We’re putting the final pieces together now! It’s been quite a journey, and I’ve accomplished a lot I wasn’t expecting, as well as faced setbacks and challenges I didn’t see coming. Let’s catch up.
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!
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.
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.
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.
So far, it sounds like folks are enjoying the upgrades v0.03 brought to Project Wild One a lot, and I’m glad for that. It was a beast of an update to get through, and I’ve been picking up the pieces after it since I finally put the seal on and shipped it out. This is something of a transitional period in development, and I’m hoping to make a smaller update with a few easier things in it next.
Let’s talk about where we are with Project Wild One in a broader sense, then we’ll get into a little bit of the specifics of right now.
So where are we with Project Wild One, in the grand scheme of things? After anticipating it for many years as a complicated but exciting new project I’d hoped I might get to someday, I finally gained the skills necessary and took the time to hammer out the most incredibly simple prototype for the idea and named it v0.01. It’s hard to overstate how much it was basically a bundle of placeholders ready to be expanded into the game I wanted to make, but it was enough to give a very rough idea of the direction I was going in.
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.
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.
A lot of the development for Project Voice has been characterized by frustration, delays, and a lot of anxiety. It’s been a huge challenge on many different levels, and keeping any kind of momentum going on the project has been pretty tough. So it’s hard to overstate my relief at this point to report that the project is finally coming together and looking better every day! I just got the game to the point it actually “plays” and all the basic functionality actually works this week, which I’m coming to really respect as a huge factor psychologically in engaging with the game and all its needs.