Douglas Adams used to talk about the big whooshing sound that deadlines made as they went by. That is where I am at this week, wind ruffling my thinning hair, wondering where all the time has gone.
Not many items underlined there, and nothing bolded. To be fair to myself, Friday and Saturday were taken up with FanFooty, as I was forced to update some clunky old SMF forum software for the first time in forever. Have I mentioned I hate LAMP Web forum software platforms? They all suck, every one of them. I am very glad to have that pain point in the rear vision mirror, hopefully starting another five years of neglect.
I find myself playtesting my own game a bit too much. It’s great to validate the core loop, if only for my own confidence. At some point in a play session, it is just wasting time. It’s also fun to plan and implement QoL features, but this is also the wrong time in the process. I need to focus.
The siren call of shaders still sounds loudly in my ears, as well. I managed to combine two Shadertoy techniques into one Phaser shader for the tutorial lady Nez, a task which pleased me greatly and looks fantastic… but really could have waited. I am gaining confidence very quickly on how to adapt public examples for use in Phaser, and have a lot of ambition to spread them liberally around Mr Football to add juice wherever possible. Games are supposed to be lively and active, and a UI-heavy spreadsheet simulation like this kind of game can tend to look rather static if you don’t add visual flourishes. I don’t pretend to be any sort of shader whiz myself, and I don’t think I ever will be. As ever, my skill is that of a a bower bird, scavenging stuff just lying around and repurposing it to produce something “new”.
I did get some work done on team selection policies, one of the big two remaining tasks to complete before beta. The interface is alpha-quality at this stage and needs a lot of work, but the code is basically functional and that’s what I should be working towards at this late stage. I have left the Journeys stuff to last because it requires a lot of content creation, which I really should be doing when I am mobile on my phone using my LAMP platform to enter data into HTML tables… instead of what I have been doing, which is idly scrolling through the latest uploads on Shadertoy looking for new flavours of juice.
Perhaps I need to take a step back and spend an hour or two planning the downhill run to open beta, and committing to doing nothing else. All of this work I am doing is not wasted, it’s just my timing that is suboptimal. No one else is here to tell me this as a solo dev, I have to work it out for myself. That’s part of why I am blogging every week: it’s like a meeting with myself, and these are the minutes.