Dev Journal: Looking Back, Getting Ready

Alright! I’ve pledged to keep more in touch with you guys to talk about how development is going, and the main way I’m aiming to do that is to post dev journals here once or twice a month talking about what’s going on in a more general sense, alternating with updates on the Patreon and SubStar once or twice a month that get more detailed about what exactly I’m working on. This one is probably gonna be a lot longer than the norm, as there’s a whole lot of mess that’s been going on in the past month or two that I decided to save for this rather than complaining too much about it anywhere else!

And… yes, these journals will probably involve a lot of grumbling about the problems I run into, since that’s where my focus tends to go. I did warn that trying to post this often would probably devolve into a lot more silly nonsense in general rather than the pure news on what’s new, right? So if this is your bag, settle in for a much more casual, off-the-cuff kinda ramble about how things are going. I think if I try to get too up and at ’em with these it’ll turn into too much for me on top of everything else, so I hope this works for you guys.

Right now, I’m still in a weird transitional period. Knowing that this big crazy change was coming has been practically giving me ulcers for a year now, but my main coping mechanism when dealing with big changes is basically to analyze, organize, and prepare for it in just about every conceivable way. So that’s been a lot of this week: plotting out, organizing, and writing out documentation to hopefully make everything painfully clear for anyone on the support platforms looking to understand how things work now and where to go for what. I’ve been peppering my patrons’ emails basically every day with more explanations and some placeholders, along with some early rewards, and there are still more on the way. It’s helped me feel a little more like I’m on top of whatever the hell is happening.

I also dropped the first big supporter survey, which asks the folks that pay me to make some pretty key decisions about the appearance of main characters in the project I’ll be focusing on this month. These are things I was a little wishy-washy on and really just needed nailed down, and I figure you guys will care a lot more about it than I will, so hopefully this is a good way to solve two problems! It’s been pretty weird watching the results come in so far. They’re not coming as quickly as the huge, public surveys I did a while back, of course, so the results transform pretty dramatically as more people vote. Plus, I’m using weighted votes now, so I can’t just eyeball it from the google form to see who’s winning right now. I’ve gotten pretty good at using OpenOffice Calc to juggle multiple spreadsheets at this point, though.

So this week has mostly been recharging after a bit of a crunch the previous couple weeks, along with writing out loads of documentation for the big transition. Well, I’ve been working over things with the new characters in the back of my head some here and there, and honestly, that’s half of my work right there, the way I do things. I tend to spend a ton of time just developing characters and situations and all of that in my head before I actually sit down and write, so it’s good to give that some space.

Development for v1.00 was… weird. I knew from the start I wasn’t focusing much on content besides the post-ending bits, but there was this great, looming sense that everything needed to be perfect, that there were still a thousand tiny things I could and should do to make the game better before I can really say it’s done, before I was ready to come out from behind the shield of “well, it’s still a work in progress!” It was a scary step, but it was also a nice push to get around to fixing up a lot of little things that had kinda bugged me but had never been “important enough” in the face of churning out content. It felt pretty nice to tighten things up like that, to make all the little adjustments and fixes at last.

That was the nice part. But if there was one thing that characterized the development in the last two months, it’d probably be… despair.

I had already been struggling with getting new sounds going for the game for quite a while. At one point I’d almost thought I’d have them ready in time for v0.91, but I aborted that at the last minute when I found they’d turned out awful. I’d struggled with synthetic notes, tweaking all the knobs, editing the audio after in audacity, gradually coming to hate the sound pianos make, asking why there’s always that droning, ugly “waawaah” in the lingering moment after that nice, pure note. For some reason, there tended to be this high pitched whine in a lot of the deeper notes, just this very specific, piercing frequency way up there, and I had to learn how to cut those out and cross-fade that in. And then the end result was a bunch of garbage I couldn’t stand to listen to anyway, so I threw it all out.

Finally, I got in touch with a contractor with a real piano. I picked him because he does unlimited revisions to make sure you get just what you want, and I knew I’d need that. So we went back and forth a bunch, refining the sound of the piano, picking out notes and collections of notes that worked and sounded good with each other, struggling to find a good way to handle the flourishes, until… I was shocked to realize I liked what he’d sent me, and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. So I made a few small edits, and I put it in the game. …After I was done with all that, I was actually surprised by how… ugly the original piano notes I’d been using sounded to me. I’d come to idealize them and the identity they gave MVOL so much, I was holding all the new stuff up to a literally impossible standard. That was when I realized that maybe I really had managed to upgrade the sounds after all.

Approving things by running out of complaints or problems is a running theme for me, I guess. Getting the animation going was a nightmare on several levels. I actually started the process of getting this thing made over a year ago, but both the animator and I were busy and they tended to have personal problems delay things, and the whole thing was damn complicated. In the end, I acted as a sort of director for every frame and every motion, really fine-tuning it to match the feel of the scene as tightly as possible. We went back and forth dozens of times with me struggling to find better ways to explain the details of how the motions needed to change, sometimes making my own shitty little animations just to demonstrate how I wanted the head and the hips to move together but at slightly different rates, that sort of thing. It kinda felt like we were just… working on it forever.

