All Good Things…

So I finished out my contract last month, which was bittersweet. I really liked working with that company and it taught me so much about game dev and my process as well as gave me more perspective on what I wanted from life in general. That means I’m back on the job hunt, which is a little scary considering the current market and economy, but I also was initially looking in 2024 when the market was worse so I’m staying optimistic. I used that as an excuse to take a nice rest and relax. I took around a week off: no job hunting, next to no working other than chores, and made sure to go outside.

Touching Grass

I did some exploring of my local area, which included going to a new library I had been wanting to check out. It was so big! And they had a book on game AI (the parograms that makes enemies and NPC think not using Gen AI to make games for clarification)! I went to a nice local coffee shop and hung out with a newish friend lots too. She took me to an e-waste store and I kinda wanna revive the Going Out for Creatives series because it was so cool! It even got me to finally start making that media server I kept dragging my feet on. Especially now that I have a place to get started fairly cheaply. We went to a normal tech store after and I got my new keyboard, which I absolutely love and now know the difference between an actual mechanical keyboard and the gasket kind.

Updates on /now and My Mysterious Strategy

So now my projects are the comic, a little music Playdate game, and a naval strategy RPG.

For now, the comic is still slow going. I’ve been working more on getting the base story down that I want for this world. Which to be honest is fine as I like what I’ve been coming up with, however I’m thinking that in order to get this comic out sooner rather than later, I may change what I had been thinking of as the story I’d use for the comic series may be replaced for part of a character’s backstory instead. I’d be short enough and I’d get some nore time with a certain character. Unfortunately that means I have to design even more characters now, but at least I’d only have to do 4 or 5 designs to move forward. But of course a reasonable reduction in scope should be celebrated.

My little Playdate game will be a musical game of Higher or Lower. Basically you are assisting a singer and telling her if the note you heard was higher or lower than the one before. It’s super simple and is a great way to get more time with both C++ and the Playdate SDK. I don’t use Pulp partially because I wanted to use a language I was already familiar with and also because I think have to write my own little engine is really fun! Also weirdly enough, Pulp kinda felt like it would be too much to use on a game like this.

Now when you read nautical strategy RPG you probably went, “didn’t she say she was working on smaller projects?” and yes I did. This will have a small “army” size, and only like 3 battles. Also when I bring up naval battle in regards to this, it’s more about getting a ship positioned to be able to board it without it speeding away. This project also requires a lot of character designs, although there is a way around that as well since I could have more generic designs and have certain characters not go on this particular adventure. That said I will have to design these characters anyway and will most likely need a large amount of them before I’ll need most of the comic characters so we’ll see.

The Scope Knife Has Been Sharpened

So you may have noticed that I mentioned ways to shrink the project in ways during the previous section. I have finally been able to cut scope on my ideas in a reasonable way. When I first gained an interest in making games 11 or so years ago, all my ideas were huge affairs. Everything was something that a lone person could never have dreamed of doing especially with my skill level at the time. The funny thing about it was that I didn’t do this because any of them were my dream game. I didn’t have a big thing I had to do, all of my ideas felt like that. I felt like I had to do all of them and my version of “scope cutting” was like cutting a level despite convincing myself the game required a super realistic artstyle and an obscure style of architecture throughout (true story). I’m not going to pretend that I’m now a master of scoping, but I’ve come a long way.

A Small Note

I talked a little bit about community in both this and the last update so I wanted to share something cool I found from my explorations of the internet. https://lemonpoppyseed.games/hope-jam The Hope Jam is a jam where you do two tasks from their list in two weeks and a lot of them involve going out in your community and talking to and connecting with others. The listed date starts in May, but I try to do at least some of these every month. I suggest you do too! As is stated on their page, ACTION is the antidote to despair.

Anyway, that’s how February went. Here’s hoping March has some good things ahead :)