Gasp! I'm ready to start the next Atonal Dreams alpha test next week! Also I've maybe revised Alora Fane's logo and cosmology a bit? And a brief look at another 'solo' dev's Kickstarter, which evoked very mixed feelings in me...
I spent this week readying the game for the next alpha, which I've mostly completed. There are still a lot of things like particle and sound effects that I would have liked to add first, but I suppose it makes sense to get opinions first in case I need to change stuff around.
It seems fair to let supporters of ∞ my Patreon ∞ test first, so I'll post there either over the weekend or early next week about how that'll work.
I remember seeing something a few months ago about how Steam has a new beta testing feature or something, so I should look into that to see whether that's the best way to go about it. (I hoped to do that this week, but... I'll get to that.)
Or if you have any experience with it, I'd love to hear about it!
Atonal Dreams uses a novel musical 'reaction' system when executing skills, where you use an interface like this:
Each thing represents a bar of the background music, and you have to press a button when one reaches the middle, then release it when the next one does, forming a line (or 'concord') between them.
I tried this for the first time on my widescreen monitor at fullscreen earlier in the week (typically I test in a small window within Unity), and the way I'd coded it meant it didn't function properly at arbitrary resolutions! So that was one of the many annoying little things I had to fix this week.
While fixing it, I was also inspired to revise how the barline sections looked; now they look like eyes, which are a consistent motif in the game:
And while making the graphics for those, I had a flash of inspiration!
I came up with the Alora Fane world many years ago. In 2013, I think; that's the date on this old logo:
There you can see the aster, the flower logo, which I designed without much thought one day back then and have been reusing the exact same file of ever since.
My ideas for the world have developed a whole lot since then, though. Something subconscious must have bubbled up this week, for some reason, with the aforementioned spark of inspiration as a catalyst, and I was randomly motivated to play around with a potential Alora Fane logo redesign:
The one on the left is 'intact', the one on the right includes the Fracture.
So it's still a six-petalled flower, but made of three eyes in the three equidistant colours that are a motif of the world (teal = drealm, yellow = light, purple = dark). Rotating so that points were on the sides rather than top and bottom was necessary for at least one eye to read as such.
I think it looks more interesting maybe, and it's certainly way more meaningful, though it also brings to mind garish harlequin colours - and if you're familiar with the old one, it'll register as different - so I'm not expecting enthusiastic embrace of it or anything.
Mostly I just wanted to see what the aster might be like if I used the eye symbol!
But it also got me thinking about the layout of the land, because if I were to keep this, it suggests the 'petal' worlds are connected in pairs and layered on top of one another rather than separate and discrete. Some quick brainstorming revealed a possibility that already fits with much of what I've already got:
Perhaps the world is made of three layers that 'overlap', in that they occupy the same space but are on different 'frequencies'.
The lowest, the Dark realm, is a fairly brutal place driven by the pursuit of base physical desires. It contains Bronzeal, the Passion-elemental home of the Bold, at one one end, and Gravegrove, the Fear-elemental home of the Meek, at the other. Travel between the two wouldn't be like traversing the landscape on Earth, but the 'barriers' between them would be 'thinner' than between the other realms. This could explain how there are Meek in Bronzeal.
The next, the Light realm, is more contemplative and abstract, perhaps resembling what we'd think of as an afterlife. It contains Yden, the Harmony-elemental home of the Lucen, and Fulgur, the Discord-elemental former home of the now-extinct Elarna. Fits with some planned lore stuff.
The highest, the... Drealm realm... (Aether realm?) contains the Viva-elemental home of the Varnyn (name undecided; I've got 'Idyall' in my notes but I don't like it), and Carna, the Languor-elemental home of the Sindrels. It'd make sense for this to be more dreamlike, but I've already depicted Carna in Memody: Sindrel Song as not like that, so I don't want to completely revise the ideas presented in that.
It's all very much just a raw, freshly-inspired idea that still needs a lot of refining, but I thought I'd present it in its just-born form anyway so you can see how it evolves if you're interested!
Finally, I want to talk a bit (again) about some struggles related to moving onto the scary next stage, where I'll need to rally up financial support for Atonal Dreams and face a lot of things I've been avoiding for a long time.
