Dev Journal: Find Your Stride

At this point, developing v0.05 has been such a long, strange journey, with so many big, real-life events getting in the way, that it’s hard to even retrace everything that’s happened. It’s always been a struggle finding the right time to post these journals– motivation and focus can be tough at times, especially when I’m recovering from the rush at the end of publishing a new release, and that transitions into frustration and pushing to get all I can done before what motivation I can find runs out. And when things are going slower than I’d like, the last thing I want to do is sit down and talk about how little I’ve gotten done.

As such, these journals seem to have fallen into a certain rhythm the last few updates: when I’m struggling to get back into it, I put off writing an update until I finally turn the corner and hit my stride again. Then, when I’m satisfied things are going better and the most important work is done, I post the supporters-only dev journal to vent about the troubles I faced and finally say “while that sucked, things finally look good for the next version now.” Then I enter the “less exciting” part of development where I work on all the details and polish to get the big, rough things I got put together actually working smoothly and reliably. When I can play the game without seeing any major issues, I send it off to my proofers and write up a dev journal in that small window of satisfaction and having nothing to directly work on, to say “hey, the new version is on the way.”

Well, more personal life stuff reared up at exactly that moment to stop me this time around, and for that matter, I still had loads of stuff I wanted to fix and polish even after sending an initial test version to the proofers. So that threw the rhythm off further. At this point I’m almost ready to send out what will hopefully be the final test version, with the last of my last-minute changes and additions and a bunch of fixes from their reports so far. So it’s already pushed so far back, it feels almost silly to be writing it when I should hopefully be writing the big explanation/announcement for v0.05 soon.

With that in mind, I’m not going to talk too much about what I’ve been working on in this release, as much as about my actual development process. I’ve been dissatisfied with all these ups and downs I’ve been going through and what a strange mess the cycle above has become. It’s hard on me and I suspect it slows things down in the long run. I always try to rush through this final stage, to get the new version ready absolutely as soon as possible, because I know everyone is waiting. I let the anxiety get to me, and that just leads to burnout and a slower next version.

So on the development side, this update is about breaking that cycle. I’m pacing myself and working steadily on polishing up the game, even now that it’s almost ready. And honestly, I think the game is benefiting from it a lot. I’m doing a lot more actual playtesting myself, and I’m seeing a lot of things my proofers don’t think to bring up about the way the game is designed and how it feels playing, because they don’t know exactly what’s intended and what isn’t. I’ve been making a lot of little fixes, adjustments, and fixes that I think will improve the experience in a subtler way, and usually I would just rush past that stuff. And it’s making what is usually the “boring and stressful” part of the cycle a much more rewarding experience, actually.

I’m pretty happy with how this is going so far. I’m hoping that in the long run it won’t mean releases will take any longer to come out– if anything, I’m hoping it will shorten the cycle a little if the day after I publish an update I feel just as ready to keep working rather than feeling like a wreck.

So, as you may imagine, that means there will be a lot of small changes in this update. That was kinda already the case– developing it even from early on was a strange journey that ended up going a lot of directions. But even moreso now, this update has been packed with a mess of changes of all types, and hopefully the feel of the game has improved substantially in the process. I mentioned in v0.04’s announcement that I’d be working on enabling multiple locations so NPCs can do their own stuff in the background, and that’s still the heart of this update, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on by now as well.

I already got all the grumbling out of the way on Patreon and SubStar about things that got in the way early in development, but the short version is: I got incredibly sick, yet again, then the holidays were especially crazy, and then I got roped into a very draining working trip. Lots of stuff tried to get in the way and it slowed me down some, but I’m pretty happy with how this update is turning out in the end. I’m pretty interested to see how you guys enjoy it, too.

I’ve always done better in most things in life maintaining a certain sense of momentum rather than starting and stopping too much, so I’m really hoping that forcing myself to pace out the final leg like this will mean more productivity overall in the end. I’ll try to be better about posting dev journals more often, and maybe shorter ones, as well. Hopefully removing that tension will help me feel like I can talk with you guys without feeling ashamed or like I’m wasting precious work time, too.

Thanks for taking the time to read all this, and for following my work. Have a good one!