DEVELOPMENT

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Scene Revisions, Money Woes

2 years ago2,179 words

Another busy week! But a talk with a friend - a rare thing for me - got me worrying about money and changing my life around again...

I've spent this week going through all the dialogue scenes, all the gameplay/story stuff essentially, and revising them to fit with the revised elements. I've done at least a first pass of all of them and finished the bulk of the revisions, so it's possible to play through the whole currently-made section without anything being too wrong or broken. I'll need to go through them again though to finish tweaking some relatively minor details here and there.

I kept most stuff much the same as it was before - though I think this 'before' is a state after the previous alpha that only I've seen, so this wouldn't mean much to anyone - though I did end up removing some lengthy tutorials about runes, which is a good thing, and streamlining some others. I also moved the introduction of some mechanics to improve pacing and reduce overwhelming the player.

I thought balancing enemy stats would be a bigger part of this revising than it turned out to be. Interestingly, despite essentially rewriting all the damage calculation and skill effect code, I was able to keep most opponents' stats the same as before, and the difficulty felt about the same. So that's good. I revised - and I'd say improved - some boss encounters though.

For example, there's this one where you battle Pierce and three wolves (Impotantrulfs) which I felt was a bit chaotic, easy to lose, and difficult to really do much with last time. Pierce used Grow to grant sort-of-permanent attack buffs to his minions, and they boosted their own wakefulness to enter the double-damage-dealing Mania state, which, combined with a damage boost from increased global intensity, just got unreasonable too fast for this early in the game.



Now, Grow grants them a Levitality attack shard instead - ∞ the new mechanic I talked about last week ∞ - and any Impotantrulf with such a shard will use a Howl skill to heal its entire party a bit and give them a Viscereal attack shard, doubling the power of their next attack... unless you break the shard before it can be used.



I found that quite fun to design and to play through (many, many times, as is always necessary to ensure everything works). I'd say these shards allow for some interesting strategies which are easily manipulated and understood.


Now that I've essentially finished integrating the new elements, I can get back to where I was before I had the idea, which was working through a list of changes based on feedback from the last alpha. I rearranged that list - and added to it remaining tasks that have come up as part of these revisions - so I'll have a clear plan to work through next week. A third alpha feels close.



Some life stuff: My parents - who I still live with due to a lack of money, mostly - have been away on yet another of their holidays this past week, and that'll extend through next week too. I feel as if some subconscious ever-present psychological pressure has lifted, so that's nice, though I also have to look after the needy, fussy dog, which always gets frustrating. It's currently sitting in my lap, which is unusual, and cute, but it makes using my computer more awkward than usual! (It's a small shih tzu at least.)

I've also been particularly bad at keeping in touch with anyone lately - which isn't unusual, and neither is me feeling bad about it - so I wanted to try to do something about that. I at least reached out to one of my two remaining uni friends in a text, she called me, and we talked for like four hours with no awkwardness at all. I felt like I'd awoken from a stupor afterwards, and wished I could talk to people more regularly.

But it's so annoyingly unreliable, not just getting in touch with anyone in the first place when I'm busy and they're busy and also living with their partners, but when we do talk, sometimes it goes really fluidly like this, other times it is awkward due to a dip in my own mood and I just end up feeling worse.

Most of what we talked about was our mental struggles, as usual... though hers revolve around her partner and mine around isolation, so that's... great. I talked about wanting to move out, but can't afford to. She mentioned that several of her friends are apparently making decent money (from her perspective) from doing 'web development', in an independent/freelance capacity, and she linked me to a website one of these friends spent maybe a month making and got paid £950 for. That's not what some well-adjusted programmer in a big American city would consider 'decent money', at all, but compared to what I'm getting currently, and considering how simple the website seemed (it looked like something I could make in a weekend) and how the guy behind it sounded like he was in an even worse place than me mentally, it got me thinking.



I don't check my income all that often because I don't pay bills or rent while I live here. "Lucky you!", you might think, and to some extent I'd agree, though I worry for the future. My parents enabling and protecting me now just means I'll be completely unprepared and vulnerable if they drop dead one day and I'm suddenly flung into independence without any of the skills I'd need to survive it. I don't like this, but it takes more mental strength than I can muster to turn away offerings or benefits because of some imagined, potential future benefits I might gain for doing so.

I checked my income after talking to that friend, though, and it's quite bleak.

I wrote ∞ a detailed post ∞ at the start of May last year (2021) about exactly how much I'm earning, which wasn't much; monthly income fluctuated a lot, but hung around £1000 thanks to a combination of Patreon and sales of MARDEK on Steam.

