Dev Update 11/04/2021 (Patreon)

Update time!

The writing process for v 0.3 has begun. The third date for Jess has started to take shape, as well as a new city traveling story. It’s still rather early in the process and changes are likely to happen, but I’m going to try to get the artists going a little earlier this time around to avoid the bottle neck they had last version. That’s always a bit of a gamble as it locks a few details in earlier then I’m used to. But hopefully it’ll be an overall good for the project as a whole.

In an unrelated note, it’s been quite a while since I did a proper prototype week, so I’m doing that this week. For context, devs, especially solo indie devs, tend to suffer from “shiny new project” syndrome. Since it’s a lot more fun to start a new project than it is to put in the work on an existing one, we tend to get distracted by new ideas and lose focus. That is how games get the “abandoned” tag. Of course, nobody wants that. But also “just don’t do anything new for years at a time” isn’t a reasonable solution either. So, we compromise. Prototype week is a pre-planned, set and limited period of time where I get to try out new ideas, new technologies, and just basically mess around with stuff that isn’t guaranteed to be useful any time soon or at all. And just to be clear, prototype week only applies to programming time, so writing tasks for v 0.3 continue concurrently.

I stole of Prototype week from another dev (I think I read it in one of Vrens updates, maybe?). It usually results in either a complete broken mess, or something silly like this:

This prototype isn’t likely to get fleshed out into a proper game since it’s just me messing around with some ideas and some fun tech stuff (this one has 3D dice being rolled in a “pocket dimension” and rendered onto a 2D surface). But if there’s any interest, I’ll let you know where it ends up when the week is done.

Have a great week!