Seventy-Six

As I mentioned in Tuesday’s video, post-launch work on Gunmetal Arcadia Zero has been keeping me busy, and I haven’t made as much progress on items as I would have liked. This week is getting cut a little bit short by Thanksgiving as well (oh hey I guess that’s today, happy Thanksgiving!), and sometime this week or next, I need to do some dev streaming.

The last couple of weeks have largely involved prototyping whatever remaining features I’ve needed for items, and now I’m finally getting around to the easy tasks that I’ve been sitting on. This includes producing a variety of general-purpose stat upgrade items, creating art for all items missing it, writing descriptions of all items, and setting prices. A majority of this will probably be a single day of work, but I know there are also a few item-related bugs I need to track down, and I have a few more ideas for last-minute feature adds that I might try to sneak in. (Last-minute update before I hit publish: the item count is now up to 76, comfortably above my minimum target of 60.) I’m way overdue for a full playthrough of Gunmetal Arcadia as well, so I’ll probably try to get at least one of those in this week and see how the distribution of items across a whole session is feeling.

Overall, I’m optimistic about the state of the game. I know December is going to be full of distractions, but I’m hopeful that scheduling an entire month to figure out legacy events and rewards will be sufficient to turn that system into something uniquely cool.

I’m down to like ten or eleven work weeks left on this game before its launch on February 7, 2017, which is…whatever it is. Scary? Maybe. Mostly I just can’t wait to be done with it. All told, it’ll have been about 28 months between these two games, and that’s way too long to spend on one thing. (Well, two things, kind of, but it feels like like one long project from where I’m sitting.) Each game I’ve made has been a reaction to the last in some way, and my next game is necessarily going to have a shorter turnaround time. I’m excited to start making that one and to start talking about it, but right now is the time to focus on finishing this one.