Dragonien
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Development update: CPA! and SE
🕑 Added 2021-06-14 23:33:23 +0000 UTCHey everyone! Just wanted to give a quick update on my plans for the next couple of months when it comes to developing my two projects.
The long and short of it is I'm probably going to be putting scientific Espionage on a temporary Hiatus at least for a month or two.
Part of the reason is that I would like to focus a little more on CPA for a bit. With it being more reliant on your word count additions rather than new mechanics I kind of want to Beef It Up a bit into a bit more fulfilling size before I get deeper into the nitty-gritty of scientific Espionage and it's more complicated game mechanics.
The other reason is I need to take a little time to rethink exactly what I'm going to do with scientific espionage.
The long and short of it is to be totally blunt I never expected the game to go even half as far as it did. I started that thing completely at random mostly just to test new basic things I was learning in the how to use these programs to create things like that. I never intended it to become a real game in the first place and it just kind of grew out of that idea. And at that point I just started adding things to it as I was experimenting with more and more complicated mechanics because I've never done anything like that before.
I eventually have come up with at least the skeleton of the rest of the story I want to tell what that game but to be honest it was all created after the fact. Almost all of the writing and content for that game has been created purely from a reactionary standpoint. I had absolutely nothing planned ahead of time when I started making that game and it wasn't until probably the security guard update but I really started actually planning things out beyond the immediate content update that I was working on at that very moment. And unfortunately as I'm getting deeper and deeper into adding to this game that lack of forethought is becoming more and more prevalent and more and more of a hindrance.
SALI is a perfect example of that. I didn't even come up with the idea of adding her until I was halfway through the security guard update. And I didn't even know when I was going to put her in at the time and as I'm sure you guys have probably noticed there have been more than a few glitches and bugs in previous earlier content that you could go back to with using her because she was never originally intended to be in all of those scenes. So it was increasingly difficult to add her to Old scenes and rework old mechanics to accommodate for her without just breaking everything. Which I mean is fine things are always going to break it's not that something like that really bothers me. But it said it's something like that that clearly and easily could have been avoided or made significantly easier if I had just planned it out ahead of time and knew that I was going to make her part of the game before I started getting too deep into things
So I guess basically what I'm saying is I need to completely rethink how I'm going to approach this game. And I'm not exactly sure what that's going to entail. I might just make the extra effort and fix everything that I need to and keep going as is or I might try to rework something and do something different, maybe reboot it and try to make it a lot better from the start now that I know way more about what I'm doing now than I did when I first started the game.
I do a lot of this sounds kind of wishy-washy and admittedly I don't have a whole lot of answers. I just wanted to be upfront and honest with you guys. I don't want to completely abandon the project because I have kind of become attached to it. I mean it's my first real game after all. I'm not going to just throw it in the garbage bin because it became a hassle. I just need to rethink a better way to do it so I can make it easier on myself and make over all better content for all of you.
I don't want to give exact date because I don't know how long it'll take me to figure out exactly what I'm going to do. I could get super inspired and come up with the best idea ever this weekend or it could take me a couple of months. So the best I can say is that right now scientific Espionage will be put on a temporary hiatus.
Now that's not to say there won't still be content updates. I still plan to do full monthly updates to CPA! In place of scientific espionage. So you guys are still going to be getting new content every month.
This whole thing and these last three months have been a huge learning experience for me trying to learn a new skill completely from scratch so speed bumps like this were inevitable. I just appreciate all of you sticking around and supporting me through this transition. As I figure out the best way I can create content for you to all enjoy and still be able to support myself financially on it. Lord knows I don't want to have to go get a regular job again and let the stress start slowly killing me again when instead I could be continuing to write things that I love and that you all enjoy.
So feel free to toss any questions by the way if you have them I'll do my best to answer. And again, thank all of you so much for your continued support.
Comments
Giza White Mage
It's all good--such is the way with large projects. If you need help testing, I may be able to assist! I have experience with an app called Selenium which basically automates clicking around a browser, so a series of tests that do the same thing over and over can be run to verify correctness. Hit me up if you'd like to chat more about it.
