Here’s a tricky one. I’ve let myself lapse to a full month between Dev Journals lately (alternating between public and supporter-exclusive) lately and I’m trying to break that, but when I finally find myself with a moment to breathe and focus on checking in with you guys, I can’t help but realize the timing is a little weird.
Project Wild One v0.02 is very nearly ready, and I’m waiting on one last wave of reports from my proofers to try and make sure the game doesn’t have any crippling bugs before I roll it out to mid-tier supporters. That means that soon, hopefully tomorrow, I’ll be writing up a big explanation of everything going into that update and how it came to be to go along with that release! At most, a big problem will come up and delay things to after the weekend (it wasn’t my intention originally to work Monday to Friday, but lately that’s how it’s kinda worked out) but either way, it feels redundant to talk very much about PWO right now given I’m just about to give the full shpiel about it in another post.
So that opens up this post to be about… well, everything else I’ve got going on. Or rather, what I want to have going on.
Working on these projects, my first priority has always (well, since I started accepting money on a monthly basis for it) been to focus on producing as much game as I can, constantly. If I have the time and focus to work, I should be writing, or designing, or commissioning art to make more of my games happen sooner. I feel like I owe that to the people that keep a roof over my head, and it’s something I love doing. …Except commissioning art. That’s incredibly stressful.
But there’s so much more I could and arguably should be doing, and that’s been increasingly on my mind lately. I know I frustrated folks when Project Voice slowed everything down so much and I’ve been feeling a little frantic about keeping content going to show I am working, but I know it’s easy for me to lose myself in that hole and just plug away at purely “making games” for a year and let a lot of other important things go completely unnoticed and uncared for. I do want to strike a balance where I’m getting all the other stuff done too, and I plan to try and work a little more of that in once this release is finished. So let’s talk a little about what “the other stuff” is.
Technically, a lot of the time, commissioning art itself becomes one of the big side things. It feels less important for Project Wild One this early on when everything is in flux with the design, but MVOL still needs loads of art and I should still be hunting that down. The problem is that getting art isn’t just figuring out what I need and paying someone, it’s a long, painful process for each piece. I’ve ranted on this a few times, so I’ll try to keep it short here. I try to be very picky with my artists to find the right style to match the game and to match the scene, and every artist tends to have their own complications for availability with long queues, short availability windows, or heavy restrictions on what they’ll draw at a given time or how, and working through the questions of doing work for a game in particular both in terms of rights and of all the variants that may be required makes it a big headache just to lock in with an artist to actually do a piece. Getting the piece actually done right can be a nightmare all its own. I’ve long fantasized about building a relationship with a solid artist who’s versatile enough and skilled enough to handle most or all of my art needs and actually communicates well with me, but generally that’s going to be far more expensive than I can handle. Anything I put into my game needs to meet some very exacting standards, and the pressure I usually put myself under to get things just right tends to be rather stifling for anyone else.
But the players love art, as they’ve told me time and again! So I need to get my butt into gear and get on top of hunting down artists and getting more art in my games, one way or another. That’s the bitterest task I have waiting for me. After that…
The obvious other thing I should be working on is a port of My Very Own Lith. Flash is “dead,” though you can still play the game to this day using the projector I link on MVOL’s download page, and if I can remake the game in another medium I may even be able to do fancy things like release it on Steam. Theoretically, if I went for the absolute minimum-effort approach on that, it wouldn’t be too much work doing a straight import into Unity or the like.
But I can’t see myself doing that. MVOL was a labor of love, but it also had a lot of hidden compromises and little problems, and to this day I still get some complaints about now rather obvious problems with the game’s design. And on top of all that, I more or less knew from halfway through making the game: someday, I would go back through all of it and refine it into a better product from start to finish. I did a little bit of that in the updates between v0.90 and v1.00, but rebuilding the game in a new engine would be the perfect opportunity to go through every single aspect of the game and refine it to play better, read better, and feel more cohesive with itself.
So if I’m going to do it, I believe I should “do it right,” but that in itself would be such a huge undertaking that it’s hard to really squeeze it in as a “side thing.” The more I’ve thought over it, the more I’ve supposed the solution is obvious: I’d have to make it a major project to tackle in its own right, presumably once I’ve more or less settled on one Primary Project to work on in alternation and am not churning out lots of prototypes… which is right around now, actually. So maybe I’ll have to pose that question to my supporters soon, how they’d feel about me shifting my focus to a Unity Remaster of MVOL. It would be a delay in actual “New Content,” but it might make for a better and longer-lasting version of the game many of them came to me for.
After that, there’s lots of stuff on my to-do list that’s smaller one way or another. I should make and run more ads for my work to drum up awareness. I should examine a lot of business stuff that I barely understand, for that matter. I should make more of my cute little erotic eBooks, and I’ve wanted to write proper novels since I was a kid, and people keep telling me here and there that I should be a novelist, I just never find the time for it, but it would make perfect sense as something to squeeze in while working on all this heavy coding stuff, to keep the writing part of my brain going. I still let the idea of actually writing a novel intimidate me, though– maybe partly for its size, despite the fact MVOL is many novels “long” by now.
And there’s always more I could be doing to make the Discord server a nicer place. There are plenty of places I should be working harder to network with potential business contacts and things like that, and plenty of potentially helpful contacts I already have and could work harder to keep and build relations with. It’s just so easy for me to keep my head down and keep making games and hope for the best.
And I think there are probably a dozen things past that too small or embarrassing to bring up or to remember at the moment that I could/should be doing to be better at all this… that don’t directly mean “more new game being made,” so it’s easy for them to fall by the wayside. I’ll be looking at a lot of that in the coming week or two, and looking at ways I can maybe get outside help to make more of it happen without distracting myself too much or stressing myself out too much.
But that’s what’s coming up after PWO. Right now I’m still putting the finishing touches on that, and soon, you should see a big write-up on that going up on here as the new version rolls out! Keep an eye out!
Also: I’m still looking for more proofreaders/testers! It’s a tiny team right now that’s standing between the world and a buggy mess of a game, and if you want to help me make my projects happen, you’d be more than welcome to join in! You do get early access to my new work, as long as you’ve shown you’re serious about contributing to the improvement of the game! Get all the details here!