Dev Journal: Final Push!

Little worn out at this point, so I may keep this a bit brief. I’m happy to report that I’ve finally gotten Project Wild One to the point where it’s ready to start getting tested by my proofers, meaning the main content is complete and playable. I still need to add a lot of side stuff like supporter rewards and options and graphics, but the core of the game is working and in a complete enough state I won’t be absolutely mortified to let other people play it.

This project has stretched out much longer than I’d hoped, and while I regret that, I also feel like I’ve gained a great deal from this process. I’ve learned a lot about what’s involved in making a game from scratch, I’ve gotten a feel on so many concepts and questions that were a mystery to me before now, and I feel like I’ve leveled up about ten times as a programmer, even if there are still a thousand levels above me. I’ve touched on this before, but the initial build for a game as complex on this is going to have a very high “startup cost” in terms of time, so while things did slow down and get hard back in December for various reasons, I feel like overall it was worth it. I got a lot done, I’m happy with what I’ve made, and I’ve learned a lot. It feels like my work and my time have paid off.

Of course, it remains to be seen how much that holds up in terms of the actual product. I’ve been getting more and more nervous as I get closer and closer to maybe possibly actually ready to put this in someone else’s hands, and as much as it’ll be a relief to stamp “v0.01” on this and get a second to relax, I can’t help but worry about how it’s going to be received. It is… very, very different from my other work, and it does things differently from most games, but I’m hoping that my work and my passion will still shine through and make this a worthwhile experience.

Anyway. Sorry for the long gaps between journals. That sense of “why stop to talk about what I’m doing when I could spend that time DOING MORE OF IT” was strong, especially as I got into more and more of a groove, so to speak. For most of the last month I’ve felt more like I’m “actually working for a living” than I have for a long time. Which might be a dubious thing to say when I’m crowdfunded. But to put it another way, I often struggle with something like impostor syndrome because I make my living through my writing, and I grew up believing that was one of those things that you might strive for as an ideal but that you really should never expect to actually happen. So the last five to ten years of my life have almost felt like some kind of embarrassing, self-indulgent dream where I just write my heart out and focus everything on finding ways to write more and better and people actually go “yes, that’s good! Keep going, we’ll pay for your food!” and I can never shake that fear that I’ll wake up one day and… be alone. And I’ll have to go out there and find a “real job,” and I’d have to explain in the interview that I was self-employed in the most implausible and professionally useless way possible for most of my adult life, and I’d tell my coworkers, “no, I’m serious, I used to be paid to write,” and they wouldn’t believe me.

That sense that I’m not “really working” always hangs over me, making me feel kind of… embarrassed? I’m afraid to be proud of what I’ve accomplished, when it’s arguably quite clear at this point that I should be. Not many people can claim to have a completely finished video game, especially in this section of the market, and especially at the scale of MVOL. It is a unique product, and sometimes I do have my moments when I’m very proud of it, even while I have a hard time believing I’ve done anything meaningful to earn my living.

But this month felt very tangibly like work. I felt like I mostly understood how to make the programming happen, I knew what needed to be made or changed, it was just a matter of putting in the hours expanding and refining. The first month of this project was so wildly creative and intensely focused on predictive thinking and planning at the same time, it was an intense and wild experience, but this last month has been a very different beast– yet still just as rewarding, if not moreso. It’s helped ground me a little, I think, to feel like this really is a job, but also a job that I enjoy. That’s a really precious feeling, and I’m doing my best to embrace it and hold on to it.

So thank you, all of you, for helping me come to this point. Thank you for your patience and your support. Thank you for believing in me even when I said I didn’t want to just do “more MVOL” and wanted to keep pushing in new directions, to keep pushing myself. I deeply hope that this and the other projects I’ll be putting out will make you feel both satisfied and vindicated in putting your faith in me.

And of course, thank you for reading my tired rambling. Keep an eye out for more news soon, I’m hoping to ship v0.01 to supporters in a week or two, if nothing goes wrong. I should probably make some proper announcements about the whole deal with Flash as well, come to think of it, once I’ve had the chance to catch my breath. If any of you are reading this and wanting to know, the short version is that the projector I link on my download page right in the tabs to the left should still work fine, and there’s still the HTML5 version, and the Android version, and various groups are working on a replacement for Flash itself also. MVOL is not dead, and if I can help it, Lith will still be breaking hearts for a long, long time to come.

Thanks again.