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.
I got a lot of feedback on the recent update, and usually I’d incorporate changes as needed into the next build, but in this case it sounds like a lot of players on Android were getting game crashes all the time, and adding an important adjustment would both give everyone a more enjoyable experience and enable those on their phones to actually play as much as they liked, so I’m updating v0.02 with a few small touches.
This build went out to supporters a little over a month ago, and if you’d like to know more about…
As of this moment, the new version of Project Wild One is going out to my mid-tier supporters! In a…
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.
Supporters got to play as much as a month ago, but Project Voice is finally rolling out to the public! You can read up on the first version and all my thoughts on what it’s supposed to be and what’s gone into it over in my big announcement post here, and you can now find the game available to play in the menu on the left (or above on mobile)!
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.
The first release for my new experimental side project is now available to Power Player level supporters, rolling out to Fan level in a couple weeks, and going public in a month!
It blows my mind that this release has taken this long. I’ve been telling myself Project Voice is just a small side project, something to drum out quickly to try out a few things, but it turned into such an endless procession of problems, challenges, and ever more editing that now I’m finally coming up for air, it seems at once ridiculous and only too real that it’s eaten this much of my time.
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.
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.