Dev Journal: Revving Up

It feels good to finally have Project Voice v0.01 done and out to supporters, and it just went out on the two-week advance this weekend as well. That project was a bear to work through and took way longer than I liked, and when I finally squeaked past my self-imposed deadline on getting it done and out of my brain, I had to take a bit of a break just to shake it all out.

But Project Wild One has been creeping up in the back of my head since well before I finished that build, and even as tired as I was after the release, I found myself losing sleep thinking about how to design and refine it if I wasn’t careful. There really is something special about this project to me. There’s so much I want it to be, and so much I want to experiment with, and so much I want to open it up to potentially becoming for people that want something special, or something different.

But the hardest part of all of that is, the more complicated you make a game, the more it can confuse and frustrate players. PWO v0.01 was already pretty confusing for people, and not just because a lot of the design is janky and poorly balanced right now. The lengthy explanations weren’t doing the job, either because they just weren’t enough or because they were too much and people didn’t want to read all that just to learn how to play. It’s my hope that I can make a lot of it feel intuitive or natural as the pieces come together, but right now there’s still a lot of nuance that players need to be able to appreciate to find success in their encounters, and a lot of the clues and feedback to encourage that is still missing.

It’s not my big goal for this release, but I’ve convinced myself that PWO definitely needs proper tooltips and can’t wait on them any longer. I’m hoping that having information showing up contextually for whatever you’re looking at will go a long way in helping you learn about the game in bits and pieces as you go, rather than asking you to just front-load all of it with the introductory explanations. I wanted them for the last version (along with a hundred other things) but knew the tech could be a little messy, so that’s been my first main focus as I ease back into the project. It’s also complicated a little given I’m trying to revamp the control scheme to be a little more compatible across platforms and inputs, and that’s provided some interesting challenges. I’ve heard the game acts weird if you have controllers plugged in and that’s a common frustration with Unity games, so I’m hoping to at least nip that in the bud, but if things work okay we should have some proper support for basic controllers in the next version as well.

Past that, my big focus for this coming release is enabling multiple NPCs in encounters. I knew I wanted that available and I tried to lay some of the groundwork for it in my initial design, but I’m still wrapping my head around all the challenges that’ll present for the engine and the GUI. There are a lot of nice features I can add along with that that would make a lot of sense, but I’m trying to keep my target set on the simplest implementation for now, partly because I have no idea how much work it might bloat into just to get this working reliably, and partly because I hate how long the last release took and I want this one to have a much shorter development period. I’m hoping that adding the possibility of multiple NPCs to interact with at the same time (and that can interact with each other) will add a lot more variety and excitement to messing around in the game even if it’s still so simplistic and has so many placeholders. Plus I do think I need to answer a lot of design questions centered around this feature before I can really plan confidently for a ton of other stuff I’m hoping to do before long.

It feels great to be back on this project. There’s always something so satisfying and engaging about the work. At this stage I’m hardly even doing any writing, mostly coding and design work, a lot of theory and trying to refine my ideas for the UI and a smoother player experience, but I guess it’s stuff that hasn’t been as important in the past and that I’ve always wanted the chance to work on more. Maybe to some extent, PWO feels more like a “Real Game” than anything else I’ve done so far. I hope that’s as exciting to you guys as it is to me.

I’m still getting into gear on this project, but I definitely don’t want this update sitting around cooking for ages like the last one. Keep an eye out for more news before long. And Project Voice is scheduled for public release in less than two weeks!

Thanks for reading!