WHY NOT BOTH?

Week of May 14th, 2017

WARP DOGS’ CORP LOGS

• The state of our WARP CORP continues to hold steady at ~doin’ fine~
• The Extinction-Level-Event (ELE) is holding steady at ~39 weeks away. Rad!

I’m trying something new! That’s what working for yourself allows for, yeah? Pivots, baby!

Truth is, I was spending more time than I wanted to on these planning and retrospective posts. I mean, ok, it wasn’t that much time, but it was always something I kept putting off and putting off, and then when I actually did do it I always half-assed it.

I won’t get rid of the concept entirely because I think it’s important to my psuedo-agile approach, but I am combining the two. This new thing will go out each Sunday (except for, uh, this first one?) and it’ll look exactly like the Planning posts with the addition of a Show & Tell section. I’ll also try to weave in last week’s successes (and many failures) into the Goals. Ok, cool? Cool!

Not much to report on the biz side of things. The prototype release Flower has been out for about a week now, which is rad! Everything else is on schedule.

SPRINT GOALS

The latest prototype contains two hobbies – critter hunting, and fishing. Since the start I always envisioned three primary hobbies, and this week marks progress in that 3rd one: archaeology!

This’ll be the most involved of the hobbies, and includes things like digging up jewels, finding treasure maps and clues leading to even greater treasure, finding the remains of long-dead ancient creatures…there’s a lot!

More importantly, this hobby has the most ties with other systems of the game – like seeding the ground with things to dig up each new day, or adding new quests to the Compendium if you dig up a map, and so on. As such, focusing on something like digging will end up improving a whole lot of systems as I work through them all – it’s like five or six birds with one stone!

SHOW & TELL FROM LAST WEEK

IT’S NOT BUILT FOR SHOES

Week of April 30th, 2017

OVERVIEW

This was a pretty lousy week, if I’m honest. You ever have one of those days where it feels like you do a ton of work, only to you realize you don’t have a whole lot to show for it? Imagine that, but it’s all week, and you have an idea for how it went.

Dunno why, really, just one of those things.

This coming week includes a full moon – meaning a new release! – and I’ve felt completely taken by surprise. Has it been a month already? What the hell! Only 4 days to go…so, I best get back to it.

SHOW & TELL

IT’S NOT BUILT FOR SHOES

Week of April 30th, 2017

WARP DOGS’ CORP LOGS

• The state of our WARP CORP continues to hold steady at ~pretty ok~
• The Extinction-Level-Event (ELE) is holding steady at ~41 weeks away. Rad!

Not much new to add on this front – money is continuing to be spent, but not too much. We still have just under a year to figure this stuff out, and I’m still feeling confident we will.

For the first time in like a decade we’re getting a tax return back, and its substantial enough to make a blip on the ol’ WARP CORP charts above. That’ll come some in the summer. Between that, various retirement accounts and other sources of income, I think I’ll be able to keep on trucking until an eventual plea for money in the form of a Kickstarter. Ah, but before that I need a game worth backing, right? Well stop making me type this and let me get back to it!

SPRINT GOALS

I have a few different analysis-related goals this week. I’d like to get together a “Lore Bible” of sorts – for myself! I’m picturing an Excel sheet of sorts that lists every character, their personality, relationships, places in the world, and so on.

I’d also like to finish up the public roadmap that I’ll be sharing over Trello – I’m committing to getting that out this week, actually, so look forward to that.

On the coding front the plan is to continue with ‘core loop’ items. This week I’ll definitely focus on player housing including furniture placement, upgrades, and lots more. Finally finally, I’d like a more robust dialog system (one fed via an external file instead of the hardcoded version I have now)

So, could be a busy week. Let’s get to it.

APRIL SHOWERS

Week of April 23rd, 2017

OVERVIEW

It was another good week. I’m switching some things up on both the development and story fronts.

I’d like to make my development even more open than it already is. To this end, I’m moving off of KanbanFlow and back to Trello which has more robust ways of sharing things. The idea is to make my entire roadmap public so that you can look at what’s implemented, what’s coming up, and you even vote on things you think are most important.

Here’ s a lil preview:

On the story side of things I’ve been rethinking some of the themes and overall tone I’m going to explore. Nothing much I can talk about now, but in short: things are going to be more fun and less gloomy.

More to share soon!

SHOW & TELL