Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-08-01

It's the Friday Ramble. Augh! It's August! Aughust.

Game Dev Stuff

I set a hard deadline for myself for releasing a Steam page and trailer for Game 2. While I'm confident I'll meet it, I won't be announcing it here quite yet, because it turns out I'm not actually that confident after all.

Last week I mentioned that I made a bit of a story breakthrough after a long period of writer's block. But this post isn't about that, it's about a minigame I'm Skye is putting into Game 2. Currently in super early prototype stages, but I think I'm going to follow through with it.

The general UI might feel familiar, but hey, the talk'n'serve is a big genre now. Also I just coined the name "talk'n'serve". Let's make it happen.

Here are some early visuals.

I imagine it'll look pretty satisfying once I finalize the artwork and juice up the effects a bit.

Why is the main character on the left? It's so you can see what she looks like (just like with the phone in Dreams and Deadlines), and also so she can commentate about how she's operating the air fryer. Badly, in this case. Of course, she'll have more poses and expressions.

By the way, her name is Felicity. Fun fact, she was the original main character of my first Endless Monday game prototype. I'm also reusing the bar background and some story beats from the abandoned "Whiskey's Bar" omake that turned into Overtime. I'm not one to waste good material.

Anyway it's a good way for me Skye to double down on the air fryer propaganda, and also something I've always wanted to do in a more lightweight context. Don't worry it'll continue to be very stupid. More details in the coming weeks as I implement more stuff! Stay tuned!

Other than that I tried out a bunch of stuff to encourage people to play Overtime, and I just ended up settling on putting a little notification badge on the Extra Chapter button after the player completes the first chapter. I was thinking about renaming "Extra Chapter" to like, "Chapter 2" or something so it feels less optional, but it looked weird. Also I explored putting a Steam developer page button on the title page so people can follow me from the game, but I didn't like that either. I'm so bad at The Hustle.

Not Game Dev Stuff

Stuff has been happening on the merch front. I'll talk about it more later when more stuff happens. Stay tuned...

I got a new pen. It's a Jetstream Edge. I'm spending a lot of time daydreaming about my trip to Japan when I'll be able to visit a bunch of stationery shops and get more pens and get next year's Hobonichi Techos and stuff.

The Jetstream Edge (middle) looks and feels great, but sadly the 0.38mm tip skips and globs too much on my Hobonichi journal's smooth paper. I'm going to be stocking up on Jetstream 0.5mm refills to swap the stock refill out.

I started making a new zine but then just worked on my game instead. Maybe it'll happen at some point. I have a bunch of words written for it that I wanna release.

I played "Dear Me, I Was...".

It has somewhat minimal interactivity, but I really loved and appreciated it. I'm glad it exists, and I'm happy ArcSys decided to publish something like this for the sake of art. Go play it, if you have a Switch 2. Well worth the price (less than Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines).

As a reminder, the Buy Three Get One coupon for Patreon supporters on the sticker shop is still active! The store is closing for like 2 months in the next couple weeks or so, so don't miss your chance! You can use this code on checkout: 2025BUY3GET1

The End

That's all for now. Next week will show off a more juicy Game 2, hopefully. Thanks for your support, as always!