Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-03-22

Whew! It's the fourth Friday Rambles of March 2024.

The Steam Spring Sale has came and went. It went pretty good. Some new localizations performed better than others, but that's the way things go, I suppose. I hope I can at least break even at some point. At least I know for next time.

I'm all moved into my new place. It is a lot smaller than my old place. Well, my solo gamedev "paycheck" is more uh. Variable. than my previous job. So I can't be spending all willy nilly on stuff like expensive rent and health insurance. Anyway, no one cares about that boring stuff (and it's TMI anyway), so moving on.

I spent most of the week unpacking boxes and retweeting my sales post. Did you know Yuri "Signalis" Stern liked my game and posted about it? My game is popular among at least three cool and popular game devs!

Above: Spoilers for a joke ending at the start of the game, but Penny does that all the time anyway, so it's okay

I did a bit of refactoring some of the older jankier code to make it suck less, because I learned a lot since I started coding the game. I was planning on rewriting the whole thing from scratch (which I did a lot of when I was working on prototypes for Game 2, if you recall), but now that this game is fairly battle tested (and has a bunch of new localization code I added that I don't want to redo) I figured I'd just iterate on it instead of reimplementing a bunch of stuff that already kind of works okay. Mostly it was the UI animation code, which sometimes behaved in weird ways on machines that couldn't (or didn't) run the game at a full 60 fps. For certain parts I actually backported the code that I wrote for Game 2, so that wasn't a total loss.

For Game 2 I think I'll still use the EMDND code as a base, and rebuild each component as needed.

Okay, so, what's next.

I won't be able to do any major gamedev stuff for a while because of my upcoming trip, but hopefully I'll have some time to do some writing for the Big Story Update. I finally added a debug menu to jump between various dialogue nodes. idk how I worked without that to begin with.

Above: simple debug menu for jumping to other locations/dialogue nodes quickly. Cuts down on lots of restarting the game to jump to a new node. Could have saved a lot of time by adding this 9 months ago.

I got a game called Tangle Tower during the Spring Sale because it was 80% off. Might as well, right? It's from 2019. Dang. I was very impressed by its production value, full voice acting, and wonderful animations. It's a detective game, nominally, but it's less the player doing the deduction and more choosing things to look at and people to talk to so you can advance the plot. Functionally it's a lot like the investigation sequences in Ace Attorney, but I think implemented in a more intuitive way. I also liked the art gallery with all the behind the scenes commentary from the artists and devs (and I should probably add one myself, maybe as part of the mythical Big Story Update). In any case, I definitely have some learnings for my future games. But I probably won't ever be able to afford full voice acting. I wonder how many people would buy my game if it were 80% off. I'd make next to no money from it though.

I also got Replica, q.u.q, and a bunch of DJMAX Respect DLCs. I played a bit of Replica, which is an older game by the developer who made No Case Should Remain Unsolved. It was an interesting experience. It kind of reminded me of what I was trying to do with the Button Game Prototype, except well made and fleshed out and interesting (and pretty short, like it should be, I guess). But it does kind of give me hope that the Button Game might live on one day, as a really short-and-sweet sort of multi-ending sort of deal. (reading back on my post on it after so long, it actually looks kinda interesting to play lol)

Above: I loaded up the game again after writing this and I actually thought it was kinda compelling and has potential... I think I want to mess around with it a bit more. Hana is delightfully cranky throughout the entire intro

Maybe I'll just make it a really short experimental demo sort of thing and release it on itch.io for pay-what-you-want or something.

Anything to avoid working on Big Story Update, huh?

I've been doing a lot of stuff so I haven't been able to spend a lot of time on social media. I don't feel bad about it. A long time ago I used to feel a tremendous pressure to draw anything at all to post if I hadn't posted in like, 2 days or whatever, but now I've gone like 3 months without a new drawing and I don't care. I think I've evolved as a person. Well, I still have to make a game at some point. Ironically I think gamedev is less stressful than trying to keep up with the artist Joneses. Probably because I already put in the work years ago and have a comfortable number of people following me already lol. I don't mind becoming known for being a gamedev who can draw, rather than a twitter artist who can gamedev.

Ah well.

Anyway, hopefully no one's gonna find any huge gamebreaking bugs, or if they do, I hope they do before I leave. Or else it's gonna be a huge pain in the ass to fix it.

Okay I have nothing else to talk about, so I'm going now. Thanks for your support, as always. See you next week, if I remember! Timezones will be all weird.