Blogging Roadmap (And About Roadmaps)Can blogs even have roadmaps or is that just a tech thing?
A month or so after my last update, I realized I was doing the thing where when I'm not feeling like death lightly-warmed-over any more, I get so excited at the prospect of being functional again that I just start flailing around at all of the things I want to do until I overwhelm myself and wind up not able to do anything and being miserable about it. At which point I forced myself to step back away from ALL my projects, take some time to just chill and finish recovering, and then revisit everything in a more... sensible... frame of mind.
Blogging Plans
I've now sorted my dev projects around a bit and settled on three (well, three and a half) projects to actively work on. I've also assessed just how much time I can reasonably spend on those projects, and that particular assessment has led me to determine it would be reasonable to post a dev blog update once per month. This post will thus function as the August Update, and I'll put out a new update sometime within the first few days of each month going forward (unless things change and I have reason to do them more often).
If I get exciting ideas to blog about and opportunity to write them down, I'll maybe (hopefully! I like blogging) do some extra posts during the month. We'll see.
And now, the Official Project List!
Zerrarium
My current "top-priority" project is the ZPG game I mentioned previously. (Except this time I have pictures!)
Originally I made it as a social media tie-in project where all the player interactions were from the fediverse, but I ditched that angle a long time ago. So the work I've been doing has been giving it a proper user interface and account management, as well as just... updating the code to be more maintainable. You have no idea what a mess it was. Ha ha.
I'm currently working on improving the content release system - I want to use that super nice patching system I built for the "cozy game", since it's fundamentally compatible and it makes data updates so much nicer - and then reviewing/updating the existing content. After that-- well, actually, I spent some time organizing my repos and writing up issues to track my to-dos better, so I can simply show you.
NEXUS
Behold! The return of my beloved cyberpunk text game!
I kept poking at it because I missed it so much and it had so many things I wanted to do, but it had gotten stalled out (and abandoned) due to what seemed at the time to be an unsolvable architectural design problem.
Well, it turned out to just be a regular old bug in an entirely different system that I didn't even check. And it's fixed now! So this has taken up a position of honor in my current development as well.
I'm really excited and hoping to actually get to that pre-alpha gameplay test I was aiming for a year and a half ago sometime soon.
(Title Redacted) SDV-like Farming Life Sim
I just don't want to share the title yet, but amazingly enough I do have one.
I know, I know. I was making that cozy RPG web game and was really hype about it and yadda yadda. That's actually the dev slot that I've given to Zerrarium, though - the web game thing, you know?
This is my single-player game slot - I'm building it in Godot. I have rough notes, some avatar base concept art, and a whole bunch of system prototypes in Godot from other game ideas right now, so nothing to really show... yet. Probably won't be much demonstrable progress on this one for a while, but we'll see!
The half-a-project
I'm also committed to (and enthusiastic about!) helping a friend of mine with their MUD - I was tapped to build the crafting system, which is exciting. Doing dev in someone else's codebase is a lot tricker in some ways, so it is a bit slow going, but I'm really hoping I'll have it done enough to be in the next playtest. I am... less optimistic about that happening than I was at the end of the previous playtest, though. We'll see.
Wrap-Up
And that's the current state of things! Next guaranteed update will be the beginning of September, with whatever I have to share.