Dev Journal: First Steps

Well, as you may have seen in my last journal, I hit a substantial slowdown. I'm still a little out of it, but I'm happy to report I was able to whip myself into shape a little not long after that post. Maybe taking the time to really express how I was feeling a little helped?

I did manage to get a decent chunk of writing done last week, though I didn't get as far as I'd hoped. Still, I think this will hopefully be enough for players to at least get a "feel" for the basics of the game, for the nature of the characters and the flow of the early gameplay. There's still so much that's missing, but right now I'm just focusing on having the absolute basics working somewhat reliably. I had really hoped to get a proper sex scene in there, but I think we ended up with some decently steamy character development at least.

I opened up to suggestions from mid-tier supporters to name the characters and such but didn't actually get any responses, so I had to bite the bullet and come up with some names myself. Still not 100% sure of them, but they'll do the job for now. It's true that folks didn't seem quite as excited about the idea of naming characters on the feedback survey, it looks like that's really not a big hit after all. Shall have to adjust things going forward.

Did finally get art for the characters done, too! Came out better than expected. The other artist I mentioned before has been slower so far, getting a little concerned there. Sounds a little like yet another "everything is going awful so I can't really get anything done," which I've found has been yet another dangerous pathogen I have to minimize my exposure to. Makes it hard to get things done either way, though.

I've been letting Unity (and the program I commissioned to start from in it) intimidate me for a long time, but I've finally started making progress with that. I managed to break down some of the worst parts into chunks of "I kinda understand this" and "black box voodoo for later," which lets me make at least some modifications to make things work better. Ideally I'd overhaul the parser entirely before the release, but I don't think I'll have time for that, and I shouldn't do anything so drastic past the start of the proofing period anyway.

Speaking of which, I sent the game to the proofers on Saturday. I still need to add a few last bits, but hopefully with their help we'll be ready to finally ship Matchmaker v0.01 right at the start of September.

I'm still not sure how cheats will work, but at this point the gameplay is so rudimentary I don't think there's much to "cheat" anyway. It's basically one long tutorial still at this point.

This process has been pretty humbling for my plans, though I know part of it has just been my own slowdowns skewing the results. I've let things intimidate me for a while, and now I have a lot less done, a lot slower than I'd hoped. I'm still hoping to start on another prototype as soon as MM v0.01 is ready to ship to supporters, but I'll have to either use some shortcuts to get to a playable state faster or aim for extremely simplistic prototypes for the side projects, just because there can be so much work involved in the basics of making a game functional.

Even if I start with a stupid simple prototype, theoretically it makes a good sandbox for testing ideas, as well as a starting point for better figuring out how to build a "proper version" later, presumably salvaging some code from the prototype while replacing others. One challenge for me will probably be just trying to avoid building everything to be ready for the long term from the start and focus on getting things functional right now. To some extent, this represents the drag that "frequent playable versions" can force on development, but it's also true that, at least with early development, it's good to test the gameplay early and often to figure out what works and what doesn't before you've built everything else around it. We'll have to see how to strike that balance as we go.

I think that sums things up for now. Slowed down a lot, frustrated that I let that happen, but looking better at the moment. Feeling better about working with Unity, more in control, pieces are starting to fall into place a little. Working up just a little hope for the future.

Shoot. Still need to do a side-write for this month. Still haven't gotten any suggestions in the drop box there, guess I'll have to wing it.

Hope you've got a little hope going in your life, too. Thanks for sticking it out with the project in these crazy times.