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Now that I’m officially more than one year, into developing this game, it seemed like a good time to evaluate my current practices, and consider whether they are truly serving the project.
After a brief pause from mid-April to mid-July last year, I began posting updates, along with updated demos, on a weekly basis, and I have sustained this discipline ever since.
This was largely motivated by a desire to keep myself accountable, and demonstrate a track record of delivering new features on a schedule. I can easily get caught up in the fascinating process of designing and building infrastructure, and lose sight of the practical need to ship working game code on a regular basis.
As I’ve moved deeper into this project, however, I’ve needed more time to take on larger programming tasks, and a single week has often proved insufficient to finish the work. This has resulted in me repeatedly halting the work on Thursday, and scrambling to get one or two less meaningful features implemented and tested, so that I can release a new demo on Friday or Saturday. This has resulted in what amounts to a 3-day work week, which has significantly slowed down my progress.
This has also resulted in a sequence of incremental demo releases which, taken as a whole, have transformed the game significantly, but which individually don’t seem like they would be worth downloading.
To combat this phenomenon, I’m going to begin releasing demos on a monthly basis, rather than a weekly one. I will continue to posts news updates weekly, so you’ll know what I’m working on, but actual demo releases will happen on a longer timescale, with each demo including significant new things to play with.
Most of my work during this past week has centered on a rewrite of the music systems. Because many of the music features began as quick answers to questions of the form “What would it sound like if…”, the related code had devolved into an ad-hoc jumble of components, with no cohesive vision for how they should fit together and interact.
The new music systems are much cleaner and more extensible, and I’m looking forward to using them to increase the sense of musical immersion, create an intuitive sense of the progression through each mission, and differentiate areas by employing different melodies, key signatures, and instruments.
Meanwhile, have a great weekend, and if (like me) you’re in the path of the allegedly oncoming blizzard, stay warm!
(Archived gamedev post from 2026-03-14)
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