State of Things (Life, Giant's Sandbox, etc.) (Patreon)

Hello there!

If you don't like to read a lot, there's a "tl;dr" at the bottom.

So first up, life things. To be fair, not much has been going on there though the company I'm currently working for has to let me go by the end of the year, meaning I'll start 2020 jobless. This kinda sucks but things like that happen, I guess. On the bright side, I'll have a lot of free time on my hands, until I land a new job. Therefor, aside from working on naughty stuff, I've considered picking up streaming and see how that goes. Can't hurt to try.

As for Giant's Sandbox, things aren't looking too bright, as you might have guessed already. Let me explain to you why. This whole thing started as a passion project and it was fun to work on, until things started to get messy. See, I originally planned to create a much simpler game but over the course of time, I've started stacking things on top of it, things I didn't plan for in the beginning. So a lot of the features (especially VR), had been tacked onto a structure, that was not build for them from the start. This resulted in an incredible mess in terms of code and logic. I've added comments to the code and kept it as organized as much as possible but it's just too convoluted at this point. I'm always afraid that I'll break the whole thing, if I add something new.

This whole mess could have been avoided or somewhat mitigated, by having a proper game design document and actually sticking to it. Though at the point where I began developement, all I wanted was some giants stomping around and to have growing and shrinking options. However, I got carried away with the most dangerous way of thinking about projects like that, "wouldn't it be great if..." and "I should totally add...". That worked for a while but over time I became less enthusiastic about it and grew more reluctant to work on it, which culminated in not having it updated for over a year now. I do want to release one final update though, however don't expect any new features really. It'll mainly be bug fixes and I'll add a bunch of new character models to play with.

Not working on the game has always been sitting there in the back of my mind, making me feel even worse for not doing it. At this point, I just want to be done with it, move it aside and focus on new things. It was my first big solo project and lets be honest, it was destined to fail. I've learned a lot from it though and I'd like to take that knowledge and apply it to something new. For example, I'd like to make a proper version of Endless Rampage, amongst other things. I want to keep things simple and focused, with proper planning from the start.

I hope this helps to somewhat understand my current situation with the game and all that. Either way, thank you very much for reading and for all your support <3

tl;dr: Starting 2020 jobless and releasing one final update to Giant's Sandbox before putting it on hold indefinetly to focus on new projects.