Now, the sales of MARDEK seem to have dried up almost completely; I haven't had a payout from Steam since March, which was about £200.

So ∞ my Patreon ∞ is essentially my sole source of income at the moment. I want to make it crystal clear that I profoundly appreciate anyone who's donating to me on there at all!! I frequently feel a ton of gratitude for having as many supporters as I do, all things considered, and it's the biggest motivator for me to be able to keep doing creative stuff.

But the cold reality is that the number of patrons goes down more than it goes up - it was 82 before, now it's 77 - and patrons reduce the amount they're donating as well. I'm getting US$388 a month from it currently, when it was something like $450 before.

The main reason for that, probably, is how damn long it takes to make a game. I often think about content I could produce more regularly, but I'm really not sure what that could be.



I've technically had a YouTube channel for years, but I've never treated it as a YouTube channel before; just a dumping ground for miscellaneous stuff I want to share elsewhere. So it's cluttered, disorganised, aimless, and I wouldn't expect - or really even want - people to follow it.

But something I've been thinking about for ages is putting my music on YouTube in a more organised way. I have quite a lot of new stuff that I've never shown off anywhere, which brings me a lot of joy personally and which I'd like to share with others, but I keep putting off doing anything with it because of the assumption that nobody will care, and that apathy will harm the benefits listening to my music has for me.

So recently I set up a new YouTube channel (as a kind of sub one of my main one, which you can apparently do) specifically for my music compositions.

I've yet to upload anything to it though because of, well, that assumption that nobody will care, but also I'm not actually sure what to start with! Old stuff already on Bandcamp? Or new stuff I've never shown anywhere before? Old, familiar game stuff, like MARDEK? Or new non-game stuff that shows how far I've come in terms of technical prowess?? Does it even matter??? Probably not!

I'm planning to do videos like this one, of single tracks with accompanying music notation and music theory analysis/notes:




I'll link to the new channel when (or if, though hopefully when) I actually upload something there!

Oh, and I wrote recently about wanting to get a USB monitor so I could put it in front of my piano and play sheet music with it... then again about how I failed to get such a monitor.

This week, though, I reconsidered something someone said about using a normal monitor, which I previously thought wouldn't work because it's too bulky for the space I had available. I'd been meaning to rearrange my room a bit anyway, so, well, long story short, I now have a slightly different room layout and an old monitor I wasn't using rigged up in front of my piano keyboard from which I can play sheet music.

(After trying to buy a cable for it three separate times because one was too short and next was the wrong connection type! I didn't know DisplayPort to HDMI was a one-way thing!! At least the cables were inexpensive.)

Since it's just an additional monitor of my main PC, I can have Sibelius on there too. So I'm hoping that'll help encourage me to compose music more often.

And if I were to upload it and people cared about it even a bit, and I got into the swing of things, I can imagine being able to produce new stuff way more often than I can produce games. I'd still be making games! I'd just be putting those out as well.

When I've asked in the past (maybe I've said all this in exactly the same way before?), nobody has shown interest, which puts me off even trying... but maybe I need to just push through that and upload some music on there anyway, even if it only gets like 3 views. If nothing else, I'd like to at least have the new, not-yet-uploaded-anywhere stuff archived somewhere.



Going back a bit, I have been giving some thought to doing something where I can use my existing skills from home and get paid for it, like the web development thing, though I'm aware I'd need to do quite a bit of research into how exactly to go about it, plus I'd need to somehow find and interact with clients.

The website my friend's friend made and which I was linked to was for some local tradesperson's business (plumbing or gardening or something like that), and seemed largely static with a very bare-bones layout. I was told by my friend that her web-dev friend is reluctant to go out and seek clients, but just set up a website advertising his services, and they come to him? Surely it can't be that simple?

Makes me wonder whether I should set up some kind of portfolio site myself advertising what I'm capable of, see if anyone bites... though it's a huge divergence from games dev, and to focus on that would mean not focusing on this. And I do want to finish this project.

I'm very close now to doing a Kickstarter, I hope... though I talked about doing a Kickstarter in the money post I linked to, which I wrote over a year ago. It does feel closer now than it did then, though, and I think that is what I should do next.

Well, not immediately next. I need to finish off at least most of the stuff on my post-alpha-2 To Do List, then run a third alpha test, and - provided feedback seems okay - I'll make a bunch of promotional images, videos, gifs, etc and start using them to promote the thing finally. I've refrained from doing that so far because the game was changing a lot and the videos etc would be obsolete or even misleading. The video on the main page of this site is obsolete and misleading! So that's one of the things I need to update.

I'll use a Kickstarter to gauge whether or not I can earn enough money from this. If it does poorly, then I'll look into selling my other skills in earnest.