Plan for the future

I'd like to talk a bit about what I plan to do in the future and what I've been up to these past couple weeks.

First of all, I recently posted a poll to find out what I should work on in the future, overall, a majority of people so I started with that. I'd still like to do a bit of 3D, so I think I'll work a bit on the game in 3D. It's probably going to be a bit complicated until SoM is finished, but I should be able to manage everything.

I've advanced the card game a bit, and implemented a recipe system that's relatively modular and allows you to manage a few aspects of the game, such as resource harvesting, combat and construction.

While I was struggling to find a layout for my cards that would be both enlightening for the player (to know what each card does) while allowing me to have a satisfying art direction (I think the aesthetics are by far SoM's biggest flaw and I don't want to repeat that mistake), I started to see how games of the genre went about it. And that's when I found a game: stack:space, which has the particularity of having almost the same gameplay as stackland, but with an engine that allow to make a lot of changes.

The only problem is that I don't yet know how much I can change the game mechanics, and I have mechanics that I really want in my game that aren't in stackland.

On reddit, the dev seems to indicate that it's possible to modify the engine with javascript plugins, so I tried to contact him to find out if it would suit my needs.

I don't have an answer yet, but in the meantime I've started working on my 3D game, the other reason is I met someone making on that is also in the early stages of his game which is cool, it both give me motivation and we sometimes help each other when we're stuck that helps me progress faster.

This will be a mix of a tower/hero defense (like Orc must die, dungeon defenders) and with a couple survival element: you can explore the map between (or during if you trust your defenses enough) waves to gather material to increase your defenses/improve your gear.

I've made a bit of progress, I currently have a character who can move, dodge, attack enemies with basic AI.

I've almost incorporated the construction and trap system (there are still a few bugs, but you can build traps in real time and it consumes resources, and they inflict damage when hitting their target).

I've still got some work to do before I can have a playable version. I need to make the user interfaces, manage resource harvesting, enemy waves etc., but I think I should be able to make a prototype in a reasonable time.

I'm going to post a roadmap for my games in the future, I've already started the one for the 3D game (the card game I'd rather wait and see if I continue on game maker or switch to Stack:Engine).

I'm also planning to change 2-3 things about the way I communicate. I wasn't sure if I wanted my relatives to know that I made erotic games back then, so I was relatively discreet about my private life, but now I don't really care anymore, so I'm hesitating to start streaming again (I used to stream strategy games back then). Even if it raises a few questions, am I going to do it in French or English? Do I show myself coding or just say hello from time to time to show progress?

I don't know if it's a good idea, but in any case if I do it, it'll have to wait, because at the moment I'm just discovering the tools and seeing myself struggling live with tools I haven't mastered yet isn't really interesting to watch, but yeah, explaining what I'm doing is something I enjoyed so I might do it again.