(I hope it’s not too tacky to call these wicklogs instead of updates. It makes me feel sorta like a smurf to put my name on everything)

So! The Kickstarter gave eight months to make a game. This is doable. I can do this. Hoo boy.

Scripting

In the demo, I have all the content (levels, cell behaviors, body parts) hard-coded in the game’s files. It’s a quick-and-dirty way to get things working, but not a great way to structure a game long-term since you need to recompile everything whenever you make any sort of change or addition (and it’s hard for non-coders to make contributions).

A better way is to load external files. Games already do this for art and music, but the way this happens with code is generally through scripting languages. These are code files that are loaded and run on-the-fly, like so:

Monkey X has a custom scripting language called mini c thanks to a few programmers who decided to do the impossible task (for me, at least) of writing it from scratch. So rather than having to cobble something together myself, it was just an afternoon of downloading their modules and starting to integrate it into my game.

Bizness

Steam: Crescent Loom got Greenlit (which is an arbitrary and brutal internet popularity contest), so yay! But I’ve run into a few snags due to already being associated with Starship Rubicon on the Steam backend. Their system is confused since I’m not running the finances on that project, but will be for CL. Emailed ’em.

itch.io: I’ve set up a way for people to still preorder the game & join the beta via itch.io. I’d like to eventually completely host the online demo through them, but I haven’t yet figured out how to save/load creatures to my database from an external source. Gonna have to get that done for the desktop versions, anyway.

Funding: I’m looking into applying for funding beyond the Kickstarter, which generally falls into one of three categories: 1) Publisher! 2) Investors! 3) Government Grants! (#4 aka rich friends is not reliable) All of these are gonna be brave new worlds for me, so that’ll be fun.

Goals for next week

Do my taxes / work out how the KS funds affect my Obamacare-provided health insurance

Publish a postmortem on the campaign.

Set up milestones for the next eight months – backer rewards

Concept art/design of new creature bodies.

(there’s a distressing lack of programming on that list. I need to remind myself that Production is real work too, and super important to get right)