demo mission accomplished

The ‘Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown’ demo has been accepted, and as far as I know, it should make an appearance during the festival.

When I heard about this thing, I was very reluctant to even start, as the deadlines were extremely short, but as usual the DK30 came to the rescue. Making your goal public, and having people commenting on it, makes you feel a lot more committed to your project.

Afaik, the demo/preview will be live and playable for a limited time during the festival in early June.

polishing up the demo

Apart from constantly dabbling with sounds, I changed some other stuff as well. For example, the text on cards which ‘attack’ the chat (your enemy) is now reflecting the theme by saying ‘satisfy x hunger’ instead of ‘deal x damage’ (your mission every stream is to stuff them up with content).

week 3

As I’m waiting for the demo approval, I’m doing some bootstraps and fixes for things that I’ve never noticed before. Fixed my gamepad support which was riddled with bugs, among other potentially game-breaking things, it now doesn’t suddenly open up developer-only menus (lol).

Apart from that, I’m taking my sweet time dealing with the slight anxiety about the demo (normally you’d want to have your game already finished and well polished). I’ve been exercising more, and started fixing up my diet.

watch me write about my upcoming mental breakdown - submission deadline is here

Time to upload a demo build for the steam summer festival, I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be, but it’s not falling apart, which is quite surprising - but I do sincerely hope they’ll allow updates before the thing actually starts.

I don’t know if I’ll even make it, and I’m getting pretty stressed about my game not looking like a hundred million project. Anyway, wish me luck.

Update: I did all there was to do, and the demo pages/builds are awaiting review. If it goes without issues the image below will be legit, and I’ll probably continue the DK challenge right till the end and polish this demo up before the event.

the day of reckoning is near

Time is running out for the Steam submission thing, but I’m doing pretty good, considering that before this DK30 I didn’t even have a tutorial or a single sound effect file. Even if I fail to meet their deadline, I’ll be happy with the amount of focused progress boost I got out of simply knowing what to do for a change.

Currently, I’m gluing sfx, background noise tracks, and music all together into one blob, while keeping track of free asset licenses and credits. Sadly, I encountered a couple of sound bugs, where tracks sometimes get clogged and stop playing, but it’s usually caused by me recompiling/reloading the game in the middle of a playthrough.

Week 2 progress report

Having a surprisingly productive day/night.

I’m done learning the basics of how to input sounds into code, and I’ve got most of the groundwork finished for the card battle sequence. Still missing a couple of small jingles, but I realized that my dialogue scenes need to be worked on asap if this demo is to show up this month.

Right now (at 3 am) I’m digging through loads of copyright-free recordings of various noises, cityscapes and whatnot. It takes a lot of time but thanks to my amazingly mediocre amateur musician skills, at least I have a vague idea of what I’m doing in programs like Audacity.

I got the music and most of the sounds I need for the demo. I’m making a lot of progress in terms of coding all of this stuff in; it’s surprisingly neat in RenPy.

Lastly, worked some more on the starting screen and settings screens to make them more appealing.

2 migraines in 3 days update

All I was able to do was putting some ideas on post it notes, and the stuff I’ll need to do asap is:

• a player score system (you get a score upon death/bankruptcy/story completion)
• get music from the asset store
• get sounds for various dings and whatnots (atm I’m using very ugly placeholders)
• stop having migraines

Week 1 goals successfully completed

After much effort battling extreme laziness, I finally slapped a couple of test sounds into my game - and it all seems to work with no drama whatsoever. I didn’t expect it to be that problem-free in RenPy!

Worked some more on the tutorial, but still keeping it brief. The card battle basics are covered, but the fun stuff behind the scenes will have to be figured out by the players themselves if they want to succeed in becoming a REAL streamer.

A bare-bones, text-based tutorial sequence is up and running.

The demo will probably be based on the first 8 weeks of in-game time, as it is a good introduction of the general vibe when it comes to the story. It’ll be very challenging to get from nothing to even a single subscriber for your channel within that time limit, but that should be a good representation of what the game is like.

Meanwhile, drew a custom cursor thing: