Devlog: Great Advice (Patreon)

I've received three pieces of excellent advice since I started working on MindWare:

• Design by committee never works.

• You should focus on what you enjoy the most/do the best.

• A good open-world game is extremely difficult to pull off.

Of course, being the dummy I am, it took me until now to realize how much I should have internalized these lessons from the start. Because I hadn't, I kept increasing the game's scope, envisioning more and more gameplay mechanics, plot lines, character customization options, and so on. While a few of these ideas made it into the game, they collectively managed to paralyze me to a large degree.

I was afraid to move forward because, due to my inexperience and the overwhelming complexity I had inadvertently created, I didn't know what the next step should be. This paralysis led to a significant slowdown in development—a serious issue, considering that I already have limited time to dedicate to this project—much less than I would like.

It took me a while to understand all this, but after much reflection, I've decided to scale back my ambitions and focus on a more streamlined version of the game—one that's enjoyable for me to develop and, as a result, (hopefully) fun for you to play. That said, my main goals remain the same:

• Create a fun cyberpunk game with a focused main story influenced by the player's actions in a very contained open world and a few gameplay mechanics that go beyond the traditional Twine experience.

• By doing the above, become good at Twine-engine game development.

• Actually reach version 1.0.0 instead of abandoning the project or endlessly tinkering with it without actually making substantial progress.

Ad 1: Only you can judge how well I'll manage to pull off the first goal, but I'm certain that I have a much greater chance of succeeding if I keep things simple. I'm still a noob developer and I often can work on the game only late at night when I'm already tired, so the creation of a really complex open-world game with a good and tightly paced story on top would be a totally unreachable goal for me, especially if I decided to go all in with character customization. By the time I would finish planning, writing, and coding a small section of the game (accounting for all possible paths), I would forget what the rest was about, or I would simply burn out before ever seeing it through.

In other words, until I get good, I need to focus on what’s realistically achievable within my current skill set and time constraints.

Ad 2: The good news is that the concept of learning by doing REALLY works for me, and I have improved so much since I started that much of my old code seems completely demented when I look at it now (always a good sign of progress, in my opinion). For example, I can now create a completely custom UI (the current UI is just a reskin of the stock SugarCube UI) that's completely mobile-friendly, enhanced with sound effects, and just a joy to look at and use.

That said, I don't want to fall into the trap of constantly redoing things just because I've gained new skills. It’s tempting to go back and refine every little detail as I improve, but I know that can quickly turn into a never-ending cycle of revisions and prevent me from achieving goal no. 3. It's better to keep things moving forward and eventually apply all lessons on a new project.

Still, I think it's a shame that MindWare isn't mobile-friendly, so that's probably something I'll slowly work on in parallel with the story development. I already have a custom UI that I could use (I created it as part of my learning experiments), so I would just need to deal with the minigames, which won't be difficult since I'm now in the process of adding the option to skip all of them easily (the video games in the player's apartment could be removed since they don't serve any purpose and exist only because I wanted to see if something like that could work in a Twine game).

Ad 3: I'm currently working on finishing the transformation quest. I know there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of pacing, but it's easier for me to optimize it when the content is in the game and I can experience it instead of just visualizing it.

In addition to the transformation quest, I'm also working on the consequences of the player character failing to pay his rent on time. Since it's quite easy to miss a rent payment fairly early in the game, I think this is a major blank spot that's best addressed sooner rather than later.

Once this is done, I will continue working on various Chapter 1 storylines, including the one with Xavier, the relationship quest with Trix, and Ray's feminization. There are also the various side activities, such as GloryWall booths and the dishwashing job, so plenty of things for me to alternate between.

So, these are the main things I wanted to share with you. As always, thank you very much for your support and the advice I've received from you—I'm blessed to have such amazing supporters so early in the development process.