Development Update, October 26th, 2024

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all having another wonderful weekend! The weather outside is transitioning from one season to the next and the temperature is just perfect for going outside and sipping tea on the deck. Before I do that, though, I had work to do. I found some time to work on two tasks this weekend. One of them was more difficult, and I anticipated that I might have issues with it. I balanced that with another one that was more chill and easy to accomplish. And both of them helped move the alpha build to the final state it needs to be in to get a release.

Cursed Crown Updates:

  • Addressed Issue #25 Update Tech Demo (Alpha) Burke Placement
    • I had to fiddle with this one for a while to learn and understand the FSM system that ACF is using for the dialogue system. I’m not going to say that I fully understand it, mind you, but I have in place what I wanted for the purposes of the demo.
    • Burke has a new portrait that looks more like him than the default one provided by the samples.
    • Burke’s display name is now “Burke” instead of “ACFGuy.”
    • Burke’s dialogue is voiced instead of being static text.
    • I’d like to update the dialogue system so that it will automatically advance the stages of the dialogue from one stage to the next, but for now the player has to press “Continue” at each stage to move to the next one. I’m satisfied with this for now, though.
  • Addressed Issue #34 Update Chests in Overgrown Ruins
    • I created a new blueprint for an open and empty chest and replaced all the prop chests in the Overgrown Ruins map with them.
    • Essentially, the open chests are supposed to represent that Burke has been through the ruins already and looted everything he found already.
    • There are a couple chests hidden in the area that Burke hasn’t found. In them, the player can find supplies to help: a shield, an off-hand sword, a bow, arrows, and healing potions.
  • Miscellaneous
    • While I was updating all the chests in Overgrown Ruins map, I added a few more enemies in. There are several just hanging around the map inside the ruins. They won’t be a huge challenge, but should spice up the flow of the level some.

I’ve been tracking a task list of what I wanted completed to consider the tech demo complete and ready for release. I’ve used issue #18 to track it, though the issue doesn’t really have anything other than that checklist attached to it. What’s important is that the checklist is almost complete. The only thing left on there is to export and publish a proper test build. And while this should be a half-hour task that I can complete right now if I want to, I’m not going to do it right now. Please allow me to elaborate.

Voltaire said “le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” Put another way, “perfection is the enemy of good.” I know that if unchecked, I’ll allow myself to just build and tweak and add and refine and tack on and so on and so forth. I need to consider what I have as “good enough” at some point. While I’m trying very hard to do that, I also don’t think that I’m at that point right now. What I’ve decided to do is to keep tweaking and adding and adjusting, but only until the end of this year. I have some time off saved up from my full time job and I’ll be taking the last three weeks of 2024 off. I want to spend that time with whatever further updates and fixes I can then start off 2025 with a published alpha build so I can start with beta development.

I don’t have a specific roadmap yet, but by the end of this year, I want to have a laid out roadmap for what I consider to be a full release with a plan for getting there. I’d like to have something like a Kickstarter or Patreon set up to help me fund additional assets that I will require, and I’d like to try to get into the developer backend on Steam so I can get builds out to people faster and more reliably. Between now and the end of the year, I’ll likely have to take more than a single week “off” from development so I can get documentation and other similar work done. There might not be forward-facing changes, but work will always be getting done behind the scenes and I’ll always make sure that there’s something going on here on 6fpsnetwork.com and in the Discord where applicable.

Thanks for sticking with me through all this, everyone. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Keep on gaming!


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