First some great news! The game is getting very close to release! I recruited ~15 friends for game testing, and this was done between the 15th of November and 1st of December. I got lots of good feedback and suggestions on how to improve the game, and of course, most importantly some bug reports.

I had crushed my deadlines and time estimates, but due to being sick and otherwise feeling quite low on energy, I have lost the gained time, but I'm still quite certain that the game will be released on January 2022! How awesome!

Well. Last time I promised some talk about the more technical side of things. And sure enough, there have been some technical hurdles to overcome during the development.

I have participated in a handful of game jams and I have had a few failed projects before this. That helped a lot in getting up to speed with the basics like menu interactions and "cutscenes" (basically just text in this case). All of my projects have also had extensive game design documents, so keeping everything together and up-to-date has been really easy.

Everything that has been done code-wise is really super simple, and there's probably a ton of tutorials out there that could have helped me.  But to become better, I wanted to figure it out all by myself. And so I did! I am very proud of myself really. It's a great feeling to figure out bugs and stuff, even if it ends up taking longer.

Especially these things gave me a headache during development:

• Spawning
• Randomization
• Syncing up the "audio game"

Currently, before all the bug fixes for the final release, spawning is quite bad. Objects clump together and glitch out. Randomization in regards to this is also very basic currently, and sometimes it means everything spawns at once, or something doesn't spawn in 10-20 seconds. Both are bad things, but I'm sure I'll figure this out.

The "audio game" has been a constant headache. People kinda expect it to be a completely synced rhythm game, but I don't know if it's a good idea to put so many hours into that, considering the scope of this game and its series in total. At least the arrows move in sync with each other now, so that's something. Oh well, as said, the reports and feedback are in, I need to soak that in and make some decisions.

That's all for now, next post will probably be about the release of this game, which is near!

Kippis everyone, and have a great December!