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 was the final week of the second development period for Black Feather Forest, its goal being to polish up the demo to submit to an event here in Holland. I’m glad to report it was succesful, which means you can play the new version right here!
Content-wise not a lot has changed; I’ve mostly fixed bugs, edited dialogue here and there and added a few of the planned features to the GUI. Notably the Dossier is nicer to look at, and the dialogue UI should play nicely on all resolutions now. Initally I wanted to also add some new locations, but with the time I had I decided it was better to make the existing content solid before moving on to new challenges. And the past week left me no other option when a handful of game-breaking bugs came to light!
being a game developer is sometimes a bit like being an explorer, because you often see really weird things that nobody has ever seen before. Especially when there are several plugins working together in ways you have no idea about.
Things like a conversation with an NPC only triggering if it was the first location you visited in the game. Or menus that you explicitely disabled popping up again if you press the skip button at the wrong time. Colliders rotating on the X-axis when a character turned on the Y-axis. Cutscenes that only run half of their actions. Z-buffers that sort differently between engine and build. Every day is a new adventure.
Luckily both of these plugins are made by devs that really understand how to run good and swift tech support. So thanks Chris and Tony.
So now that the demo is ‘done’ I can comfortably start adding new content. Basically starting the production towards the final product.
And finally, there is also a matching url now: www.blackfeatherforest.com
Next week: the tale of how I’m probably going to break all of the things by upgrading the software.
If you have other topics you’d like to hear about in a future blogpost, let me know in the comments.