Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-03-21

It's the Friday Rambles, once again.

Gamedev Stuff

I haven't done a lot of work on the Overtime Update. There's not much to do. Still waiting on External Factors lol. I have a lot to say about it but I'll keep it bottled up, unhealthily. Rest assured, I'm trying to resolve it.

The Spring Sale has come and gone. With the VN Fest and this sale, it's been pretty okay. Maybe the Overtime Update will be so well received that the word of mouth factor will result in a bump in sales. One can dream. At least I'll have a big complete double sized game to launch on Switch with. Definitely feeling the drop off in sales lately, considering the game's nearly 2 years old, so I really need to finish Game 2 this year, hopefully.

Speaking of Game 2, while waiting on External Factors, I started working on the code for the new Endless Monday Video Game Framework that'll drive the next game and beyond. During Overtime playtesting, the playtesters found a lot of weird issues and softlocks (which, to be fair to me, no one will see in a normal playthrough), which are an artifact of my "learning game" being turned into my "real game". A lot of crappy spaghetti code, put together with duct tape and elmer's glue, but I think it's in a pretty solid state at this point. But it's also very brittle and an absolute nightmare to add features or do anything that's not specifically Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines with it, though, so I'm building something more robust, that fixes all the mistakes I made the first time around. So far I've built enough to start prototyping my next game, and it's working pretty good. It eliminates an entire class of bugs that have plagued EMDND, and it was pretty fun doing some real coding and seeing things just work. You know, as opposed to sitting around being mad about External Factors.

Merch Stuff

The Penny Plush is in development. They're making the sample now, and they say it'll take a few weeks. Might even be able to time it with the 2 year anniversary of Dreams and Deadlines release, if things go well.

Other Stuff

I've been reading a lot (of books) lately. I read a tell-all memoir about a tech company. The tech company that was in the news lately for trying to bury the tell-all memoir about the tech company. It's called Careless People. It was an entertaining read, in a kind of horrifying way. Then I read a novel called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It's a story about game dev. Or, about relationships, with game dev as the primary subject and driver of the story. I tore through it in a couple days. What a good novel. Now I'm working through Blood Sweat and Pixels, which I knew about before, but decided to finally read it after seeing it in the acknowledgements of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It's really interesting seeing the behind the scenes of various games and dev studios, but the common thread between all of them is "crunch" lol. Something I, of course, don't know anything about.

In addition to reading, I also played some video games. I finally played 1000xResist, which I had gotten on sale a while back and saw everyone talking about, but never played til now. It's very indie, but also very good. One of those games that you really gotta "experience". Hekki Grace. Then I finally played through the Final Fantasy Remake Intermission so I could finally move on to Final Fantasy Rebirth. Yuffie is my favorite character now.

Yes, as you can see being blocked by External Factors has gotten me to appreciate the arts more, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise. I'm still feeling kind of miserable about it, though.

The End

Thanks for your support, as always. Next week will be Overtime Update. Or not. I'm looking into other options. In the meantime, maybe I'll make a little vignette using my new Endless Monday Video Game Framework and release it on itch or something. Who knows. I'm going to keep moving, regardless.