Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2024-10-11

It's the Friday Rambles.

Real Life Stuff

I've mostly recovered from Tokyo Game Show and am fully back to work. I'm also back to jogging again, but two weeks off has somehow killed my stamina so this week I slowly worked my way back to what I used to do before. Somehow I didn't get con-crud from a convention with something like 100,000 visitors a day. Knock on wood!

Merch Stuff

I got my sticker restocks this week, so I reopened the store. The clearfile folders were popular, as I'd hoped, and I spent an entire day packing orders. Something ridiculous like 90% of the orders were from "returning customers" so I'm really happy that Endless Monday has such a supportive and cool fanbase.

Above: My social media post to promo the new merch drop

The Skye plushies have been arriving, which is pretty cool. I wonder if any of them will be haunted again.

Above: Paranormal phenomenon, as they say

I've also been planning for a new plushie, but it might not be what you expect. Gonna try something a little different the next time around. Change it up a bit, you know? But that's a while away.

Project Management Stuff

As I start working on more things simultaneously, I figured I needed to do some better project management to organize all the things I need to do. I spent some time going through my Linear workspace again and divided the remaining tasks into more manageable chunks.

Above: A small snippet of the project timeline.

I decided to make each major aspect of the development into an individual "project" (as opposed to making the entire Extra Chapter development into a single project, which made it unwieldy and intimidating). Each project is made up of "issues" that each contain a single task. Examples of that are like, "[EMDND Narrative] Complete "thinking really hard" segments" or "[merch 10-2024] Add clearfiles to store" or "[emdnd bugfix] language selection reverts on exit to title" and so on. I think it's been helping give some semblance of progress during this marathon-like part of development. I can also just add an issue for each bug I find during testing and then deal with them one at a time later.

All in all, since I'm my own team, I can organize this however I want.

Game Dev Stuff

After getting inspired at TGS, I finally got off my butt and started my Nintendo Switch release journey. Since basically everything about Switch dev is under a strict NDA, all I can really say is that it's "going much better than expected".

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Above: A picture of ████████████████████ running on █████████████. Very cool.

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Above: So darn cool!!!!

Anyway, now that I've set everything up and I know things are mostly working, I tabled that little digression and spent more time writing the Extra Chapter.

Graph sent me a report of survey results and stuff from TGS but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I'll probably add some QOL updates based on the feedback. idk. I need to read it first. I'm scared.

As for the Extra Chapter, I completed the "thinking really hard" segments (hinted to above). What is that? You'll just have to play the game and see.

Above: This is also how I do my projects

I also completed the Notes app for Penny's phone. It's for keeping track of the objectives of the chapter, namely the new inspiration system and the things related to thinking really hard.

 Above: Also, new phone BG of Trombles(R) and Sniffs(L) 

And other minor stuff, like: Making Penny's speech bubble bigger if the text gets too long instead of trying to stuff everything into 3 lines.

 Above: Basically exclusively for the word "dream" here. But will be useful if I add anything else where I'm not witty enough for brevity.

And a bunch of other stuff like changing how certain systems work in the backend so it's more maintainable, and adding some new one-off effects for certain scenes, and so on. These smaller tasks all branched out from the main task of completing a major story segment, and it'll probably be like that for all the other story segments I need to finish as well.

Above: So it goes

I also fixed some bugs that were introduced after a GM runtime update. It's because certain functions were fixed to work as they are actually supposed to, and my code was working based on an assumption that those functions behaved brokenly. There's a bunch of these workarounds that break the game in weird ways every time they fix something in the GM runtime, which is why updating is so dangerous and annoying.

After that I wrote some other parts of the story, like thousands more words. I fully completed a route (at least the first draft of one, without art assets yet). The chapter is getting really long, but now that all the systems are well in place, it's become much easier to just write the remaining story. Definitely gonna have to do some major playtesting and edits to pare it down a bit after all this, lest I go bankrupt from localization costs. But I'm also trying to get everything done by the end of the month so the localization can finish before the Winter Sale.

Above: Another thing that's going to take so much effort to localize into 5 different languages. I just can't help myself lol

All in all, a pretty busy week.

The End

Thank you for visiting my weekly diary and End of Week report. And thank you for your support, as always! Next week I'm going to fully focus on writing the story, now that I'm not distracted by console porting or merch packing or whatever. My goal is still to finish up by the end of the month so I can ship it to translators asap. Okay! See you next week!