Category: Dev Journal

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.

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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.

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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.

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It’s been about a month since my last public dev journal, when I broke the news that Project Voice had hit a wall on the concept stage, but that I was finally really getting things rolling with it. Then a couple weeks ago I dropped a whole bunch of behind the scenes commentary about the process I’ve been going through on my supporters with the supporter-exclusive dev journal. At that point I was just about done with the writing for the project, and the last two weeks have been turning more to focus on the audio side of things, both for recording lines and exploring how to turn those recordings into actual game assets.

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Well, I ended up putting this one off for a while, and now I’ve suddenly got a lot to talk about.

First thing, the results are in from my recent survey! It looks like both Project Matchmaker and Project Wild One are seen pretty favorably overall, but Project Wild One was the clear winner between the two. I’ll take a minute to go over some of the details.

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Working on Project Wild One has had a lot of weird implications for coming back to Project Matchmaker. For one, it made me a little embarrassed to have released something so unappealing to look at… implying that now that I’ve gone and made PWO look halfway decent, I’ve accidentally raised the bar for myself and now I feel like PMM needs to match it. I’ve always believed the content comes first, but it’s true that the packaging, the GUI and all that, can do a lot to “set the mood” and alter your emotional impression, so it’s probably true that I should at least strive not to hinder myself overmuch in that regard. Unfortunately, this game’s themes might actually be more demanding, style-wise…

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For a few reasons that may become clear, I think this is a good time to review where we are overall. If you’ve been following my work closely this may be rather repetitive, but I’m hoping to have a fair number of new people reading this, so I’m going to try and give a quick background.

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Happy holidays! I hope the final month of this… whopper of a year has gone relatively well for you. I’m sorry to say it wasn’t the best for me. I had some pretty bleak stretches where I just didn’t feel like I had any control over my life, largely thanks to some… surreal family issues. It was really hard to get anything done, and it didn’t help that I was starting to feel burnt out on building all this code in one giant marathon. But things are looking better now!

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Overall, I’d say things are going well right now! I do wish I was getting things done faster, but that’s always going to be true. The important thing is that I’ve kept working pretty steadily, and I’ve been getting better at minimizing downtime, making sure to take care of myself emotionally and not try to overwork myself. Development for the prototype of Project Wild One has been immensely challenging, but it’s mainly been challenges I expected, and most of it I’ve enjoyed, even when it brought things grinding to halt for a day or two.

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