time to direct the project into a new direction. It was on January 18, 2021, at the Week 99 update, that I announced the commitment into the new direction.
That’s useful since, for all future accounts, I’m going to consider the Emerald Jungle project to have finished end of 2020.
The first thing I discovered is, the current git repository does not reflect the entire history of the project! around July 2019 we migrated to a new repo in gitlab due to “file size limitations at git LFS complications”, so I had to clone the old repo and use the multirepo query feature to get a more complete idea.
Expedition: Children of Bachué – CREA Digital
An important caveat should be considered in the 2019 data, as we were also working in The Children of Bachué, a single player campaign focused in a Muisca story, which was the pitch with which we won the CREA Digital 2019 government grant.
Using again the blog archives, I see the 2019 rewind mentions work on it started on September. The program official boosts the development for 3 months, but I ended up working on it all the way to December (I reported it had been completed at a summarized update in January 20, 2020). It’s hard to split my work between both projects, which were running in parallel, but I’ll put it at 70% in the CREA Digital project, and 30% in “NovaMundi”.
It’s fun how how much of this project ended up being inherited in NovaMundi, to the point it can be considered it’s direct antecessor.
All in all
After adding both repos, and considering the Children of Bachué history, here’s the days of work I got:
First commit: November 6, 2018
| Year | Camilo | Slashie | JD |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 32 | 21 | |
| 2019 | 203 total 38 (CoB) | 178 total 56 (CoB) | 19 (CoB) |
| 2020 | 189 | 236 |
Part 3 – The Spear of Chaquén
2021 started then with a new lookout of things which would ultimately become the NovaMundi that was released on Steam. For 2 years I went on my own pushing as hard as I could with my own resources but ran out of motivation. Come 2023 Stoltverd would join the efforts in the design side and we managed to get it out on October 12, 2024. To a very mild commercial reaction. 2025 and 2026 were just small blips of work with minor updates.
| Year | Camilo | Slashie | QuietGecko | Stoltverd |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2 | 148 | 9 | |
| 2022 | 33 | 5 | ||
| 2023 | 1 | 136 | 7 | 129 |
| 2024 | 1 | 71 | 6 | 24 |
| 2025 | 10 | 1 | ||
| 2026 | 2 |
Total Tally
So, based on this, it looks like these projects have eaten about 978 days of my life; a lot of work, not so much economic return – but I guess they’ve helped make me what I am now.
NovaMundi, as (probably) the longest experiment of my career, taught me about game design, production, pitching, collaboration, scope, failure, persistence, and how a project can change dramatically while still carrying pieces of its original idea with it.
Hadria / Serenade of Chaos
A spinoff of NovaMundi with a darker theme- the history on the repo (just 2 days in July 2021, and 1 in November 2022) doesn’t make justice to all the design work that went into it beyond the proof of concept built on top of NovaMundi’s engine.
I haven’t talked about it a lot in this blog or anywhere else public but… maybe this one is still the future of NovaMundi.
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