Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2023-05-19 (Patreon)

It's the end of the second week after the ENDLESS MONDAY: DREAMS AND DEADLINES release, and things have really calmed down. Not much is really happening now, and everyone's moved on to playing Zelda or whatever, like I wish I were doing.

This week I spent a bunch of time packing and shipping shop orders! It's been something like a year since I last made a big new batch of stickers like this, and it was nice packing orders without having to fold a hundred zines beforehand. It's a nice supplement to the revenue from my game, which is great for a first indie game dev project, but not like, [editor's note: TMI] enough to live comfortably off of on its own, especially with all the Steam fees and VATs taken out. Well, that's what the next game (and the next one after that) is for. lol...

Anyway.

I'm still working on the game. 

After like 3 tries ("your backgrounds are too bright", "your emoticons are wrong", "take the text off your badges", etc), I finally got approval for the Steam trading cards and profile stuff!

Above: Trading cards!!

Above: Skye! On my Steam profile!!

It's all very cool imo. My characters are on Steam! You can put them on your Steam profile! You can use my airfryer emoticon :airfryer: all over Steam community stuff!

Apart from that, I spent a lot of time getting Mac builds to work. But it's all done now and I also got the App Notarization working, so we're ready to go on the distribution front. I was testing on Steam and everything looked fine. At least on my old Intel Macbook Pro.

Above: Cool graphical glitch affecting only "Apple Silicon" Macs. 

A tester found that blur effects were broken on his M2 Macbook. I had to get a new M2 Mac Mini just so I could reproduce this (and might as well, to do builds and testing and whatever for future projects). The dev for the effects library I'm using in the game is aware of this now, though, so it should be fixed soon. This is what's holding back the Mac release! I love supporting multiple platforms! Well, at least it'll make the three people who are waiting for a Mac release happy, so I'm not gonna complain too much. Plus I'm learning a lot.

I've also been busy adding localization support to the game. Like cutting out all the hardcoded text in the game into a separate file so I can easily drop in translated text, and shoving in logic to show localized CGs when running a different language. Luckily the library I'm using for the dialogue has localization support, so I'm just using that for the dialogue itself, with some modifications from me to support some super specific use cases. 

I'm building all this around the Japanese translation that's happening in parallel. The translator has already made lots of progress, and we're hoping for the first draft to be done within the next month or two.

Above: Current state of Japanese localization. 

"Miss Whiskey" is now "ウィスキーさん". I drew the phone sprite myself, after changing my iPhone's language to Japanese to see what the words for "mobile" and "work" were in the contact list app lol. Behold my Japanese handwriting skills...

Above: Using a dot font so it matches the pixel scale of the game.

It doesn't really match my original English handwriting font, but it does look cleaner than the bold font that I'm also considering...

Above: Bold, which kind of matches my original handwriting font better? May or may not be more legible?

It's still a little early, though, and I imagine the font will change again after we get closer to the end and get some playtesters on this. I really want to get this right. (I'm hoping to contact at least one person reading this to get their input... :-)....)

Again, this has all been super useful stuff to learn for when I'm building my next game. 

Above: Random art to fill the space. One day I'll be able to draw something that's not a game asset again...

I'm really happy that my game is finally out and I'm happy to be doing additional work for this, but I'm also antsy to hurry up and start working on new stuff too. I'm not one to really spend a lot of time dwelling on the work that's over and done with, and I'm really excited to apply all my learnings from this game to the next one.

What else...

There are a few other things related to the game that might be happening in the coming days that are exciting for me, but I'm not really able to say anything publicly. Anyway it's not that big a deal. Just personal milestones I guess. I'll talk about them when they actually happen :)

And... I'm approaching the ONE YEAR mark for quitting my job! Has it really been that long?? It's been a weird journey full of unknowns, but I'm super glad I did it. I was writing up a special zine issue commemorating the date and summarizing all the stuff I did during my lil career break, but idk if I'll actually get it done on time, because the next few weeks will be super busy for me personally IRL. Oh yeah, that means my next few Rambles may be short and crappy, too. Sorry.

Okay, I think that's it for now. Thanks for your support, as always! See you next week!