DEVELOPMENT

9

1,142

Weekly Update - Promotion Wariness, Wondering Whether To Focus On Porting Old Games

2 years ago1,327 words

This week, I made some Atonal Dreams improvements (mostly) based on feedback from the previous test, and intended to post about it on Reddit, but... am I too burned out? Should I focus on stuff like porting my old games first?? Am I just making up excuses to avoid doing something I have a strong trauma-related aversion towards???

Let's look at the technical changes first!



Now you can summon up a dialogue log - like the one in MARDEK - by holding a key at pretty much any time. Useful, probably! May need some tweaks once people - myself included - play around with it during actual gameplay.

There's a line in the scene shown here which multiple testers commented about, where Savitr follows a reference to the "lawful light of Harmony" with the contrasting "chaotic lightNING of Discord"; apparently the first use of 'light' was skimmed over and not retained in memory because of how we tend to read (getting the gist but not all the details), so - since they were in separate dialogue bubbles - the 'NING' bit felt like a typo or was generally confusing.

Would this log help with that, or would I have to rewrite the line anyway?? It was worth adding the feature anyway!



I've also started on adding a configurable settings menu thing. Are you excited by that?? Because I'm not! I find this sort of thing entirely tedious, but it must be done, annoyingly. I'm not sure how many options I should even include though. I definitely need and intend to add key rebinding - that's what the empty space will be for - but that turned out to be more difficult than I could be bothered with when I looked into it so I thought "ugh, I'll do that later".



Nobody asked for this, but the way that boons worked previously had been bothering me for a while. Each figmon had an associated stat, which they permanently boosted by a certain number for every skill level you gained with them... but if that stat was either attack or defence, they grew far too easily and quickly and I was concerned they'd lead to huge balance issues in the late game (which is difficult to predict and test; I seem to remember starting MARDEK with high-levelled characters specifically to ensure the mechanics would work well enough at those levels).

I randomly had an idea a few days ago for how to revise the boons which seems so obvious in hindsight: now, each figmon has six separate stat increases that it gains in sequence with each level up. So one might have attack-HP-HP-attack-HP-HP, in that order, meaning it still boosts attack, just not as drastically (only at levels 1 and 4). It also gives the potential to make some skills late bloomers and others barely worth levelling high, which is perhaps more interesting.

My only real concern with it is that the HP boosts - the most abundant - are only +1 currently, which might feel too worthless. I could change that to always being some other number (like always +3), but that seems like it'd be less obvious; I'll fiddle around with it as development continues.



I'm also very aware that I've been dragging my feet about promoting the game for far too long now. So on Wednesday, I lurked around some indie dev communities on Reddit a bit, and wrote out something I could post...

...but then got cold feet and didn't actually post it. I'm disappointed in and annoyed at myself, but I think I understand the psychology behind it. Partly it's just general social anxiety, but more specifically it's due to enduring trauma from running Fig Hunter years ago, which I've mostly recovered from now, though it still definitely continues to haunt me and will take some more time and effort to break through.

As part of that necessary recovery process, next week I'll at the very least try to write out a blog post here just examining my own thoughts and feelings about it all. I don't know how interesting that'd be to anyone else - maybe a bit if you were a Fig Hunter member or you're interested in psychology? - but it could be valuable for me. I don't think any of it's stuff I haven't said elsewhere, but still.

I also got a bit concerned that I still don't have any proper 'marketing stuff' to show off, so posting before getting that ready wouldn't be wise, and this website's a bit of a mess at the moment as well. The front page in particular has a ton of stuff on it, including hefty video files, which is stupid; I don't know if anyone who checks in on this blog ever looks at that page, but it's what you'd see if you followed the basic alorafane.com url, and I'd prefer it if it were better.

So I've been cleaning that up significantly! It's been therepeutic in itself actually, as it feels like tidying up my digital home or something. I'm really pleased with what I've got so far, but I started on Friday and it took longer than anticipated (as is always the case), so I'd like to spend a bit more time on it next week before making the revised version live.



The site's front page redesign will put my games at the forefront, since that's what most people will come here caring about, but it's such a shame that I only really have three to show after all this time, and the only one that's actually finished (Memody: Sindrel Song) is something few people even care about!

So that got me wondering again about porting my old Flash games to Steam in some collection... as I've talked about many times before but never end up actually getting around to because I spend what mental energy I can even muster working on Atonal Dreams.

So I've been wondering... Christmas is coming up. Would that be a terrible time to do a Kickstarter and general promotion stuff? Or an especially good time? Or would it not matter? I should look into that.

And if it would be a bad time, maybe I should just take some time off Atonal Dreams to focus wholly on finally getting some other stuff done, like porting those old games, finally posting some music on YouTube which I also keep mentioning, maybe looking into getting therapy again specifically to deal with the trauma that's obviously in the way...

I feel like no, I MUST spend every waking moment on Atonal Dreams so I can finish it and move on with my life!!, and I can't afford to redirect my attention... but said attention has been poorly-focused recently anyway because I feel so burned out...

Ehh. I don't know. I'll think about it as I continue doing stuff next week related to renovating this website and producing promotion material like videos and screenshots for Atonal Dreams.

(And do I include Clarence's Big Chance in a compilation or release that separately??)



I left this post for a bit and gave it some more thought, and checked when I last talked about porting my old games; I think it was ∞ this post ∞ from 5 months ago, where I talked about some specific technical snags. So those will be tons of fun to try to work through if I do go down this path.

And how many people would even be interested in buying a compilation of old unfinished Flash games anyway? I know other Flash devs have done it, but they're more successful than me in general, and I assume the games they include are actually finished...

I think those were the thoughts that put me off last time I got thinking about this. But the thought does keep coming up every so often, so... I don't know.