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.
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.
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…
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.
I’m happy to report that I’ve finally gotten Project Wild One to the point where it’s ready to start getting tested by my proofers, meaning the main content is complete and playable. I still need to add a lot of side stuff like supporter rewards and options and graphics, but the core of the game is working and in a complete enough state I won’t be absolutely mortified to let other people play it.
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!
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.
The more I’ve been working on the math behind Project Wild One, and the harder it’s gotten to get things just right, the more I can’t help but imagine that if I tried to explain what I was working on to anyone else, they’d just ask, “why are you even bothering to go to all that trouble for that?” And… in a way, that’d be a fair question? But it’s also one that I think is pretty important to the whole “point” of this Project, so the more I thought about it, the more I felt like this would actually be a good time to explain some of that.
You know, it was a funny thing. I’ve been letting these journals slide over to the long side of “one to two weeks apart” between the public and supporter alternations, but after I updated everyone on the Patreon and SubStar last week, I actually felt like writing another one only two days later! I finally had what I felt like was some pretty good news and I wanted to share it. But I figured it’d be a little silly to just jump out with it on the spot, it’d be better to give it some time and let more things accrue so I’m pacing them out at least a bit.
Well, shoot. I’ve definitely let these journals space out more than I’d intended. I’ve put it on my to-do list to update with you guys maybe a dozen times now, but… well, it went the same way as a lot of things on my to-do list from day to day. Often I’d tell myself, “today’s the day I’ll get back into it properly, and once I have some good news, once things are back on track, I’ll post a dev journal about it!” And… instead of jumping back into it, I’ve kinda been crawling back into it.