Devlog #13: Making Good Progress

Steady progress on the design of the game. Actually got quite a bit more done today than I thought I would: I made some changes that I feel help to better distinguish the rooms than different skyboxes. I like the feel of it a lot better (but I'll withhold the details for now). So yeah, made those changes to the looks of all 4 rooms, plus all the items in the second room have been positioned. I also handled the transition between rooms (just setting scene indexes) and implemented the display of cards from previous rooms. With all that done, tomorrow  I'll just need to:

• Implement progression all through the second room.

I'd put more, but I start classes again tomorrow, so my time is going to become a bit more limited during the week (not by too much though), so I feel that'll be sufficient, though if I can start work on the third room that'd be even better. 

As I'm hitting the halfway point of January, I've been thinking about how much more will need to go into this game before it's ready to be released. Looking back at the rough timeline I drew up for myself, I'm getting close to the point that I marked as the end of Phase 2. Clearly, I'm not there yet by any stretch. The rooms aren't done, the story hasn't been worked on past its initial planning, and there's literally no sound in the game yet. But I was well aware of the possibility that this would happen, even saying so in the beginning. What I think matters now, most of all, is the commitment to keep making progress every single day, which writing these devlogs honestly helps to motivate. I've had multiple creative projects of mine in the past come to a halt because I just lost the drive to continue working on it and couldn't bring myself to start work on it again. By making daily progress, even if it's just a few things added to the room or some UI elements worked on, I hope that I can keep up this drive that I've had for the past two weeks. Even if no one ever downloads this game, it means a great deal to me that I see it to its completion.

So to update my predictions from the start of the project: I think that within the next 5-7 days, I will have all 4 rooms completed, with the player able to progress completely through the game. I should then have a start menu, scene transitions, and an endgame/credits sequence in place in 2-3 days max. From there, I'm going to be generous and give it somewhere between 1-1.5 weeks solely on developing the story and writing descriptions for each of the items in the game (there are 52 of these, remember, and they won't be short). After that, I'll be even more generous and say 2 weeks to implement music and sound design. So altogether, that puts the rough finish date of this project somewhere in the area of mid-February at the earliest to early March at the latest. I'm obviously going to shoot for earlier if I can, but I think this is a bit more realistic than getting every last thing done in 8 days. Guess we'll just have to see.