Posted On: 2024-07-01
Today marks the first day of a new planning cycle: the past three months of work are complete, and I'll need to set new goals if I want to keep moving forward. Between the feedback I've received and some mental notes I've made while working, there's quite a variety of things I can work on, so I'll be using today's post to put my thoughts to (digital) paper and plan out what I work on next.
Working with a medium-term deadline has been useful for controlling scope: when a feature turns out differently than intended, it can be easy to stop development and focus on improving it, but doing so too often has led me to spend quite a lot of time on features that eventually ended up getting cut. While I haven't been entirely happy with the state of the project when I hit my arbitrary deadlines (this is especially true of the June deadline), the opportunity to take stock of the project as a whole and assess which parts are worth polishing is proving invaluable.
As such, I will be setting my next deadline for October. That will mark the end of my 5th year working on this project, so it will be a good time to once again take stock of my project's progress.
Having a complete script to work from has drastically improved the rate at which I can develop my project. Whenever I set out to make something new, I can look at the specifics in the script to see which assets I will need (characters, environments, etc.) as well as which features need to be fleshed out/implemented. Compared with my process when working in Unity (building features that seemed good, with no larger goals/direction), I am making much more progress - even if the individual features themselves are less notable.
Unfortunately, by focusing on medium-term milestones, I haven't been keeping pace with my writing, and the implementation is starting to catch up to the amount of written content that is ready to go*. To solve that, I plan on focusing primarily on the writing side of things - so that the project can continue to stay on track into the future.
There are a lot of improvements I can make the controls*, but, thanks to my most recent feedback sessions, it's clear that one specific issue is actively harming players' enjoyment: there is no way to control dialogue with the keyboard. Prior to June, the keyboard wasn't used much, so it wasn't really an issue: players could complete everything that was available with one hand on the mouse. Now that gameplay is implemented, that is no longer possible, and swapping between keyboard and mouse has been a pain point for several playtesters.
In addition to my other tasks, I also have a possible issue that requires investigation: a long-time playtester reported that one scene doesn't look right in the current version*. Based on the details of the description, it sounds like a subtle animation/timing issue, but I haven't yet had the chance to properly investigate it. As such, I will set aside a bit of time to record and compare old vs new, to identify what (if anything) changed in the latest version. Ideally, I'd like to resolve whatever issue I find, but at the very least I intend to confirm whether or not it is an issue, and pin down a specification for how it's supposed to behave.
In order to focus on writing, I don't plan on tackling any other tasks. If all goes well, the writing will (finally) catch up to the point in the story where the Magic Training Prototype takes place (although I will be completely rewriting that scene, as several major plot elements have changed since I originally wrote that.) Overall, I am pleased that I am continuing to make progress on this project, and I am optimistic that taking time to have a writing focus now will improve my productivity overall.