Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2023-06-02 (Patreon)

Whoa, it's the Friday Rambles. Already June!!

Lots of games I won't have time to play releasing these days, like Diablo 4, SF6, and the new Zelda I still haven't played yet. I've barely had any time to work on my own game as it is. Still really busy with family stuff!

It's been roughly a month since the ENDLESS MONDAY: DREAMS AND DEADLINES release. Has it really been that long? Well, I've still been plugging away at the game, mostly working on 1.0.7, which now has some more features than planned.

I added a text speed option! "Text skip" as an option is no more. It's just enabled by default now, because why not.

The "fast" option is for people who like faster text than the current default, and in my own testing it's made me skip to end of text almost never. And then there's an "instant" text option, for people who are into that sort of thing. A little selfishly, I kinda don't want people to enable it because I spent a lot of time making the text flow naturally with like, pauses and effects and stuff! And the game isn't even that long! But it's also like, people can kind of already get instant text by doubleclicking right now anyway, so might as well make it easier for them.

I guess the only solution is to add more content for more playtime >:) And well, all this is good learnings and re-usable work for the next game.

As for the Mac version, some people tested it and no one has complained about crashes or anything so I'm going to assume it's fine. And I've been on 1.0.7 for all of my localization testing and it seems fine too. Time to release! Soon!

UI work for localization is mostly done. I've moved all the hardcoded strings out into a file that translators can use to localize the menus and UI. I still need fix the layout stuff so that the buttons on this menu are aligned properly. My UI code sucks and all the elements use specific hardcoded coordinates based on the original English text and font and button dimensions, so it's been really annoying to fix for localization where different languages will have different widths for strings. But hey, lessons learned for next time. Can't wait to have a proper framework done so I can just reuse it for the yearly games I'm gonna churn out >:)

The Japanese translation is chugging along and I think it's almost ready for editing/QA. We'll probably finish way ahead of schedule, so maybe I'll start working on an additional little episode, like a short vignette or side story, that I can release as part of the big update.

Other than that, I don't have much else. When not working on the game I've been doing family stuff.

As for the shop code: it's still PATREON0523YXQPZ for 15% off.

That's it for now! Thank you as always for the support!