This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
Last week I got some great feedback on the Black Feather Forest demo. Articles ended up on warpdoor, indiegames.com, rockpapershotgun, badogames, indiegamemag, and I even got a call from Canadian radio! I’ll be on their morning show later today.
When you’re working on a thing in isolation for a while you start to lose sight of whether it’s any good or not. I hadn’t expected people to get so excited about it yet, so this definitely cements that I’m going to finish this game. Working on it is so satisfying that sometimes I forget I’m not earning any money this way. That will have to be stage two of this campaign.
Sadly there was a problem with my new internet connection at the new house so I’ve had to subsist off of the wifi of parents, friends, cafe’s the past week. Not having reliable internet is such a burden, and when emails pour in and you have to participate in heated discussions in comment threads that’s a bad position to be in.
There was a bit of discussion about the influences in the game that led me to de-emphasize some mentions in the script. The people I spoke with were very accomodating and I think we came to a good solution.
In terms of progress, I’ve been working on a new iteration of the ingame GUI. I’m still having problems hooking a few menus together the way I want to, but at least they look good now. A big issue I had before was that the dialogue GUI didn’t scale well on lower resolutions. I finally sat down and adjusted everything, so now the look is unified and works at any size.
Aside from that I’ve been mostly doing polish on existing content, and adding new animations for all the characters to make the whole thing feel more alive.
Next week: the premiere of the new demo build.