Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-02-09

It’s the second Rambles of February. Time marches on, as they say. Did I even do anything this week?

Okay, I did a fair amount of stuff this week. On the “productivity scale” it was probably a “okay, I guess”. I imagine it’ll be a lot more busy next week when a bunch of translated scripts will be ready for turning into new localized sprite assets, playtests, and QA. On Saturday I threw out my back (from packing and moving boxes around I guess), so I spent some time recovering from that. I also did a bunch of other real life stuff, like going to Costco. I bought a bunch of potato chips. Did you know a big sporting event is happening this weekend? And also a non-football related big holiday in many cultures? It was really crowded at Costco.

Most of the KR localization work is finished. KR playtests happened, I did a bunch of KR UI improvements, and fixed a bunch of things in the script. I’m now waiting on some final revisions, but it’s basically done. I made the trailer for the Steam page! It’s a shot for shot remake of the English and Japanese trailers, which I’m also going to do for the other languages too. I've made the trailer the "video" for this "video post." You can see it at the top of the post.

Above: Putting a screenshot here instead of a video because Patreon doesn't let you embed videos in the post

Anyway. Pretty beautiful.

Coming along right behind, the PT-BR localization is also almost done. Just need final playtesting and final revisions there too, before we’re ready to make the trailer. And so we’re still on track for all the languages in this update (calling it v1.0.10) to release sometime before the Steam Spring Sale. I’m spending a lot of time on this update and staking my entire financial future on it, so I hope it doesn’t ruin me.

While I wait for remaining work to complete, I’m doing work on the Bonus Story Chapter (calling it v1.1). I drew a new character sprite for it, and wrote a bunch of words. I’m still hoping it’ll be done by the end of this month so I can ship it out to translators and have it ready to release sometime before the Steam Summer Sale (lol good luck).

I’ll post a screenshot of some of the work in progress (kinda spoilery, as is the nature of the dev updates in these Rambles, of course.)

Above: Kini has a new outfit!

Above: Plot is advancing!

Above: Okay, moving on

Don’t worry, I’m saving the really interesting spoilery stuff (well, to me anyway) for the actual game.

After, like, months of angst about not being inspired to write a good next chapter, I feel like I’ve been able to channel it a bit into writing a good next chapter. So it’s moving along, which is better than what it’s been doing for a while. My goal has been to write an interesting story that doesn’t significantly blow up any of the status quo established by the ending of the original story (because I don’t want to lessen the impact of the original ending, or write myself into a corner before I even start the sequel), but also making it a meaningful continuation.

Above: I can’t believe it’s already almost been 1 year since the game came out

The premise of the story is “a year later” - basically starting exactly a year after the original game, so it serves as kind of an anniversary bonus thing, while focusing on Penny’s (lack of) career progress through her trying to complete another project at the last minute. I’ve gone through multiple iterations of this idea, and they were all boring and bad, but this latest one (which I talked about a couple weeks ago as well) has been sticking and I have high hopes for it. And I already made a bunch of new sprites, and by golly I’m gonna use ‘em.

Above: super rough hana concept drawing. i think hana needs cool goggles and giant gloves. because that’s what operations team does. i’ve thought of a bunch of ideas for a new hana sequence like the one from emdnd, but thinking about implementing any of them for the bonus story update immediately puts me in despair, so i’ll probably save it for the sequel

The story of the original game was fairly topical (okay, pretty topical), but I think the non ZINEBOT specific parts were still fairly timeless. Half the story was from the Endless Monday Monthly Zines, which were basically just me ranting through silly comics, but the rest of it was channeled from my real life experiences at all the real life companies I worked at throughout my career. After my big story update, I want to do another few issues of the EMM Zine, and do make some silly comics and do some topical writing again, and maybe it’ll be some interesting fodder for the sequel. lol. Then again, I’ve been so disconnected from industry and everything in general, because I’m mostly just sitting in my lonely gamedev cave, so who knows if I’ll have anything interesting to say.

Above: baka typing a rant i’d put in a zine… if i had one

So, Bluesky opened up to the public this week, and a bunch of artists from Twitterland joined up and I was able to maintain mutual follow status with a bunch of artists I respect on the new platform, which was cool. We’ll still never interact with each other beyond me pressing the heart button on their art, but hey, I’ll take it.

Above: life imitates art, as they say

I am enjoying it a lot more than I did Threads, which was a nightmare of blocking influencers on my feed every day I was there, and making sure I didn’t accidentally like the wrong thing, lest the algorithm show me influencers related to that thing forever. It does feel like it’s sticking a lot better than the other “escape twitter” sites - mostly because it’s basically just “almost exactly twitter except without a lot of the unnecessary stuff”. But then again, until Twitter actually dies, it’s just another site that people sometimes post to and forget about. It’s also still missing some basic functionality, like hashtags and DMs and gifs, but I’m guessing those will be added at some point. Previously I’d been using Bluesky as a kind of stupid shitposting zone, but now that I have a bunch of people I’m intimidated by following me, I need to turn on professional mode and only post when I have things to sell or ate a burger. So it goes.

If you’re using Bluesky, I recommend adding the OnlyPosts feed, which will show only the posts of everyone you follow without retweets and replies.

Above: um

Okie dokie, I think that’s it for this week. It was kinda all over the place, but so is my mind right now. I’ll be busy with finishing up localization stuff this next week, as well as doing more prep for the big move. Can’t wait till that’s over and done with. Anyway, thanks for all your support, as always. See you next week!