Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2023-10-06

The first Friday Rambles of the month, and the first Friday Rambles since whatever this new Patreon branding is.

The weird new logo and corporate mission aside, the new text editor is certainly not very good. I don't know why the text is so small. I don't know why the entire textbox flickers every time I change where the cursor is. Really good "creator" "experience."

In the meantime, there doesn't seem to have been any improvements to make up for it, like captions for images, or being able to drag and drop an image into the editor, or inline videos, or any other embeds for Tweets or Youtube videos or Steam modals or whatever. There are zero new text editor features, besides making it more annoying to use. If this is Patreon's way of trying to keep up with Substack, I'm not impressed.

Above: 0 steps forward, 2 steps back

It wasn't particularly pleasant or anything to use Patreon's post editor before, but now it's actively painful to use. This text flickering is driving me insane. Did they even test this before they rolled it out to everyone? I certainly hope the supporter experience is better...

Speaking of Substack, I might just start using that more instead, because I've definitely been neglecting my paying subscribers there, and my Patreon hasn't really been anything more than a weekly newsletter for the past year anyway. Whatever. We'll see.

What stuff happened this week...

In "Me" news, having become fully resigned to my creatively blocked state, I've started trying out locksport, in hopes that it would make me feel something. I bought an acrylic see-through lock with a pick and tension tool and tried it out, and it was fun to pick, so I bought an actual padlock (Abus 55/40) and picked that open too. According to the locksport community, that puts me in "Orange Belt" status. If nothing else, it's a nice sort of fidget toy for when I'm staring into space.

Above: Some people might find this interesting idk

This text flickering is giving me a headache. Patreon. Please.

Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines is still on sale on Steam, for a couple more hours? Not that it matters to anyone reading this, right? Because you already have it. :-)

I think it was a good idea to do a li'l marketing push when we got 500 reviews. It was a nice little bump in copies sold, and we got 50+ more reviews!

Above: Still 100%!!!

Based on my super scientific analysis of the reviews, people have generally liked these aspects of the game: Skye, Air Fryers, deforestation, Tiger-chan. I'll have to be sure to include those in Game 2.

Anyway, having been inspired by all the love thrown towards EMDND, I've decided on what I'm going to do for Game 2. Again.

Thanks to a few sparks of inspiration I got while jogging and staring into space in the shower, I've written out an initial premise and rough outline for the game. It's turning out to be a direct sequel to EMDND, with similar mechanics, but with all my game design learnings applied to it to make it a more fun and enjoyable experience. As for story? Well let's say if you enjoyed EMDND's story, you'll also probably enjoy EMJAJ's. (Yeah, I'm keeping that mysterious for now lol). I prototyped out a segment of one of the game's set pieces, and it's pretty great, so I'm moving forward with putting it in the actual game. It's still pretty rough and I'm going to try not to spoil it so far ahead of time, so I'll just leave it at that.

Above: Screenshot from Game 2. This all works now... again...

The stuff I made for Halloween Update is probably just going to be rolled into Game 2 (henceforth EMJAJ) in some form or another, which kinda sucks, but I just don't have the time to fight with the EMDND code to add more stuff. And focusing on a free story update delays EMJAJ more, and I honestly can't really afford that, because EMDND, while very successful as far as my own milestones go, isn't some kind of blockbuster hit that lets me do whatever I want creatively without a new game release for more than a few months. Not to mention trying to shoehorn in extra story into what I consider a completed story just dilutes the final product. What's done is done, as they say.

Above: Phoenix Wright 2 and 3 reused sprites too, okay

And so, having finally decided on the direction of EMJAJ, the real work begins. For real, this time! I'm actually doing it! To start I've restarted work on the rewrite for all the game logic, so it basically looks and feels like EMDND but isn't held together with chicken wire and duct tape. So far it feels really stable and smooth. The plan is when I make Game 3 (tentative title: EMUOO), I can reuse the engine and save like 2 months of time. And then after that move EMDND onto the same engine and release it all in an Endless Monday Trilogy Definitive Edition for Nintendo Switch 2 and other consoles. :)

Above: I bet you can't even tell this was made with all new code that doesn't suck! When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all! As they say.

That's right, you heard it here first. My new goal for my "game dev career" is to finish a trilogy of Endless Monday games. After that, who knows? Maybe a top down fantasy JPRG. Or that typing game deckbuilder roguelike I keep talking about making. Or getting a job.

In other news, I restocked the sticker shop and did a lil marketing push for that too. And now I have to pack a bunch of orders, which takes a long time. But it's a nice supplement to video game sales income, so it's worth doing. I wish I had better stickers, like actual sticker designs that aren't just sprites from the game. One day I'll just set aside a day to work on that.

I guess this week was mostly spent marketing! Buy this! Buy that! Well, soon I'll have more interesting and new things to share, I hope.

Okay, I think that's it for this week. It wasn't a total loss. I hope next week I'll have more to share! And I really hope Patreon fixes their new text editor by then because it was a huge pain in my eyeballs writing this.

Thanks for your support, as always!

Edit: okay, so formatted text isn't showing up in the live post as formatted. cool update patreon. i didn't want to italicize or bold my text anyway