Dev Journal: Turning Point

Hmmm. I should have written this up a week ago. Not just because I've let more time elapse between these journals than the goals I set myself, but because about a week ago, I reached a turning point. As I've described, editing all this audio has been an endless, frustrating task, and while I picked up a few tricks to make it more bearable, it still only seemed to go slower and slower as I struggled to push through the sheer volume of it all, especially when all that work only produced so little content.

Finally, I realized it was looking like the work was almost interminable and even when I'd mused at possibly being done last month, it seemed like I wouldn't even be done by the end of October. I knew it was time to be realistic, and pragmatic, and focus on just getting a release out with what I had and moving on before it burned me out altogether.

So it's frustrating, but it looks like Project Voice v0.01 is going to be very... incomplete, in some respects. Mainly the actual voice lines, which are supposed to be the main "payload." But I guess this means I'll finally have a chance to see how people like what the project is so far, before I get into the even more challenging task of editing my own sexy moans and such.

I say that I should have written this a week ago, because that's about when I made the choice that I wanted this version done and out the door by the end of the month. I knew that was a pledge you guys would be interested to hear about, and it might help motivate me to stick to it... but as it turns out, motivation wasn't exactly the thing lacking, here.

When I finally turned to actually putting all the pieces together, it soon became clear there was a lot more work to be done before the game was actually fully playable with all the little niceties one expects, and this last week became a flurry of activity, rushing to build new menus or salvage old ones and update them, add all the little GUI elements, and fix all the bugs that had been piling up this whole time. There's still a lot to be done, but I've finally reached the point it feels like I can pass it off to my proofers soon. There are just a few last touches before I send it over to them, which means I'm on track to start releasing the game to supporters on Halloween at the latest. Phew!

So I finally felt like I had the time to spare to sit down and ramble a bit about what I've been doing rather than actually do it. I deeply regret how dang long this project has taken, and it's all the more frustrating that in some respects a lot of the work I've done won't even be evident in this version, but I don't want to fall into the trap of guilt over longer dev periods driving you to want to spend more and more time making it "good enough to be worth the wait." Maybe if I'm lucky, I can mix in a little bit of editing on the rest of this while working on Project Wild One and get over this hill at a slow but manageable pace.

I've already been brewing some ideas and plans for PWO for a while now, as well. I'm definitely looking forward to getting my hands on the project again. It's been a big internal debate whether I should go for multiple NPC support first or a revamped AI, but at this point I'm thinking it'll probably make more sense to tackle the crowd option first. The current AI should hopefully adapt to multiple targets easily enough, but there are still some questions about how crowds will work that I should answer to inform my decisions in redesigning their decision-making processes. Next version will be the "mob mentality" update, I guess, where there are even more critters to deal with, but they're all still kinda dumb.

I've also been developing some pretty interesting ideas for other features, including a possible graphical element that could add a deal more flair to the experience, if it's practical to build. Probably not something I can have ready in the next few versions, but something to work toward that should add a satisfying edge to events.

I believe that covers everything I've got going at the moment! Thank you for your support, and for your patience as I waded through this tough lesson I set out for myself. I'll have a lot more respect for audio work in the future, that's for sure. Thanks for reading!