Bogged down

As some of you probably noticed already, there wasn't any news these past couple of weeks. I was on the fence about sharing it here (blogging about it), as most of the stuff that happened had very little to do with DSC itself (as in the technical side of developing the game), albeit it had a great impact on. However, as I’m looking at my current task for DSC (shown in the picture below), trying to judge how far till the next step is, it became clear that at least a week or two will go by without any further news, if let that way; so here we are.

Been mostly staring at this growing table of reference shapes “all day every day” the past weeks (currently clocking in at 47 unique entries, that’s 47 rows), whilst going back and forth between Google Sheets and Blender to determine what will go into each cell; mind numbing process, and quite the boring one. All this is for that procedural map generator that uses that fancy “wave function collapse” technique mentioned a couple of times. Downside is that it meant that I'd have to manually figure out what and where each piece from that array of shapes (seen in the image above) can go. Probably would’ve finished it by now, and perhaps could’ve shown how it looked in game, but the events outside of gamedev really took my time away from continuing; and to be frank, there wasn’t much enthusiasm left in me as well to push for an update.

However, as I’ve seen especially on IndieDB that people are still somewhat interested, as now the demo snapshot has 14 downloads, so thought to fill in some of the gaps.

Dirty business

This is the part that’s not really relevant to this game, and probably will not be interesting for most of you, but has a direct impact on all of it and making it all work. A few days ago I made a quick video about explaining my “venture” as a solo developer (it’s mostly useful for aspiring devs, which almost fried my PC, see image above), going over some of the things I experienced and the difficulties I faced working full time for the past several years (with nothing). Bit of a long winded explanation of failures, obstacles and the industry, in hopes someone would find it useful (for avoiding some of my mistakes). Point is that from this point forward, I’ve no idea what will happen to DSC; all of it is out of my control.

I’ve tried really hard to do something about it, but my circumstances and reach (as in industry credit) could only do so much, which is the no.1 reason why the game is not on Steam as well. I tried to push a deal with several publishers, something I also talked about in the video, because how things went so far, the game is set to be dead in the water in terms of revenue. Some were interested, one almost signed the project, but nothing happened by the end. Which is an issue when life is breathing down your neck and you need a way out, like right now.

At this point it feels like I’ve exhausted all my options and the only way this could be saved is me somehow stumbling on a bag full of cash, somewhere on the side of the road, and be able to pull the game through it’s financial struggles that way. However, it’s unlikely to happen.

So I just wanted to give any of you interested in the project a heads up as to why there was a bit of radio silence these past few weeks, as I was mostly writing business emails and coping with the stress and all the other crap that comes dealing with this.