Devlog/Update/Whatever (Patreon)

Thought I would take some time to go over the current state of things after the release of 16, as we're now in a bit of a transition state. I've decided to make this one publicly available. Obviously things here are a little bit different than the usual, but if you enjoy this kind of miscellaneous gamedev rambling stuff, I do that and more in the weekly posts that are available to all supporter levels.

Alpha-16 Release

So far, I haven't been made aware of any particularly game breaking bugs, which is pretty good news. That doesn't mean that things are flawless, but it at least means I can feel okay about not rushing out another version immediately. Actually having a day or two to relax after a release is kind of important, so I'm glad that I have had that chance.

That said, I have had a handful of things reported, and I will probably be making and releasing a 16.1 bugfix version. In particular, there is an issue with the Hole of Nothing interacting with other effects weirdly and either not moving the ally back to the safe room after Lost runs out, or darkening the safe room, neither of which should happen. I think I probably need to overhaul how I'm doing Lost in general, since it's is particularly buggy and hard coded in. Aside from that, there are some other things as well, like reports of monster/traps spawning earlier than they should. Still have to spend time looking into and correcting things, but at the very least in the mean time the game is still very much playable.

As for this eventual 16.1 release, I'm not sure if it will come with more content for the Noblewoman or not? Anyone who has fought her will probably notice that her content is a little rushed (or maybe I just see that because I know it was factually the case), but even if they don't, she is still taking up a lot of space in my head as far as potential for more fun stuff. That's one of the earliest bits of content I want to work on, but saying that also leads me into more considerations.

Supporter stuff and other changes

I want to figure out what, if anything, should change as far as the schedule of development and releases. I've been holding pretty steady over the last year as far as doing one update per month. Well, mostly per month. When I originally started, releases were on the 20th. They're not anymore, as they've gradually taken more and more time and releasing slightly later. Still, there has been an update at some point every month, and I DO NOT want that to change. If anything, I want to determine if I should try to go faster.

To a degree, that sounds kind of dangerous, but things should be different enough to at least consider it. I've been mentioning this ever since 16 came out, but as I'm now looking at moving out of Alpha and into Beta, that should mean switching to updates that are content centric, and as such they won't require as much system work. Individual pieces should be easier to release in isolation and have stand on their own, at least in theory.

So looking at that, I want to see if I can also use the potential of switching up release speed to handle another thing that's been somewhat bothering me. At present, I haven't felt like there is much of a difference between Page and Knight tiers for supporters. The ability to vote in polls didn't come up much during Alpha. That kinda makes sense, as I don't think that crowdsourcing development decisions would be a good idea for the health of the project. The only real votes that happened were content focused, which reminds me...

Quick aside here on the Experiments stuff. That was voted for, and I do still intend to add to it, but I think the timing of the vote and my working on it was somewhat poorly thought out. I'm generally happy with the actual content that came in that update, but the amount was somewhat lacking, and I wasn't really in a place to mechanically implement all the stuff that I still want to. At the moment, it actually feels kind of awkward just because it's prompted by the Witch when it feels like Coraline should care about it as well. Dunno if I'm going to rework it or not.

But regardless, I will be setting up some more opportunities to vote on things soon. The audience has both grown and changed a lot since the previous polls, and it will be good to see what people are interested in. That's something of a solution to the Page and Knight problem, but I'm also considering setting up to give early access to content for Knight and above tiers as well. Maybe something like a week or two? I'm unsure.

People will have to tell me what they think about the idea. It does seem to be a pretty standard practice for games with crowdsourced development like this, but I decided against it when I first set up my supporter tiers on purpose. I don't necessarily like the idea of asking the people who pay money to also do bug testing for me. It also means extra work in terms of creating more builds and going through the whole release process, as well as requiring content be finished sooner. Having to hit more defined milestones for releases decreases the flexibility of time management. Things never go as planned in development, but I'm the only one aware of problems happening unless it leads to an actual delay. More releases means more chances for a delay, which could look worse on a PR front.

But I also know that it is a good option for adding value to the tier that is (surprisingly) the least popular. I'm somewhat tapped for good ideas on other stuff to add, but I do want supporters to feel like they're getting something decent out of whatever tier they're choosing. I honestly don't really like this whole crowdsourcing development model, but it's what this industry runs on, and there isn't really a better option. It is what it is, so let me know what you think, and stay tuned for further decisions.

Modding

Moving on to another area of development that is surprisingly not all that popular, I want to talk a bit about modding.

Currently the documentation for mods is still in mostly the incomplete state that it was posted in. It's not exactly out of date, as most everything in there is still the same, but it is missing new things that were added or old things that were never documented in the first place. It's a thing that has always been hanging around in my head, but it's harder to justify time in while mods aren't really being made very much anyway.

Still, there have been some people coming in and out to ask questions about it, and I do want to help out on that front. To people interested, I have added a small utility to the discord for easier mod testing, and will probably continue from there when I have time. I've previously tweeted about this, but I have set up a dialogue writing utility. It's... Still not actually completely functional, so I only use it about 50/50 when writing my own dialogue scripts, but it would probably be useful for modders. It's another thing that's difficult to figure out how to time budget, although considering I would also be using it, it probably should be a pretty easy sell. Honestly, I could probably justify a more thorough full creation suite for writing up the jsons, but that's something I have to decide on.

Point is, if you're interested in modding, have tried it and bounced off, haven't tried it because you're waiting for this that or the other thing, or just want mods to start existing, please do share that information with me in some way, as it does influence my decisions on how I spend my time. Over the past year, I've built up at least some amount of code debt where there are shortcuts or weird bits of logic in how things are structured. These things are perfectly fine to me, but may be better to spend time looking into and making more consistent if they're likely to be issues for modders, and doing it BEFORE a lot of mods exist would mean breaking fewer already created ones.

Moving along

So those are more or less the things I want to talk about. I'm at a point where various decisions about things should be made in order to help make the game even more fun. The delay that happened with Alpha 16's release means I have a bit less time to make those decisions before I need to start figuring out the hows and whats for Beta 1. While the lack of planned mechanical changes should help counterbalance the time issue, there is still going to be some confusion in figuring stuff out.

Hopefully by now, after the game has been out publicly for a year, I've been able to show that even if things don't always go completely perfectly, I am very honestly working to do the best that I can on this game. I think it's in a pretty fun state already, and it's only going to end up getting more to show you over time. Thanks for reading, sticking around, discussing, and even just playing the game!

Be on the look out for further updates, votes, previews, and whatnot soon!

(Also tell your friend about the game or alternatively tell me where I should advertise so that your friends see it because I have no advertising knowledge aaaaaaaa)