Day 9 - A year on, Aug 8 2022.

I haven't touched this in a year. There was a bug with mouse input on Android, and it never got fixed, and so I waited, and ultimately decided that this program was unneccessary.

But now, I'm thinking about starting a YouTube channel for real. (I know, I know, I say this all the time, but this time I mean it.)*

***

It's a Monday, so I'm going to count this as my Monday, uh, meeting with myself, to set up goals for the week. I want to make a DevLog by the end of the week, but should it just be about MegaGolf, or should it be an overview of everything that I'm working on?

As far as releases go, I'm nearly ready to release a demo for MegaGolf, but there are a few things that need to be fixed before it's completely there. There's a bug that's completely out of my control involving recentering the display. It's happening within the XR plugin, and I know nothing about that. I opened an issue on the github, but after a different user found where the issue started, nothing else has been said. I have no idea how to even bug hunt that kind of thing, and it makes me feel very useless, overall.

But besides that, the game is fun, and has most of the basic features to show off the main gameplay loop, and works as a kind of proof of concept to hopefully players and investors.

I don't know how to make money off of it. I either package it as a demo for a bigger later release, a la kickstarter or patreon. OR: I sell it as an early access thing, and just keep updating it.

***

Other goals that I have: I want WriteIt to be at a 1.0 release before November, which shouldn't be too hard to complete. I only have about 6 tasks left before it's feature-complete, as a themed text editor.

It's not the best thing in the world, and doesn't have all of the bells and whistles in the pipeline, but it'll work well enough for me to use it for NaNoWriMo, which I WILL be doing this year.

I hit my goal of getting MegaGolf to a playable demo by the end of July. I haven't released it yet because of that XR bug that I already mentioned, so that just leaves more time to polish while I wait for a fix and just kind of sit on the project mulling over monetization ideas.

***

It's August now, so I can keep working on MegaGolf and WriteIt for the rest of this month, but I'd like to release Jumpin' Jack on the Google Play Store by October 1st, 2022, so that leaves September to sprint on that. Before that time, I need to simplify the game loop, and finalize the unlocks / levels / skins / ads. I think the game scope should mirror classic arcade games like Galaga ( which was my initial intent ).

So, level, level, level, bonus. In fact, each level is just a set of waves of enemies. I only have 2 enemies so far, so I should look into increasing that. But first:

Playtests showed that the initial game loop is unclear. Putting candy into a hole isn't as intuitive as I thought it was. Also, there's the issue with the screen moving. I think the game is much clearer to play in landscape mode, but I *prefer* playing in portrait mode.

Agh, making decisions is the worst part of the whole process for me. :P.

***

I updated my Itch.io page with all the current content. No game uploads, as it's not the correct time yet (as I mentioned before-lier).

Now I'm going to take a stroll around the yard and perhaps read REDACTED's book. I'll see you on the flip-side.

Tanx.

*I didn't mean it.