Getting Closer

On Halloween, we'll be launching our release date trailer!

But since y'all are stumping cash to help with development costs, I'll leak it to you early -- January 10th. It'll be before some indie releases later in the year, and hopefully after the inevitable coup attempt. (I am a safe apolitical game developer and not a brand risk~)

The game's almost completely done. I'm waiting for Steam to approve the code, and then I'll be distributing the last beta via Steam -- that way you can test it in all its glory, and on Mac and Linux too if you want. I'll send early access keys to folks who want them at that time.

On the development front, today I found a couple sweet tricks I can do with RenPy's text engine. Similar to other VNs like Phoenix Wright, I've got the game doing a tiny pause when it hits a comma or a period -- simulating the natural cadence of speaking. The 'booper' sound effects respect the pause as well, even the floppy disk and typing based sounds! Also, I've got the text smoothly dissolving into view letter by letter instead of being hard-drawn on screen, which is a very lovely effect.

A lot of this research was being done for my next game project after this, tentatively titled "Laugh Track," in which you craft TV sitcoms. I wanted wackier text for that, more expressive text. I also looked into a phonetic Animal Crossing-esque system to replace the 'booper' but honestly it doesn't sound very good, so I'll probably stick to the booper technology I'm using for Cyberspace. (More to come on that project -- it's in very early planning and pre-production, nothing really to show yet, and may not be what I'm pitching here. Heck, Cyberspace went through two and a half full overhauls of concept before it became what you're playing.)

But one new problem I've hit is with the Minesweeper minigame. It works, but I can't make it accessible for players using the visual impairment mode.

My current thinking is to do an alternative minigame, probably similar to the board game Mastermind or to a lesser extent Wordle -- having to guess a secret code but not knowing exactly which parts of the code you have right. This way I can do it with simple inputs that will work with the VI mode user interface. It's going to take some time, but since the game doesn't go live until January 10, I've got plenty of development time.

I haven't been keeping up with the weekly game industry musing blog posts, but hopefully this extensive update makes up for that. Not long now!