#project maiden

What’s up everybody?

I’m in a bit of a weird place right now.

Project Maiden is out in the world. It’s my job to promote it, take criticism well, and fix it. These things interfere with each other. 

Or rather, these things make it easy for me to interfere with myself. I am starting to understand why these jobs are all separate in that there games industry.

Promoting your game requires knowledge of everything that’s great about your game, fixing your game requires knowledge of all your game’s problems. Discovery of both comes externally through criticism. I need to do all of these jobs.

The majority of my time with Project Maiden, however, has been spent developing it. And the developer process of “Identify problem, hypothesize, test, repeat till solved” is super great for fixing bugs and compatibility issues. When I stumble with promotion and criticism, however, it’s because I am stuck in Developer Brain.

Developer Brain knows all the problems with Project Maiden. When I write an email to a press person, Developer Brain says, “Next update will be better,” and I struggle to find the right words to talk up the game. I only know what’s wrong.

This is because, as far as Developer Brain is concerned, if something is good leave it alone.

Similarly, when I’m taking criticism, DB thinks every critique or problem is a bug. Bugs are different than critiques. “The game is hard,” is the most common comment I hear about Project Maiden, and there are absolutely ways that I can make Project Maiden more fair but I don’t want to make PM less hard.

Because I like hard games. But that’s a deep topic. And not this topic.

To get to the point, one of the perils of working on your own or even just wearing different hats for a job is that you can easily get locked in the style of thinking that you use for your dominant task.

You cannot have just one problem solving philosophy that works for all your problems. You have to change your tactics to fit the battle.

Sun Tzu probably said something about that. Sounds like him.

When I let Developer Brain do the fixing and Hype Brain do the promoting and English Major Brain do the critique-getting, I can almost be a functional small business human.

But getting those wires crossed is a really quick and easy way to waste time and not feel like you’re good at anything.

Thanks for reading this week and thanks for following me to the new(ish) blog. Project Maiden is due for an update soon, so keep sending those bug and crash reports, I’ll let Developer Brain handle it.

What's up everybody?

Project Maiden has been out for a week and some change and the response from you all has been amazing! Every piece of feedback and every bug report goes toward making the game awesomer, so thank you guys so much for that!

Project Maiden 1.01 is available now! (Your save file from 1.0 should still work)

1.01 Update

Mac Version Exists - Woo!

Air Control Increased - Imogen has a little more control while jumping now.

Enemy AI balanced - Swordfighting enemies will not stab through their friends to get Imogen, meaning fighting a conga line of enemies is slightly less impossible now. Getting flanked and shot is still possible so be careful!

Up to Rockjump - The super jump ability can now be triggered by holding up or down and jumping.

More space for Duo Fights - Some of the scion duo fights needed a little breathing room.

Frameskip is gone - I took it out because it's terrible.

Keybinding Works - Custom key binding is no longer totally crazy dumb and broken. A controller is still recommended!

Boss Tells - Some bosses telegraph their attacks and weaknesses a little clearer now.

Free swords - I planted some swords before bosses that really need swords, but feel free to knife fight the final boss if that's what you really want.

Larger Button Masks - Some of the buttons and switches are hard to hit while jumping so I made their hiboxes a little bigger.

Various Crashes and Exploits Removed - Jumping ship no longer causes Theo to crash the game out of grief. Artillery Mechanic will no longer give you free bullets for knowing how to jump. Cat no longer distorts Imogen's shadow and neck while held.

For PC users having trouble running PM, this update might work for some of you! I'm still tracking down what exactly is causing PM to make some Windows machines sad. Updating and reinstalling your drivers seems to work for some people! Every machine is different though. Keep bothering me and I'll find the fix eventually!

Special thanks to Pete Nahas for providing PM with a NSI script!

Special thanks to Maggie Maguire, Casey Lane, and the Vesey-Townsends for confirming that the Mac version works.

Special thanks to Steve for letting me borrow his Mac for 3000 years.

Special thanks to you for reading! Spread the word about Project Maiden and keep the feedback and bug reports coming!

KC

What's up everybody?

If my hands don't disintegrate and my eyes don't melt and I manage to stay awake and work all the hours there are to work,

Then, holy crap, Project Maiden will launch a week from today.

So I'm getting back to work!

Thanks for reading!

What's up everybody?

Project Maiden comes out in two weeks! I'm working hard. Here's a gif of a cat:

(That's backerfriend Corey Condardo's cat.)

I'm closing the gap as far as likenesses go! I only have a few more people left to do. If you haven't seen your likeness yet, bother me and I'll instantly feel terrible and make you something good. Or just wait and I'll also make you something good in the next week or so.

Dialogue is being written and edited like crazy and scenes that I came up with six years ago are finally real. That's kinda crazy.

And of course there was more polishing and making and testing stuff this week.

But today's my birthday! And I'm crazy tired. So I only have the energy to be vague. So let's switch this up a bit. If you have any questions for me, post them on the Project Maiden Facebook page and I'll answer them. I mean, you could always do that anyway, but whatever.

Maybe that'll be alright!

Anyway, thanks for reading! Not much longer now!

What's up everybody?

Here's some of what I got done this week:

Project Maiden Doom Tracker Constructed Everything I'm doing for the next six weeks has been added to a calendar. This calendar is now my life. I am the calendar.

Project Maiden's itch.io page has been set up! There's nothing to download yet and little to read, but one day you'll be able to download Project Maiden there!

SuperTryStudios.com is live! I have a website and, thanks to Brian Townsend, it is nice. In fact, if you want to read WUWs there from now on, you can! I'll be posting my updates both on SuperTry and on Kickstarter for a while, and eventually I'll move entirely to SuperTry.

Added HUD Options You can now turn the HUD on and off. For now it's just an aesthetic option but I eventually (like, maybe tonight) want to add some color options for color-blind players.

Added More Credits Currently the credits screen runs, like, 15 minutes long and I haven't even added everyone yet. So that might need some tweaking.

Save and load system finalized The save and load system works! If you aren't particularly interested in why or how, you can skip to the next bullet! It is totally fine. So, Project Maiden saves by writing a bunch of values (Imogen's position, her equipment, what powers she has, where in the plot you are) to a text file, one after the other and then to load, it reads those values back in order and changes Imogen's position and abilities to match the text document. Game Maker has a few quirks involving persistent rooms. By default, leaving a room and re-entering it resets the room to its original state. Making the room persistent saves the state of the room so when you come back all the walls you've broken and doors you've opened are still broken and opened. This makes the save system sad because if you do a small part of a level and then reload your save, the rooms maintain their persistent status and everything is broken, open, dead, etc. It's a weird teleport which isn't what I want. So to clean the slate, Project Maiden on loading writes the save file number (1,2,3) to another document and resets the game entirely. Resetting the game also resets the persistent rooms. Then, in the splash screen in the first part of the main menu, the game reads the document with the save file's number and loads that save. Note: The save file value in the document is reset to -1 after loading so when it reads -1 it just goes to the main menu. Boom. Persistent rooms where it matters and a save system that works as intended. Too many persistent rooms can also eat up memory if left unchecked but I haven't run into this problem yet.

Project Maiden Main Menu finalized. Just full screen this image and play this to simulate the experience.

More Stuff In General And, of course, more levels were designed, more bosses polished, more text added.

That's about it! I've got a rigorous design week ahead of me so I better get back to work!

Thanks for reading!