Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-01-12

It’s the Friday Rambles. The second rambles of the New Year. I hope everyone has been keeping up their New Years Resolutions. As mentioned last week, this is gonna mostly be a list of stuff I did since the last Rambles. In a fortunate twist, I was actually kinda productive this week.

Keeping busy has allowed me to avoid hanging out too much on social medias and the internet at large. Well, not having anything to sell helped, too. But man if I ever catch myself wasting time scrolling social media and feeling bad about everything, I’d rather just start up a video game and play that instead. At least I might learn something about game design. Speaking of video games, I played A Short Hike last night, which was delightful. I had been meaning to play it for the longest time, but if I knew how short and sweet it was (like all the reviews were saying, natch) I would have played it way sooner. And it goes to show that 2 hour games can be fun and satisfying to play and linger with you long after you see the ending.

Game extra chapter stuff

I took a break from banging my head against the wall writing specific pieces of dialogue, and started working on a completely different set piece. I made a lot of progress on it and it feels good. I drew a new character sprite, and implemented a lot of the code for the character’s part of the game.

Above: temp art. unfortunately I can’t share the new character sprites i drew even though i really want to because they’re kinda big story spoilers lol

It was a nice change of pace. But it reminded me of how I actually made Dreams and Deadlines in the first place, which was like, “make a rough outline of the overarching plot, then make a bunch of cool individual segments that may or may not have anything to do with the outline, and fit everything together somehow, and write all the missing dialogue to fill it out.” … Yeah, I don’t really recommend it for writing every story, but it worked that one time…

While writing story stuff, I’ve really begun to appreciate behind the scenes interviews with Shu Takumi (who wrote the Ace Attorney series and Ghost Trick, some of the best games ever made imo), which give a lot of insight into his writing process. One in particular talked about how he wanted Ghost Trick to not establish any particular location or time, with lots of fantasy elements. My game is fairly topical as it relates to current events in the tech world, but I’ve also been thinking that I want my next stories to revolve around more timeless themes (of course, not that Ace Attorney or Ghost Trick didn’t have any commentary about societal issues, eg. related to the criminal justice system). He seems to do a lot of improvising as well, which kind of reflects my own process lol but maybe that’s more universal among narrative writers in general.

Game localization stuff

Localization stuffs for the new planned languages are in progress, and the initial drafts are estimated to be done by end of this month. I did a lot of code updates required for adding another language (because a lot of stuff was hardcoded for just English and Japanese), and it should now be more flexible and usable in the general case. It’s mostly UI code, which has been a nightmare to disentangle, so I’m going to make sure Game 2 is built with localization in mind in the first place. And I’ll have to do that anyway, because I’ll have to launch with at least all the languages I already have now…

Above: still experimenting with different fonts for KR

Above: unexpected extra language??

With 3 new languages coming up this round, and each language requiring playtests and QA and a bunch of new sprites, it’ll be a really busy couple of weeks, really soon. But I’m honestly very excited about it.

Other game stuff

It’s a little early to announce publicly or anything, but I’m now officially allowed to develop and publish games for Nintendo Switch! You can bet your butt I’ll be porting Dreams and Deadlines. But it’ll probably be after I finish and release the bonus chapter, so maybe late in the second half of this year. Extremely unsure about how worth it it’ll be, time and money-wise, but hey, at least I’ll be able to cross “Make a Nintendo Game” off my bucket list. And maybe I can somehow convince a publisher to make a physical version so I can frame it and put it on my wall. Limited-Run Games please notice me

Merch shop stuff

This week I shipped a bunch of orders, finally made new stickers, and also ordered restocks of the ones sold out on my shop.

Above: The new designs. I’m pretty jazzed about em

I also made a new print of Blythe looking scary.

Above: this one. yeah, it’s an older drawing… i haven’t drawn something like this in like 2 years and it kind of saddens me. maybe i should spend a week getting more painting out of my system

I’m going to do another free print promotion once the new inventory arrives. I’ve really been surprised by the effectiveness of encouraging people to buy 2 or more things for a free bonus item, and it’s a good excuse to do a little marketing without feeling bad about it, too. I might just make it a monthly event with a new print each time.

Oh, yeah, here’s the month’s discount code. LINK

Sticker shop sales has been a not-insignificant chunk of my yearly income, lately. It’s been a nice supplement to the game revenue, and a good way for fans to get some cool stuff while supporting the game. Of course, in an ideal world, Good Smile Company would notice me and the only merch I will ever need to sell is a Skye Nendoroid, but until then…

Sign off

In the background my big move across the state looms over my entire schedule, and I don’t know how much time I’ll have to work on game stuff while that’s going on. I have a lot of stuff to get rid of and a lot of phone calls to make and a lot of boxes to move and unpack at the end of February, and I’ll be off visiting family right after that, so hopefully everything lines up and I can release the big localization update before real life gets super busy. Well, whatever, things have always worked out before. Okay, I think that’s it for now. Thank you, as always, for your support! See you next week.