back
21.10.2022
We did the first proper playtest of the game and it went reasonably well. As usual, I kind of assumed a lot of stuff to be thematically coherent, but the tester didn’t even notice it was there at all.
Playtime will probably sit somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, which is exactly what I was aiming for. Nice.
The really crazy thing is that my homemade framework didn’t implode. We only had a few basic logic problems, but not a single engine bug. Pretty dope shit to be honest.
I’m too tired to write something expansive this week.
It’s that part of production where it all comes to some sort of end. Even if there’s only a pitiful stub where you once pictured a tree, at least it’s actually there and not just a figment of your imagination.
This phase usually hurts, but not so much this time. I’m excited to fill out the gaps that are there, endlessly going over the same four sequences until they feel really right and nice and smooth.
I genuinly enjoy writing. Should have started doing that in earnest much earlier.
It’s all pretty okay. I’m going for a lot of walks with the dogs. Rearranging my room. Cooking meals. Shopping. And there right next to me is this hugely impossible task of finishing a strange videogame that I just keep slowly chipping away at.
Last weeks euphoria has vanished, but the despair has not set in.
Why?
Because I’ve been through this a couple of times now? Because panicking won’t help? Who knows.
Besides the late start at actually WRITING the game, the biggest mistake of Producer was the short character-lenght of the options you can choose between. I now have to assemble more complicated input out of menus within menus. The next one (there has to be a next one, this is just too much fun) will focus heavily on options only I guess.
Maybe it won’t even need artwork.
In the evenings I’m reading essays by Orwell. Yesterday I started a low-chaos, steel-and-flesh run of Dishonored 1. As usual, I’m pushing the marketing stuff out of my mind to focus on the game. It doesn’t need to sell a lot of copies, but I believe that it needs to be the best version of itself to sell enough.
Like, it really needs to be a complete package from start to finish. Let’s just try our very best and wait and see.
cheers,
josh