Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-08-15

It's the third Friday Ramble of August. Wow! Time flies when you're not doing anything at all.

Game Dev Stuff

Over the weekend I watched a VOD of Dreams and Deadlines and the game crashed once in a specific situation and I was like, I gotta fix that. Luckily I was able to reproduce it (the game crashed when exiting Lumber Lass while logs were flying in the air, but only when playing from the Title Screen). It was an easy fix and I pushed out 2.0.6a for Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines on Monday morning. I timed it so it would be after the Steam Sale, so less people would be affected it I accidentally broke anything.

Of course, the surprise happening of the week was that Ouro Kronii of Hololive EN streamed Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines, on Monday night! I did watch the whole thing (partly because I was terrified the game would crash or something in front of a gazillion viewers, considering I had just pushed out a patch), but it was actually a really fun time. I'm happy everyone seemed to enjoy the game, and maybe some of the viewers will even buy it so they can play the Overtime chapter. Too bad the Steam sale ended that morning lol. What timing! Ha! Ha!

Now I need to push out the fix for Switch. I've been waiting to batch a bunch of fixes for 1.0.6-NS since it takes so long to do compliance testing, but I think we have enough to make a patch worth it now. I'll do that after I get back from my trip.

As for Game 2, um. Hm. Well.

Okay, so this week was not really spent on coding anything for Game 2. I wrote and doodled a lot in my notebook, all analog style. I think getting away from the computer has been helping with my creativity and being less distracted.

Or so I tell myself.

Overall it's been tough trying to settle on the main story and gameplay for Game 2. Olds will know that I went through this same thing for the extra chapter for Dreams and Deadlines and it ultimately resulted in something I'm really proud of, so I'm gonna trust the process, but man we're in for a choppy few months. Hopefully this trip and the change of scenery will force some creative juices out of me.

Not Game Dev Stuff

I closed the sticker shop today, as foretold in the ancient texts. Overall we hit my goal for the month and then some, so I'm pretty pleased going into the hiatus. I sold out of a few stickers, so I'll do a restock and refresh of the store before opening it again later this year. Anyway, I spent a lot of time this week packing orders, and will pack more orders over the weekend.

I needed to do some research into idle games (for a secret reason), so I got Rusty's Retirement on Steam, which is on sale right now. It basically started the big boom in the "idle game that sits on your desktop" genre, I guess. Anyway I left it running for 24 hours. I'm not going to say how much of that time was spent actively looking at the game. I turned it off today, and I've decided that I don't like this genre of game and what it does to me (ie. make me completely useless the entire time it's running). Overall I learned a lot and I'd consider this research expedition a big success.

I also bought Öoo, but I haven't played it yet. I also need to play OFF. Big week for games with three letter word titles starting with O.

And Lumines Remastered is on sale for cheap on the Nintendo Switch Eshop, so I got that too. Having never played a Lumines before, I don't think I really "get" the gameplay yet, but it's definitely pretty cool and stylish.

I was looking through my Kindle library and saw that I had bought an ebook copy of Dune like a gazillion years ago, and then totally forgot about it, so I started reading that before bed. Wow! It's so good. (Me, discovering a book that has sold 20+ million copies and spawned like 50 Hollywood movies and TV series and games)

The End

I'll be pretty busy with a bunch of things next week, but maybe I'll be able to post a Friday Ramble on time. Hopefully something cool happens and I'll be able to talk about that instead of the lack of progress on Game 2. Otherwise I'll have a lot of doodles to post, probably. But anyway, thanks for sticking around, and for your support, as always! See you next time.