But it finally got to the point where I couldn’t find anything else to change with the animations… so it was time to try and actually get it imported into my game file. Which was just… a nightmare. The animation is basically a collection of a few simple image files… and a great, intimidating complex of individual slices, layers, and myriad animations for each of the 18 final assemblies. I had to ask them to consolidate a lot of it to minimize reused files so we could keep the file size absolutely as low as possible, and it’s still a huge addition to the game. It was a load of extra work, and when they finally got it finished up, and I got it imported and figured out a dozen smaller problems, I was in the process of messaging them that things finally looked golden, when…

It’s… not that there was a bug in the code that I wrote. It’s not that there was a mistake in what they’d sent me. The image files were there. And then, at some point after I tested them, they all changed, and broke. Instead of having six species, all of the image files were replaced with copies of one species’ images. It… didn’t make any sense. All I know is that there must have been some kind of fundamental failure in the way that Flash stores data in its backend, but… I’ve never felt so helpless, trying to make this game work. I would save multiple backups, put them in zips in other hard drives, then test it… and when it broke again, the zipped backups were already broken when I opened them. It was black magic of the worst kind.

I still don’t know how I actually got it fixed. I still get a little paranoid every time I run the program that it might happen again. I did take a few random potshots at reducing the load the program made on my processor, tucking more of the game’s images away in places they’d hopefully take up less memory until needed and stuff like that, maybe that did the trick. In many ways, it feels like I am very much pushing the limit of what Flash can do, like MVOL has very nearly outgrown its starting engine, and I’m very glad I’m calling its main development to a close here.

With all of this going on at the same time, there were a lot of days I felt like no matter how much I worked, things stayed the same or got worse. I didn’t know how to go forward, I started losing trust in myself, and I had to take measures to preserve my ability to work.

I call it being lazy, and it kinda is. Part of the reason I’ve been able to keep going for all these years when a lot of other devs give in is that, when things get tough, I can recognize when I’m passing that point– that point where if I keep working, I’m going to grow to hate the work. That way lies a spiral into failure. So when I need to, I pull out. I play games, I watch movies, whatever I can find to just clear my head and try to enjoy myself a little. I feel bad about it when I do, and sometimes I worry I have a few too many false positives on this system, but it keeps me going in the long run.

So if v1.00 feels a little light in new features or content, that’s why. I had a couple weeks of just… miserable, black days, prodding at the work, trying to keep going, but mostly just trying to keep myself afloat. Maybe the problems I’ve been dealing with sound like nothing to folks that have handled all this and worse before. I hope that after this, I’ll be better prepared for similar issues in the future. For now, all I know is I did what I could.

It did get better toward the end, at least. And implementing the post-ending content, while I did make it way too convoluted in its implementation for little good reason, wasn’t too bad. If anything, writing it out was the hardest part, which kinda surprised me. I’m used to slamming out endless paragraphs in an evening, but these short little snippets all in a row took a lot out of me. I guess a big part of my process is just fully getting my mind into the scene, into the moment and the characters, so something like this both felt less directly natural to write in general, but also meant each section forced me to adjust to a completely different mindset, often going back and re-reading the endings and having to spend some time extrapolating and figuring things out from there before I could possibly get started on these… very small chunks of content. Felt kinda silly. But I hope it’s been worth it for folks.

The last couple weeks of development, I started focusing a lot more on all the little fixes, touching up the game’s appearance and fixing all the little bugs, trying to think of all the tiny little things I could polish up. The one looming solution I didn’t approach was “go through the entire game’s text fixing things and adding formatting.” I do intend to do that someday, but I think it’ll be best to wait until I’ve put down the project and gotten away from it a while, so I can really come back to it with a fresh mind, ready to read it more how everyone else does and see it how they do.

That’s always the weirdest part of writing, to me. I don’t read the same story you do, and I don’t play the same game you do. I’m playing the physical embodiment of the idea in my head, and that puts a lot of extra info in there that you guys don’t have. Sometimes I’m really shocked how differently you guys perceive the game, and I get insight into how to tweak things in the oddest little ways sometimes just listening to folks talk about the game on the Discord.

Anyway. The closer the final deadline got, the more I panicked, looking at the game and going “no! It’s not ready yet! It could be so much better!” But I knew that if I changed too much too late, my proofers wouldn’t get to check it over, which is a good way to ship a build with crippling bugs. So I managed to cut it off a couple days before release at least and mostly just… feel uneasy.

And in the end, the big release still had a few small bugs and issues, but nothing serious, thankfully, which is pretty surprising just for how many different things I messed with this time around. I’m still waiting for a real issue to pop up to give me a reason to redo the release, but maybe I’ll put out a v1.01 before too long just to polish things up that last tiny bit before letting it sit a while. Not sure right now.

And really, for the whole “it could be better” thing, I know I could probably keep doing that for a while, but it’d be seriously diminishing returns, and right now, I’m pretty happy with how it is. Not super happy, but I can accept it. And I’ve come to learn that for me, that must mean it’s pretty dang solid.

Well. At the moment, I have a few more rewards and docs I need to post for supporters, and I’m not sure how long I’m gonna wait for more votes to come in before I start implementing based on what I’ve gotten. It’s only been a day or so, but votes have already slowed down a ton, and I can’t afford to wait weeks or anything. I’m in touch with the contractor that set up the foundation for this game’s programming, trying to get a nasty bug fixed up before I get too deep into trying to figure out and expand the code. It’s gonna be an uphill fight already without there being right out broken stuff in there already. Next week I expect to start working on the new project in earnest, and the hard part is probably going to be just making it into something halfway presentable by the end of the month. I’m going to have to work a lot on redistributing my work schedule in the next month or two to hit the new goals I’ve set for myself.

Let’s see… yep. That’s just about everything I can think of to say on how things have gone lately, and what’s coming up. Like I said, they won’t usually be this stupid long, this is technically covering months of backlog rather than a couple weeks. Let me know how you guys liked this more casual, rambly, complainy format. If I should reel it in and go back to the more professional demeanor I use for release day and such, these will probably get a lot shorter. But then, I always tell myself it’ll be short…

Hope it was at least a little informative. Comments welcome and all that. Cheers!