MVOL v1.01: Short and Sweet

One month ago, Project Wild One finally released v0.01 to supporters, and I was frustrated that it had taken so long when I had pledged to shift to a “one to two month” development cycle during this stage of my career. I wanted to put out new updates every one to two months, and so far it had only been two months or more. So I set myself a deadline to get at least a small release done in no more than one month, and today I’m following through on that with MVOL v1.01 shipping to supporters… under the definition of a month as 30 days. February really tried to throw me for a loop there, and I’m sorry if anyone going by the dates alone was disappointed on Saturday.

Now, that does mean that this is a smaller update than usual. Even when I was in full swing writing on MVOL, I only got a decent chunk of content together every two months, so this is half the time to write and everything, and with all the other circumstances, even getting half as much content put together was… challenging. I’ll talk a little more about that in a bit, but for now, let’s talk about what IS in this update.

Part of the reason I wanted to update MVOL again was simply because I’ve had a few bug reports and wanted to push an update to fix and polish things up a little. I’ve also accumulated some new art that was waiting to go in! Along with two new pieces very near each other in the later game, one of which it’s impossible to miss as you play through, I’m also finally replacing a particular piece of art that just… didn’t fit very well with the look of those nearby it in the story. Returning players will probably find it already updated in their galleries, but for new players in particular I’m hoping it will make for a much better, more consistent “feel” for that section of the game.

So those were things already just waiting for an excuse to get published, but I wanted to add at least a little new content. MVOL is officially complete, and everything you need is in there to have a complete experience as I’ve intended it from start to finish. I don’t really want to add much to that, as I don’t want the experience to get “bloated” or have a lot of extra nonsense distracting from what should be a tightly refined experience. It’s arguably already bloated in some spots, for that matter, but I have a lot of things in mind for if and when I work on a heavily edited “director’s cut” or similar down the road, and this isn’t getting into that.

So for this update, I dipped into the open territory I set up specifically for adding new side content without messing up the main storyline too much: the content behind the Wooden Door! That’s explicitly sort of a “side area” that lets you have a little relief from how heavy the main storyline can be with some silly, fun stuff, and I left that open to be expanded down the line, so that’s where I went this time.

And, well… I’ve talked about this a lot in some recent dev journals and such, but that ended up being a lot more challenging than expected. It’s been a huge turning point in my life to stamp MVOL complete and move on to other things, so it’s been really hard to get enthusiastic about coming back to it at this point, honestly. It’s been something like a year since I wrote seriously for the project as well, and once I came back to it, I found there were actually a lot of little problems I’d left myself with how the snacks are set up behind the Wooden Door if I want to keep the content interesting and varied, to avoid any scenes stepping on others’ toes, so to speak. So there were a lot of complications making it much more difficult than I expected to get into my usual “flow” with writing.

For a while I was honestly worried I just wouldn’t be able to hit this deadline at all. It was only pretty last minute that I was finally able to hit my stride at all and put some scenes together I could be fairly happy with, to finally give the jello section repeating content, though just a little bit. I’m glad I was able to pull it together in the end, but it doesn’t make for a very strong example of a first “one month development cycle.” That’s something I’ll have to keep experimenting with, I suppose.

Still, I feel like this puts us in a more solid place to move forward. Project Wild One is going public today, My Very Own Lith is shipping a small update to supporters, and I feel more ready to tackle a variety of challenges in the coming months. Next up, I’m planning to open up Project Matchmaker again and dive under the hood now that I’m feeling more confident with programming in Unity to try and really make it my project rather than trying to fumble around with the engine I commissioned as sort of a black box. I probably won’t get all the way there in one update, but there are some pretty important game mechanics that still need to be fully built out for us to go forward, so I’m hoping to make the systems for progression and rewinding time more robust along with adding content to ship another update on that, since that’s my “Primary Project” right now. That said, this entire prototyping period is, at least partly, supposed to be about exploring more flexibility in what I work on and when, to try to “maximize my uptime” with lots of different interesting challenges to tackle, and now that I have a more solid stable of projects to bounce between I think it’s high time I start seeing how that will actually work for me.

Building Project Wild One was all about challenging myself and learning a great deal as a programmer, and the update to MVOL forced me to reflect on how different a mindset writing can take once you’re used to pure programming. Is it healthier and more practical to keep a balance, to alternate more regularly from day to day between writing work and programming, or do I work better with a certain “momentum” of focusing heavily on programming for a few weeks, then writing for a few weeks? How can I keep my work schedule structured, how can I set deadlines for myself and keep myself working steadily day by day to avoid last minute scrambles if I have a more “loose” set of goals for what to accomplish? Will variety and freedom help motivate me or lead to creative paralysis? This coming phase is going to be another set of challenges and learning experiences for me as a creator. Maybe more than anything else, I hope to come out the other side of it having a better understanding of myself, and simply being a better game maker in general. But hopefully, we’ll see some pretty great content come out of this as well.

So keep an eye out for future dev journals as I really start diving into that. But for now, I hope you enjoy the new content rolling out! Thanks for reading!