#birddev

I haven’t been active in a while. I hoped that I could pick things up again soon, but it looks like it hasn’t happened. I have a job, and I struggled a lot with this, but I no longer have time to make a game. Time For Birds is on hiatus, and if I pick it up again, it’ll be a different kind of game.

But time wasn’t the only problem. Here’s everything that went wrong.

Firstly, I turned my hobby into a job. I launched a Patreon with hopes of supporting my endeavors with income, but it turned into a source of anxiety. I felt like I needed to work. Game development turned into a bad experience where I felt pressured to get something interesting done to gain approval of supporters, but then I got stuck making game engine components. I started feeling heavy guilt, and it made me want to take multiple month-long breaks from the project so I could forget about it.

To add to the stress, I was accepting Patreon rewards for custom modeled birds. This worked well the first month, and then I lost all motivation and never gained it back. I’m still trying to contact some people to offer refunds without much luck.

In the future, I won’t take money until it’s done.

That was the biggest issue, but these next issues still greatly affected development.

The scope was WAY too large for my first time making a complete game

I’m hardly interested in most RPG gameplay, making the game engine a struggle to create

I did not have enough coding experience at the start, so there is too much old spaghetti code

I was working alone

It’s tough to say this, but there were too many birds

If I start up again, it will not be an RPG. It will be a much smaller game, and a lot of it will be coded from scratch. I also won’t intend to model 200+ individual birds.

I’ll be closing down the Patreon next month (June 2019), archiving the posts, and shelving the project. It’ll be safe and in a place where I can resume development if I find the time.

I deeply appreciate your support up to this point. Despite the issues, I still had the time of my life making this game.

Wouldn’t it be neat if your friends followed you places?

A UI test!

I was on a looong hiatus, and I just started working on the game again a week or so ago! I’m creating an updated UI system, because the game’s going to really benefit from more detailed menus, and I need something like this completed before I go any further.

Something to take note of here is that instead of each box containing only one simple list menu, I’m able to have complex layouts, like this list with a button anchored to the bottom. One of the list items is split into three as well. So I can pretty much do anything now!

Alrighty! Here we go! A new version of the framework I use came out, so of course the first thing I have to do is update the game to work with it! The new version natively supports nearly all of the 3D stuff I had hackily implemented in the last version, so now the only problem is rewriting a lot of rendering code.

After many hours of tweaking the game until it stopped rendering garbage, this is what I have! It’s a lot of work, but it’s necessary because of a few new improvements that I would really like to include in the engine!

Been gettin’ more into making new birds! Check out these friends, these pals!

Hey y'all! Haven't made an update in a while because I'm doing a lot of small technical things and big gameplay overhauls that aren’t yet presentable, so here's a small video of some silly activities.