Passes and versions, not perfection first
Its time for another completely random Voiceless progress update (one day I will get these back to every other week)!
Sneaky passages beneath/in the starter town
We are working towards a feature complete demo to send to some interested affiliates as well as anyone interested in Voiceless, JRPGs, the creation process, or critiquing errors. However, progress has been a bit slower than desired. The three main culprits being my newborn, persona 5 (so much style), and my own adhd/lack of focus - the third being the most guilty. Its just too easy to do easy things - but easy things don’t make JRPGs, so, time to focus some more.
As for the title of the post, Voiceless continues to improve and develop, and often times, that means throwing something that once was ‘accepted’ out. Specifically, we have switched fonts (again) - which is good for it is now more readable to the player, but bad for it loses the pixel-y goodness of the old font (which admittedly, was too hard to read and many people told me so) and means... all our pixel perfect formatting of the... EVERYTHING with font (menus, combat, dialogue) is off.
Old status screen with old font
New font.. and everything
To explain the title, there is much more to gain from progressively improving passes at your creation than to make everything perfect once and never need to ‘do-over’ something (If you have heard the waterfall vs agile straw man argument, its coming up here in game-dev form... so... move along, nothing to see here). Simply put, you will never make something perfect... never. A ‘creative’ work is never ‘complete’ - you simply walk away from it... at some point, preferably in a state that the creator is happy with (though often simply from neglect or other newer and greener pastures). Also, when attempting to make something ‘perfect’ is a pretty high and intimidating standard (believe me, I know. Voiceless stalled for a few weeks last year because the combat system was not ‘good enough’). Instead, make a version 1 that is good enough to let you see the next biggest problem (”Now that we have combat, town 2 might be important to create...”) and then give that a pass. Keep working on/improving whatever the current biggest need* is and after enough passes, you have something better than perfect, something releasable! And that is the goal of good game dev - not just the final release, but any time you get your game into other people’s hands. Not only to get that ‘creator’ high, but more importantly to have other peoples hands and eyes on your creation (not like that guys...) - to find where it lacks and IF it lacks in that area enough for another pass (saying no / its good enough is super important... but not this post).
So what does this mean for Voiceless? Combat version 2 should be blocked out this week as well as very slight tweaks to the new font in menus ONLY IF it looks THAT BAD - I know the font is off and will get to it, but I don’t want my testers getting distracted by what I already know when there is so much unknown for them to discover. Also, the website needs a version 2 so it can be ‘the once place to rule them all’ for voiceless news.
*biggest need - I mean the most bang for the buck. If you desperately need town 2, don’t skip everything from where you are up to it (or do so if its that important, it is your creation after all), but don’t give those things too much thought. Is town 2 after a canyon and creepy forest? Ok - world map gets some mountains and trees, and two square like maps latter I am now working on town 2 - those square maps will get their own passes later.
