The thing nobody ever tells you about game development is that you spend 20% of your time building 80% of the experience, but then you spend 80% of your time polishing 20% of the experience.
And lo and behold, my mortal enemy UI Design has once again reared its ugly head into my domain.
I wanted to try a little more fanfare, but I'm still new at brand management and I work a full-time job, so I guess here is as good a place to say it as any, but I'm taking a little break from Xgram. Nothing's wrong, I can easily pick back up where I left off, but I wanted a small project that would give me some experience shipping a complete project. My opening line here is my biggest takeaway so far.
So this new game is one of those Exponential "clicker" games. No crazy gimmicks, just pure flavor, really. I wanted to see if I could make this game in a week, but then I had medical situations arise, and then I got a taste of what I guess one could call "polish creep." Maybe not, I mean, the stuff I'm doing is pretty crucial to the experience, just in a way that is less likely to be noticed or appreciated. Accurate volume controls, animations, file saving and loading, all that fun stuff. I think polish creep would be stuff like "I gotta add shimmery reflections to all the progress bars" or "I need to re-pass a bunch of sounds through a compressor," basically lots and lots of meaningless tweaks and fiddles. Worst case scenario, your game becomes over-juiced and prone to easy breakage. There is such a thing as overcooking a project, but so far I think I've done well to set reasonable goals without trying to set this game up as some kind of timeless magnum opus nonsense.
The glimmer of light here is that this project has given me a chance to see how mighty and flexible some of my code is. I wrote a UI package for Xgram and it ported over like 99% flawlessly. My custom particle system also gracefully made the transition as well. I still don't know how stuff like source control works but I wonder if there's a way to port some of my UI tweaks "upstream" back to Xgram. Maybe now's not the time to get carried away with this stuff.
I'm seeing lots of doctors lately. In my 20s, I was too broke to afford medical care, and when I wasn't broke, I was too ignorant to invest in regular visits. Now that I'm in my 30s, I feel the inertia creeping on me, and so I take those steps to stave off the consequences of my reckless youth as best I can. I won't bore you with a rant but yes and no, American healthcare is both a total fucking mess, and not actually that bad once you get set up. I guess it helps that my company seems to have a good health plan, though being a corporation, I'm sure they would just as well enjoy castrating our benefits once enough customers die off. That would explain the underlying sense of urgency behind all my doctor visits and scheduling.
I figure that if I can get at least 30 more years out of this life, I'll have called it a fair play. That should give me enough time to do a few of the things I want to do, and to help the few people in my life I know I have a chance to reasonably help. Is that bleak? Nah, it's realistic. I never did hard drugs, never drank that much, but I also have never seen the business end of a treadmill and I've chowed through enough red meat to make a Texan feel insecure. I've also never gotten things checked out. That one could be a real problem for me.
I guess I'll leave it here for now. I wanted to maybe post a few screenshots, but I'm too tired. I do plan to put together a sort-of press kit for the game once it's out, though, so that'll be my way of making up for the lack of hype.