Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-04-04

It's the first Friday Rambles of April. I was busy today doing real life things. But I am on time!

Gamedev Stuff

As you already know, since I spammed all of my followers (regardless of whether they were paying me or not) with the Overtime announcement, I released the Overtime chapter this week. Just last week I wasn't even 100% sure it'd be out in March! But luckily the final playtests finished without any major issues, and we pulled it off at the last minute. Promise kept. All's well that ends well.

The launch went smoothly! I had put a lot of effort into the preparation, so it was just a matter of executing my checklist in order. New achievements published. Production build moved from staging to main. Store page updates published. Announcement posts published. Social media updated. Bing bang boom.

I lurked a few Twitch streams and found a couple typos, and got some emails and forum posts reporting some other typos and minor UI bugs, as well as a crash bug in the Chinese translation, so I fixed those. In general, pretty stable, though.

And, most importantly the reception! I'm so happy that people seem to be really enjoying the new chapter and are looking forward to whatever's next. I got a few heartfelt emails from people talking about how much the game meant to them, and a bunch of people updated their reviews on Steam to mention that the new chapter is just as good if not better than the original game, praising how the topics covered in the game were handled, and things like that. It's all very heartwarming. It's not yet the weekend, so I'm not sure what the peak CCU will be (if we haven't peaked already), but it does seem like a lot of people are playing too, and even 100%ing it again. People really care!

A sampling of some updated reviews below:

(usernames redacted to protect the innocent, but you can see them here)

My cold, frozen, shriveled heart has thawed and grown three sizes this day.

Some people have also expressed confusion at why this update is free. Well...

Anyway,

I'm happy that I can finally call this game "done." I now no longer have any regrets (now that it's a big chonker of a game), I've said what I want to say, and I'm ready to move on to the next thing. Or I would be, I guess, if I wasn't planning on releasing the game to Switch as well. I'm hoping to release it by the 2 year anniversary of Dreams and Deadlines (so like, the first week of May), pending all the publishing administration stuff, so hopefully I can take advantage of the new console release in June to plug my game again. Wow! A "launch title"!!! And also I should probably do some anniversary events or whatever. I don't think I can do anything in-game, though, because I won't have enough time to do localization for it. Ah, well. I'll probably make some merch and maybe I'll write a zine.

The End

I'll be super busy this weekend with real life family obligations. And with the last month having been fairly exhausting due to Overtime update work, I think next week I'll be taking a break. Maybe I'll treat myself. Anyway, thank you all so much for your support and kind words and interest and everything. See you next week!