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| Important dialogue choices! Actually the game has very few dialogue trees. |
Hello, readers. In the time since I last posted, the game these devlogs are about has had its name announced and got itself a Steam page. You can go over there and look at it, read about it, think about it, maybe express hopes that it’s going to be the exact thing you were desiring, or regret that it’s nothing at all like you’d hoped it would be. Both are true for me.
I’ve just finished a lovely round of testing, and after 2 weeks of fixing bugs and reworking things based on feedback, I’m confident to say that the first part of the game is done except for the parts that aren’t done - which are mostly little polish things. It feels good. Players have reported playtime durations of between 90-120 minutes, which is nice because I genuinely thought it was going to be about 17 minutes long. People have got stuck, been impressed, been annoyed, been confused and been delighted - all of which can and has been tweaked, celebrated or accepted as graciously as I can.
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| I promise I will not make you combine pomegranates with other items to make some weird adventure game contraption. |
Best of all, though, is I think everybody has been surprised at least once. That is possibly my favourite thing so far. I’ve done my best to surprise people with visuals, programming, design and writing. Thomas has surprised some people with his lovely music - and his music for it so far is very lovely. I love working with Thomas. Largely we just mock each other, ourselves and everybody else and then he sends me music that is so perfect for the game and so unlike anything I’ve heard from him before. Sometimes he lets me play guitar on the tracks. I’m so lucky to have him working on the game.
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| I have to get rid of one usage of "command" here which is annoying because I should have edited it more carefully before I painted the shot. |
I have exactly 20 items on my to-do list before I am ready for people to test the next chunk of the game. I crossed two items off my to-do list yesterday, and two items off the list today, as I’m currently focused on building new stuff rather than polishing. I will not tell you how many polish items I have on my todo list. It's possible that humans haven't invented a number big enough yet. At the very least we're into scientific notation territory. Yes, I’ve been blogging about this game for ages already, but now the foundations are built my progress is quite steady. I feel good about making this game.
No, actually, I feel great. Releasing a game is kind of awful for me. I like making games, not having made them. I don’t want to think about review scores, wishlist numbers, promotional sales, optimal release windows or any of that stuff. I like waking up in the morning knowing that I’m going to work on an idea that interests me for a project that I believe in, and that’s what it’s all about for me. What it’s always been all about. This morning I was up at 4am, painting away at a tough background with music loud in my headphones. Now I sit here writing this post with the background painted and in the game, and that’s everything I want from this occupation. I am happy, and I will look back at my days working on this project as being good ones. Thanks for checking in on the project and me. ❤︎
