Working on the new boss. I’m building it with multi-legged locomotion so the player can climb its legs using wall jumps. The body is driven by skeletal animation while the legs are handled with procedural animation. I’ve done procedural movement plenty of times before, but I keep getting greedy with it and ending up rolling back. When you’re solving things programmatically, you unconsciously start avoiding skeletal animation, and I think that’s the number one way I overcomplicate things.
The two most common types of messages I get while making this game are marketing offers and music composition offers. Marketing offers — I can almost tell it’s a marketing DM just from how it opens. The pattern is always the same: no introduction, just a casual greeting with no mention of what they actually want. Composition offers come with a portfolio, but with zero consideration for the direction of the music already in the game, and I’ve never once found anything relevant in those portfolios. Some even push with “do you know who I am.” You don’t even know who you are — how am I supposed to?
Anyway, promoting a game is incredibly hard for me too. I try different things, introduce the game here and there, but sometimes I wonder — is my outreach any different from theirs? Am I reaching out to the wrong places? But then I’ve tried everywhere I can think of, so where else is there? A lot of thoughts like that. It actually gets harder a year after the demo launch, not easier. “Launching is the best marketing” feels more real by the day. But you still need some visibility before launch so people even know it exists. In the end, all these thoughts and attempts always loop back to the same place: just finish it. Focus on making it.
Boss work is taking longer than expected. Dental treatments keep eating into my schedule, wiping out a day here and there. The gameplay design for the boss is mostly done — I just want to build it out quickly, but that’s easier said than done. Can’t wait to get this done.