Brief Update (Patreon)

Long time no see.

As you might imagine since it’s been six months, I don’t have entirely good news or bad news for you, there’s always ups and downs over that kind of timeframe. After my optimistic and determined blog post at the start of the year, real life immediately started throwing up petty hurdles again but the last few months have been alright. I suppose it balances out in the end. Most importantly, I’ve stuck to what I said and am more like my old self, I didn’t pause the patreon and I’ve been worrying a lot less about keeping you all happy. Might not sound like a good thing but it is.

Anyway, I planned to update you all at the six month mark regardless of my progress but I’m doing it a touch early because I just crossed a major milestone on my current project. Like I said before, I’m always torn between my desire to surprise and my desire to be transparent. I think six months is enough leeway though, it’s time to tell you what I’ve been up to.

I’ve been working on a puzzle game for the Game Boy. This started as a small side project and eventually turned into my main thing after I had enough puzzles to consider it really worth pursuing. To be clear, many indie puzzlers are sokoban-style but this one isn’t. I’m not going to explain the rules (or even show any screenshots) so that the game isn’t cloned and you don’t work out the mechanics before it’s ready but if you picture something like Picross or Sudoku, you’re not far off the mark. It’s the kind of game you could play with pen and paper if you know the rules, in fact I made many of the puzzles that way. The presentation is very simple, as are the controls.

What it does have is a bunch of puzzles. From the outset I’d been aiming to make 128, this is a power of two that will look nice on a level select screen and it seemed to be about the number of puzzles the idea could support before wearing out its welcome. Two days ago, I reached that number. Yesterday, I did my first full playthrough, which took about 7 hours. If you were to speedrun inputting the solutions it would only take an hour but I reckon a first time player will be in for around 8 hours playtime.

Another trend with recent puzzlers is a relentless focus on cutting redundant content but this game isn’t quite so strict about that. I don’t want to undersell or oversell it here but I think it’s in a nice middleground. To me, it feels like there’s enough to keep it fresh for the whole playthrough but also plenty of time to just enjoy solving some puzzles with techniques you’ve already learned.

Hopefully that gives you a good enough idea of where I’m at. Currently, the game is up and running on the Game Boy, has 128 implemented puzzles and a level select screen. That’s it though, no music, no title screen, no tutorial, etc. Obviously I need to make all that stuff but I have a bigger concern at the moment. Right now I feel the game is “good enough” to release. If I somehow drop dead tomorrow I would want it released as-is because for anyone who enjoys this type of puzzle game I think there’s enough here to be worthwhile. It could be better though. I reached my target for 128 puzzles but unfortunately I had some ideas pretty late into that process which make them more varied and in some cases just straight up better. All of these ideas are present in the current selection of puzzles but they’re undertutilised, the balance is skewed. If you played the game now you’d be able to tell I came up with certain ideas too late just because of how few puzzles use them. As such, my goal now is to make more puzzles to replace some of the existing ones. I figured this would happen anyway. You always have to make more than you need so you can cut out the weak stuff, that’s just how it is. I’m estimating I’ll need another 20-40 puzzles to fix this imbalance. This will probably push the game closer to non-redundancy but it won’t eliminate it, nor am I trying to. They’re like newspaper puzzles so a bit of repetition doesn’t bother me too much.

Over time it’s been getting more difficult to make new puzzles as each additional one makes it harder to avoid excessive overlap but I think this 20-40 quota is doable in a month or two. Of course the other aspects of the game still need work too so it’s not going to be done from that alone. Still, I’m looking forward to this phase of development, however difficult it turns out to be. In the beginning of the channel, I hated editing my scripts but eventually that became my favourite part of the job. I like the idea that the game is now essentially done and any additional puzzles I make will only replace existing ones if they’re better or improve the amount of variety. I’m very unlikely to increase the 128 limit so a playthrough will probably still take around 8 hours in the final version but the quality of those 8 hours should increase from here. It’s a small, humble game and it’s not going to be anyone’s Game of the Year but I will try to move the needle from “good enough” to “great” if I can.

That’s about all I have to say for now, hopefully you’re all on board with this but if not, no worries. I know there’s been some false starts over the last few years and I’m sorry about that but this game is already to the point where it would be wasteful not to release it, even in its current, unfinished form so it’s definitely happening one way or another. I’m probably not going to stream any time soon and videos are on hold until I finish this game but I’ll update you all more frequently again now. The break from updates was very valuable so I appreciate the patience you all displayed. Thanks for everything and feel free to let me know what you think.