Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-07-04

It's the Saturday Friday Ramble. Yeah, I'm late, on account of the holiday (in the States). I was busy with non-work stuff.

Merch Stuff

We've hit the goal of 400 Penny plushie sales! Thank you to everyone who got one.

We also got a one week extension (a very big surprise considering we also got extensions for every other campaign), but we actually ended up selling 400 a day or two before then. I'm happy to give people more time to get one, though. Maybe we can even hit 500 before the end.

I didn't put a lot of effort into these comics because drawing comics takes as much effort as making Game 2 sprites, and I'd rather spend my limited creative energy on sprites which I can use again and again forever instead of one-off marketing comics no one cares about.

I do like the cute Alive Penny and Thumbs-Up Tiger-chan and Dr. Skye doodles, though. They have their own charm, I think. :)

Game Dev Stuff

Most of the game dev work this week was around brainstorming Game 2 storyline and systems. I wrote lots of words in a text document, trying to figure something out, talking to myself and doing some very early prototyping. I think I'm making progress, though. Maybe next week I'll have have written some actual dialogue.

One idea I'm leaning towards is having more choices in responses during dialogue, so the player feels more agency in driving the story, even if it only results in minor changes in the conversation (as opposed to only having choices when there's a significant branch, like in EMDND). Might spice things up a bit. It could be annoying or cause people to feel like they're missing important info, so I'll have to be careful. It could also add more replayability. Anyway, I'll have to test it all out to see if it feels good/fun first.

I also wrote some code for different dialogue box types and text parsing and processing for autoformatting and such. For example, any dialogue starting with a "(" will automatically be set to the "thinking" color. Previously the color was manually set in the dialogue script file. Also added new highlight tags for words, so it takes into account the context in which the word is highlighted (like normal text vs thinking text vs calling text, etc). This should make it much harder to make text formatting mistakes which plagued EMDND for a bit, and will also help with localization as well. Anyway this didn't take that long, and I've been adding things based on necessity as I start writing the intro of the game.

Yes, this is me padding my gamedev stuff section, because honestly not a lot really happened. I think once I land on a solid narrative foundation things will start moving pretty quickly. I'm still hoping to have an announcement around September. Please stay tuned.

Other Stuff

I set up the new Ikea pegboard I got for my desk, and moved all the stuff cluttering my desk into little holders. I added a shelf and put a nice little desk clock on it so I know how much time I'm wasting staring into space instead of working. It feels nice. And it blocks out the view of the rest of the room I'm in, so it feels like a professional work area.

This is the desk clock I got. It's battery powered. It's a Seiko, so it's reliable. It's functional, too. It shows the temperature and humidity. Yes I'm excited about a desk clock. Sometimes you just gotta be excited about things.

The End

This was a shorter and less productive week. You can't win 'em all, as they say, again. Next week my goal is to at least test out some story ideas I have, now that the game framework is functional. I imagine a few of them will lead somewhere. Here's hoping! Thanks for your support, as always. See you next week!