I've been struggling with insomnia for the past couple of weeks because of it, just lying in bed for hours struggling to sleep as my mind fills with fears and fretting. I slept so little last night that I ended up going back to bed all morning when I'd usually be working, which is why I wasn't able to get as far along with the testing preparation as I intended to.
The biggest thing is that middle age is rather horrifyingly just over the horizon; while my twenties felt like they went on for a lifetime and I progressed through several important creative and social phases during them (Fig Hunter days, giving up Flash, getting therapy, uni attempt 1, spiritual awakening (sadly fleeting), uni attempt 2, first friends in years, finding out I had brain cancer), my thirties have just been a big blank blink, a rut so without variation I've no idea where the time has gone. I'm very worryingly aware that I'm very old to have never had a Normal Job, and at the rate the years have been zipping by I'm scared I'll be even older by the time I even start trying to address that. I really need to get my life sorted out in general.
I made a list of things - the first of which is just registering at a local doctor, and eventually I'll work up to getting regular therapy if possible (the barriers are bureaucratic, not mental) - but it'll take a while to work through.
I've been hoping that I could make a living from games dev... though Atonal Dreams has taken several times longer than I thought it would, and I've still got a long way left. And I don't feel confident about the necessary marketing/promotion aspects at all.
I've written on this blog about other devs' Kickstarters in the past. ∞ Here's another one for a game called Kokopa's Atlas ∞, by a dev I've followed on Twitter for a while... which I may actually have mentioned before (if I have I forget), but which I (re?)discovered earlier in the week. I kept note of it and meant to ramble jealously a bit about it... but I just took a closer look at it while writing this and I've changed my thoughts about some things a bit.
What I was going to say originally is that it all seems super professional and has a positive, upbeat voice to it, offers a bunch of reward tiers and all this other stuff that's extremely impressive for a 'solo' dev (it bothers me when dev say they're 'solo' when they get someone else to do the music, as seems to be the case here) already juggling too much stuff, the game has many features people seem to like these days like crafting and base building (I personally find them irritating but am probably a minority)... Plus it sounds like he has the direct support of a bunch of professional people. And yet despite all that, the campaign still generated 'only' €49,421 even though he'd spent five (?) years on the project, which is discouraging compared to the obnoxious six-figure annual salaries American tech types are always mentioning online, or even compared to the supposed 30k average here in the UK (which is what my friend is getting as a newbie data analyst)...
But then I saw ∞ this update ∞, where he talked about all the stress, headaches, sleepless nights, which eventually produced concerning eye issues. He tried to see them as par for the course, to power through them, but ended up in hospital where he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He had to hand the project over to the previously-mentioned team (or whatever they are) who he seemed to have connections with.
So that's... certainly something! Sad. But deeply familiar to me as well. I recognise the constant headaches while trying to work all day every day, the powering through, the ignoring of symptoms because you need - and want! - to get stuff done... It's why I got MARDEK 3 done in 3 years, but was pretty much destroyed at the end. I ended up with brain cancer instead of MS, but I can't help but wonder whether there's any causal relationship at all between that mad pushing and neurological collapse or whether it's just coincidental genetic misfortune.
It's why Atonal Dreams has taken so long, though; I never want to return to those dark days of constant pushing and pain.
Without that kind of pushing though, is solo indie dev a viable path forward? Probably not. But then what could someone like me even do?
While reading that left me feeling sad for him, I got something strangely positive out of it, too. Seeing other people reaching out, showing compassion, offering to take over duties. Maybe there are kind people with the right skills and connections who I might come into contact with if I break out of my shell while attempting to run a kickstarter?
I still flinch at the thought due to past trauma - people who've been psychologically wounded are conditioned to see the world as a dangerous place - but maybe it won't be so bad??
I do need to finish Atonal Dreams regardless, though. Having a finished project - no matter how well it sells - will be far better for me in so many ways than just abandoning it when things get too tough.
So yes, I'll post on Patreon re the testing once I figure it out myself! It'd probably be wise to do it over the weekend while other people might have more time, but I feel I need yet another a break myself - how annoying!!1 - so I might have to postpone it until Monday. We'll see!!
There won't be any rush with it though and I'm assuming the testing will run at least a couple of weeks, whenever people have the time/interest/motivation for it.
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