Happy Canadian Greenhouse Winter Everyone! The nights are getting longer as we march towards the winter solstice, soon to be on the way to longer days! In the mean time, let’s kick in to a November Month in Review! This is Gaian and it’s so cold, kinda~!
Introducing Joan Arteest!
What a babe.
November started with the release of Joan’s debut to the Jean Arteest series: Shes Chronic. You should just watch it! It breaks a 2 year dryspell, and there’s one more script written out for shooting soon.
-shh dont jinx it-
This one resonates closely as I’ve only just recently come out as gender fluid, in hopes to welcome ‘her’ (more of myself) into my life I wanted to integrate a “just as outrageous an Arteest” to reflect that in my self satirizing. The concept has already sparked a lot of ideas over just how they can play as characters in more Arteest episodes!
Into Some People’s World
It’s a lot bigger now!
Some People’s World got the brunt of the efforts this month. With a very clear mandate for stability and polish, a lot of great systemic work and fixes were brought into the project making my framework of code that much more comprehensive and functional. Some of which were long standing robustness issues with very basic features like entering fields and having them accurately affect you with the right properties. There’s a dev dive for that!
In an arguably more interesting front I’ve taken the time to start doing a world development pass. Having showcased a really raw and new feature set, the World State System, I HAD to put it to some level traversal testing. It did great! Of course there were SO many issues to iron out and improve, but the greater world has started to take form simply in being able to fluidly and easily travel around to places. Of course I put some time into trying to round out the edges and make it less certain you’ll fall to oblivion for no reason and stuff. It’s been a really promising expansion into the play world and what it can be, how big it is, and what fun things I can already imagine filling it with.
When talking with a mentor early on in the month, when finalizing the CMF application we weren’t able to submit on time, we identified that for Some People’s World: Mini-games are key.
Later in the month I connected with another mentor to review where I’m at and what ways I can improve my course and goals to more closely realize an actual project success. It was a great conversation, with probably a little too much friendly, time wasting, chatting, and I gleaned some really valuable perspectives on my work and how to proceed in a more potent way. One of which was making the game more “twitch-worthy” in the sense of making it as shareable, as entertaining to watch, and as enticing to get for yourself after seeing someone else play as it can be. More on that later.
The project is getting closer to being a tiny proof of it’s potential, with stability and a clearer vision and direction for the experience. And, with a precise direction to aim for to realize a strong release.
Career Dives
Along with those juicy links above, the World State and Influence Fields, I’ve released some career dives on running your scrappy business, and how to network and foster networking through hosting socials. Not to force business interactions, but rather to build friendship and comradery among your local peers. I really love sharing about this stuff, it’s so cool.
Vlogs too!
One particular, incredibly glam, one is about how haters and bigots affect you even if you don’t care. I really liked that one as it’s been a fresh and new experience I’ve encountered as I ramp up this media production game!
Another blast was delving into the “Topography of the Dream Scape“, then using that insight to change the course of your life through “Lucid Wakefulness“. Ooeeeooo oooo…
It’s been a serious reflection time in the vlog-scape with Being Tricked by Your Body and Plans Not Going to Plan as the more direct reflection of my continued fight through production and business development.
Theres lifestyle posts to balance out your world of game dev, though!
Don’t fret! Life, AND Style.
Our lives can be a lot easier with this incredible technique: Touching up your lipstick in 3 seconds, along with boosting your choice coffee flavour, my coffee guide: Making your own house blend, video!
Into the Month
So now that I’ve got you hook, line, and sinker. Holy, have I been struggling with depression this month. Many people ask “why”, but it’s an enormous list of tangible, intangible, abstract, and direct reasons. I suspect exacerbated a lot by the shift to cooler weather, it’s been killing me this year on top of humans many other predators.
While these have been periods that often cause me to stop for hiatus, I’ve grown and things have changed. And additionally, I just don’t actually want to stop if I can help it. It’s been very clear to me for a long time that I love this work, why would I seek to stop that?
So I’ve been keeping steady these past few days enough to keep rolling along with some dev, business planning, networking, and this month in review! I’ve begun a change in my meds and it’s been making it a struggle to be performant every day, but it should be a lot more steady once I’m back to my working schedule in Jan.
Intermingled with all this strife was some efforts to work towards another really prominent pivot in the project. In order to facilitate a more share-worthy and enticing game, the singular and most certain idea we had to improve is to switch the single player mini-games to multiplayer. If you’re going to spend a ton of effort making a pack of mini-games with a campaign wrapped around it, why not make it multiplayer?!
Buuuuuuuuuuut… stability is dead again. X.X The tools work really well in a single-player context but trying to build multiplayer up from under it is proving to be ridiculous.
The Guardian has Awakened.
What a relief, I was so scared!
Awakened Guardian, in a dormant state, does have multiplayer begun already. I didn’t want to pursue AG yet due to the scope of the gameplay and world building, but it doesn’t mean I can’t expand on the prototyping to build the MP framework for my other tools and systems. With that, I can upgrade all my SPW features to MP in AG, then migrate the whole package back to return to iteration. That’s the beauty of making versatile tools, you can quickly recover and restore your momentum without complete teardowns.
Okay, pivot go! (Turns out it’s not nearly so easy…)
Moving Forward
Pivoting hurts so much!
Because I put myself in the position to pick up a project in shambles and start bringing it around, the utmost priority is EVEN MORE stability. No arguing about it. What this means is that I’ll need to really focus on making progress with Awakened Guardian to start getting the base GS_Play framework up to speed.
Next is that I want to make a fast track to fun. Not in the sense of dialing in on making the experience funner… but rather that I want to get rapidly to the point where I’m making the fun interactions out of the base systems we have, and implementing the new features needed to realize our targeted play.
Which means:
SYYYYYYSTEEEEEEMMMMMMSSSSSS….
SYYYYYYSTEEEEEEMMMMMMSSSSSS….
SYYYYYYSTUUUUUUUUMMMMMMSSSSSS….
In Conclusion
This has been a roller coaster of a month but still full of a lot of progress, acclimatization, and momentum.
AG progress is SPW progress. They use the same systems all around! So, stay tuned for some Awakened Guardian content while it serves to build us toward having a stable base to work on SPW again!
In the mean time, play Del Lago Layover, I swear it’s a fun and spooky 40 minutes.
I’ll be largely out through December recovering, laying low for some of the cold season, enjoy some free content uploads through December!
What’s better than Infinity? Infinity plus one!
Oh no! You got me!
As part of my business planning I’ve been adjusting our subscription tiers! Genome Infinite has a surprise new Tier: Infinite +1. For a limited time, get on the front lines of Genome Studios development like the regular plan, BUT with a Critical Discount! While slots remain!
-nudge- It is my birthday Dec 2nd -nudge nudge-
Thank you all for coming, reading, and clicking through this update! If you’re new, come join our Discord, or Patreon Community for free and follow along for all our updates and what’s going on at the studio!
Till the December year end review!
P.S. I was on the Alberta Game Series 2023 Showcase! 0:36 I’m famous!
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