Dev Journal: Project Wild One’s Missing Heart

March 5, 2026 Leave a comment

Let’s talk about my large-scale plan for Project Wild One, and where we are in it now. I’ve had a lot of feedback during development either saying folks couldn’t understand where exactly I was going with the game’s design, or else making suggestions that are clearly based on a very different vision for this game from mine. This is fair, for two reasons.

The first is that I didn’t go into development of this game with a complete vision of what this game would actually be in the end. I’m still figuring out some of it now. The second reason is that, for all the work I’ve put in so far, the game still doesn’t actually have its most important element installed yet. There’s a lot going on with these two facts, so let’s dive in!

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Dev Journal: For the Long Haul

September 8, 2025 16 Comments

v0.09 was supposed to be a light, quick update, but it turned into a bit of a beast when I really got into developing animations. So I felt like jumping straight into another long, slow update would be discouraging– for me, and for the players. So I put the question to my supporters. I offered a lot of ideas for smaller things I could work on, and asked if they wanted me to focus on one (or a few) of those instead for a little while, and ship a smaller update in between these big chonky ones. And the results came back pretty clearly in favor of taking a break to work on some small stuff!

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Dev Journal: Big Moves

April 9, 2025 4 Comments

Since I started working on PWO, my mental list of things I’d like to add or change has only grown longer and longer with time– I always come up with ideas faster than I can implement them all properly, so there were tons of things I’d love to do with this time. But I know that, while in the long term the ITM system will make the game better for everyone, it doesn’t make for a very exciting or flashy update, and the game still doesn’t have a lot of appeal for new players as it stands. I wanted to find something that’s really going to draw in new players and raise the profile of the game, and when I was going down the list, I realized there was one thing that would do that better than anything else, and I’d just recently heard that it might be easier to do now than I’d ever thought it could be before.

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Dev Journal: I Fucking Did It.

December 16, 2024 9 Comments

So where are we in development? The good news is, we’re very close to a new release! The bad news (for me) is that we’re in one of the most frustrating parts of the process. I want to make some claim about being done before the end of the year or something like that, but at this point issues keep coming up and I have to pace myself to keep motivated, so I’m not ready to set a deadline like that, just in case.

That’s the short version. To get into the details, let’s start with a quick review of what’s even going on.

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Dev Journal: Near the Peak

August 9, 2024 4 Comments

On the long, strange grind of tackling this, arguably the greatest challenge of this entire project and maybe even of my career, it’s easy to lose track of time. When the last update came out, I mentioned that my next big goal was to finally and truly tackle the centerpiece of Project Wild One: an NPC engine capable of, in some basic way, interpreting the actions of others around it and choosing from the many different courses of action available to it in a way that actually makes sense. I’ve been calling it AI, but I know you hear that term used a lot for systems based on machine learning these days, and that has nothing to do with my work here– this is all hand-crafted.

A couple months ago I checked in with supporters about how immensely challenging this process has been, and how things were coming together, but it was still such a monstrous task that I could only barely even estimate how much work remained at the time. Since then, I’ve made several significant breakthroughs, and I’m close to a big turning point. Let’s talk a little about the pieces of this system.

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Dev Journal: Internal Logic

December 15, 2023 1 Comment

I’m deep in the process of building Project Wild One’s AI overhaul, but that’s required a lot of smaller support projects along the way. I’ve been working on a lot of different parts, and I think it might be about time to shift focus again so I can get a new update put together sooner rather than later. There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get into the thick of it!

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Dev Journal: Forethought

June 14, 2023 8 Comments

Mixture of good and bad news with recent development. I’ve been putting this off wanting to be in a better spot, but I’m trying to be better about posting dev logs more often and escaping that weird cycle I had going of only posting at the same two points in the cycle of developing a release. I do have a fair amount to talk about by now, even if I’m not where I’d like to be.

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Dev Journal: Find Your Stride

February 22, 2023 3 Comments

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.

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Dev Journal: On Lockdown

October 6, 2022 3 Comments

So. Long story short, Covid really messed me up for a while. First it stopped me dead for a few weeks, then it kept me in a fog for an absurdly long time after, and… I’m still not sure I’ve actually completely shaken that off. That added a lot of problems and delays to what was already a pretty complicated process behind the scenes, and that’s put a pretty huge delay total on this update with not a lot to show for it.

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