Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2023-05-12

It's the Friday Rambles, for Saturday, May 13, 2023. Sorry I'm late.

It's been over a week since ENDLESS MONDAY: DREAMS AND DEADLINES released, and now the dust has has finally settled and my resting heart rate is no longer at like 120 bpm or whatever. I can relax a little now. Sometimes I even went outside. I saw Guardians of the Galaxy 3 this week. I enjoyed it. I actually took a nap today.

Above: I still can't really wrap my head around this. Thanks for liking my game... I love you...

I preordered Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and I still haven't played it yet. I've been too busy with my own game! I can't wait to be able to enjoy other games again!

I also have a bunch of sticker orders left to pack, which I'll finish doing over the weekend to ship on Monday.

June 10 (in 3 weeks or so) marks the first anniversary of me quitting my job. Can you believe it's been a year????????????????????????????? wtf???????????????????? I'm writing a zine issue to mark the occasion, so if you've been keeping up with my zines and were hungry for more, well that's good news for you. But I might have to keep it digital only for now, because I really don't have the time or energy to print and fold and staple a hundred zines right now lol

Above: The final Work is Da Poop, June 10, 2022

As for GAMEDEV stuff, I'm still being productive, although I'm not spending every waking moment of my life on it like I was for the past month. 

I finally got brave enough to do an upgrade of the GM IDE and runtime to the latest version (which I hadn't done since I started working on the game, in case it broke a bunch of stuff). Of course that broke a bunch of stuff, so I spent a bunch of time fixing that and upgrading libraries and rewriting code because all the libraries had breaking changes too. But anyway, the upgrades should improve a bunch of backend stuff that probably doesn't matter, and also enable me to do the Mac build, which I'd been having issues with.

Above: Everyone waiting for the Mac build once it's released

I implemented windowed fullscreen mode, for people who are having issues with the "true" fullscreen mode. I still need to update the UI for it, so that'll take a little more time. The settings UI is already full and it was a nightmare to code in the first place, so I'm going to have "fun" with that.

Above: pretend like this is a screenshot of the screen being in windowed fullscreen mode. wow... cool windowed fullscreen mode

I also moved around a bunch of game strings so I can implement localization/translation for them. I've added support for translations for the dialogue itself, too. So that's coming along nicely, and a little faster than I expected. I'm hoping to get a JP localization out in time for Steam Visual Novel Fest in August. I don't even know if the Fests are worldwide! They probably are... 

Above: Google translated text for testing purposes. The localization code seems to be working. I'm working with real translators for the actual translation. I should also maybe find a cute font that's similar to my handwriting lol

I've been thinking deeply about how I want to approach translations for other languages. I don't want to add just any translation to the game without properly vetting its accuracy and quality, but due to the game having so many words, it's cost prohibitive for me to hire on localization professionals for even a couple languages, let alone all of them. Anyway, I'll worry about that later. I did start with Japanese, though, because I've already seen a good size response from Japanese players excited to play, which makes me feel like it'll be well worth it. 

In the meantime, I've also been fixing a nonstop trickle of typos that people keep finding, no matter how many I fix. I mean, my brain was completely ded while I was typing out the dialogue (half of which I wrote in the final two weeks) and was operating on like a month of almost no sleep, so I get it... but... it's embarrassing when a vtuber laughs at my typos and makes fun of me live on stream! I didn't mean it, okay! Even Ace Attorney has typos! At least I'm fixing mine!

Above: this was one of the first scenes I made for the game and read it 100000 times and i somehow didn't see anything wrong till today

Oh, yeah, I'm also supposed to be doing Steam Trading Cards. I'll do that soon. Really! I've just been busy!

As for "content" I think I've decided on what I want my next big content update for the game to be. It'll be fairly big, like an additional chapter. May or may not be important to the storyline, but it'll definitely have lore. I'm aiming for a specific season for release, so it's not really a rush right now. I'm not sure if I'll do any more content updates after that, because I do want to work on my next game too.

Speaking of next games, Dreams and Deadlines is on track to do pretty okay (like if the sales numbers continue to follow the general pattern for games in general), and with an upcoming JP release and other sales events coming up, and supplementing the game income with merch sales and stuff, I'm optimistic about the idea of not having to go back to a "real" "job" at least until I finish my next game, I think. Obviously not going to be buying a house any time soon, but I also won't get evicted for not paying rent for a few more months. So yeah! "Professional Game Dev" hcnone! Next game! Now ain't that a dream come true. Like, I still can't really believe it, honestly.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Couldn't have done it without you. Thanks for your support, as always!