demo progress and thoughts

I've been working on the game, and I've gotten to a place where I wanted to take some time before diving back into it. (this is pretty standard for my development process) and since I'm being all thinky and stuff, I thought I'd wax poetic a bit, and generally make a nuisance of myself by giving the select few who read this some updates and insights into what I'm thinking.

So let's go for the exciting stuff first. Combat. This has been the main focus of what I've been doing. It's not ready yet, there's still a lot of work that needs to be put into it. But I've gotten to the point where I'm about to work on the meat and potatoes of it. I tend to want to play it coy when it comes to, well, everything. Because both of how I want to be judged on what I actually deliver, and also because of how ambitious some of what I want to do is. And to that point, just because I am working on the combat system does not mean it will be available in the next update, which also I think may lend to some confusion. But with that being said, if anyone was curious as to what I was doing, I was working on the combat system. I may have also... rewritten how maps work, but let's not worry about that now.

So what is going to be in the next update? Well that's what I've been thinking about for the last few days. Because while I've been enamored with my shiny core mechanics, the game itself is sparse right now. I'm also not certain it's as polished up as I can make it in terms of story telling, there's lot's of bits of code that are a bit messy, and I think I would like to clean them up, as well as section things off and work on enabling save compatibility between updates.(It's almost certain the next update will break saves. That was always the idea, to break them while the game was short). This is however going to take some thinking, tinkering and packaging of specific parts of code to be updated and lots of silliness.  There's also some cut content that I didn't have the framework, or really the time to implement on the initial release. I also have to come to grips with the fact that I'm not going to be able to do as much as I wish I could. I'd love to magically come out with the game I want this to be, but every piece is going to take about 3 times longer then I have in my head, mostly because of polishing.

So I want my focus to be on content, not on extending systems in ways that I don't need them to be extended to at the moment.

But despite that I'm very happy with the state of the game, I think my plan for the future is to extend the demo with some mechanics I didn't have access to previously, and to clean up what I do have to prepare for save compatibility and general work-ability.

So I suppose in certain respects I had hoped I would be further along on this project, but in others I can see that what I have built can come together in the way I envisioned, and I'm happy about that.

Oh, and one more thing. There's more to being a game dev than just developing a game. I've been surprised by the amount of people that have played the game, and given it their time, however I unfortunately have received close to zero feedback. So my point to this is, If you're reading this, and you have some thoughts on it, or on the game, share them! I'd love to hear what you think!

And I will try and work on the things that come less naturally to me, such as creating a discord or such things. Because I kind of suck at it lol.

Thank you so much for reading!