Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2023-09-15

Another week, another Ramble. The weather's cooling down a bit, which has been a welcome relief.

Weekly EMDND update:

Above: Almost... there...

Only 16 more reviews left til 500! I try not to focus on numbers too much but this one is important. 500 is when we hit the mythical "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam! If you've played the game and enjoyed it, but haven't left a review yet, it would really help out if you could put a couple minutes into recommending the game... And if you've already left a review, you're so cool and awesome and amazing and I hope you have a great day :-) In any case I think it's still pretty crazy that so many people have played and liked the game, which is super inspiring (but also lots of pressure to make the next one even better lol)

Speaking of EMDND, I updated the game to fix some text stuff that has been bothering me for a month while watching streams and VODs, and released Hotfix 1.0.9. I think by now every typo has been eliminated... And I think there really aren't any game breaking bugs anymore either, considering I haven't had to fix anything for like 2 months. Knock on wood.

As promised last week, I drew a Cirno for Cirno Day (9/9). I've been as busy as I've ever been, but I will always make time to draw something for Cirno Day.

Above: Cirno, 2023 edition

It was a really quick drawing, but it was also fun. Maybe I should do that more often. Drawing, that is.

As for game dev...

I gave the new prototype graph fixing game another week (okay, more like 2 days), but I think I've reached the end of what I can squeeze out of it. At least for now. I'm pretty proud of the technical aspects of what I made, but I just wasn't able to vibe with the game in general.

Above: Operations Specialist Taiga Chan

Above: (gif) Cool transitions between various chat states. I'm actually really happy with the way the game looks and how stuff just works

A "Post-Mortem"...?

I do think there is still potential here. The main issue here for me, is that I'm finding the setting not super appropriate for the kind of story I want to be telling. Here, the player is locked to the desktop, and the gameplay is very focused on only what you can do from the desktop, and I'm more interested right now in face to face interactions, going to places and doing things you can do at the place, and focusing less on the minutiae of pressing buttons or organizing windows or whatever.

Originally the plan was to make a sort of Papers Please-inspired daily-grind-simulator where the player has to do a bunch of mundane operations tasks every in-game day while uncovering some kind of sinister plot and so on. The issue: it turns out I don't actually like repeatedly doing mundane tasks every day, so it became very unfun to think of ways to make boring tasks (like pushing a button to fix the graph) into interesting minigames, and then actually implement them. That leaves the story aspect. The issue: it turns out I don't actually want to make a detective mystery game where you uncover a sinister plot. And I was not feeling very inspired trying to fit a story into a computer desktop UI shaped container. And I wanted to make it funny and absurd instead, and I started really missing what I could do with EMDND.

Above: Li'l Succ! No!

It really just boils down to: I had fun building the framework of the game itself, but was not having fun trying to make the game fun. Oh, well. C'est la vie.

Anyway, I'm not feeling inspired or motivated for this game anymore, but I think it has served its purpose quite well as a learning opportunity for UI work and game design. And I finally got the sign off I needed to continue working on the EMDND Content Update, so I'll go back to work on that full time. After I'm done I might come back to this idea and gut it for parts and rebuild on top of it with a new premise, or just repurpose parts of it for something else.

Above: At least Taiga Chan understands

Cool. Moving on...

While we're on the topic of Game Dev, you might have heard the brouhaha about Unity, the game engine used by like, half of the game dev world, unilaterally deciding to charge game studios based on installs starting in 4 months, even if the game was already made and released 2 years ago or whatever. I'm personally not affected by this because EMDND (and Game 2) is made on the GameMaker engine, but I am sad for those affected. I'm gonna assume GameMaker wouldn't also do such a ridiculous thing in the near future, but who knows what'll happen if they get bought out (again)? Thankfully Godot is I think fully featured at this point that I could move there if needed, and it being free and open source means the community can just fork it if something really stupid happens. So if Game 2 does well and I'm able to afford to make a Game 3, I'll do that on Godot. Why not now? Because I don't want to right now and i don't have to. shrug emoji

Okay, what else.

Above: I think I posted this before

After the brief hiatus, I'm working on the EMDND Content Update, again, finally. Hopefully it'll be done by the Autumn Sale in late November (or before) so I can make a big announcement and then lots of people will be like "wow! I wasn't going to buy this game, but now it's on sale, and there's a big content update! what a great deal!" and then buy it and play it and I can rest happy that EMDND is finally finished and over with and I can move on to ramming my head against Game 2.

Blah blah blah. Too much talking, not enough working. Thanks for your support, as always! See you next week!

PS. I just applied the "rambles" tag to this post and apparently this is Ramble Number 100!!! 100 weeks of Rambles!! Isn't that nuts. Thanks to everyone for sticking around through my rambling journey through art and gamedev life and supporting me with your dollars and words.

Okay, see you next week! Hopefully I'll have good news about the content update being all finished because I was so productive.