Wednesday Update #5!

So first of all, if you haven't heard, Clash: Robot Detective - Complete Edition is now on Steam!

Clash: Blue Mirage will also be on  Steam, but first I want to pad out the demo a little more.  I decided the best way to do that was to add the introductory chapter.  This chapter works kind of like the Mass Effect prologue comic DLCs, where its a short intro that summarizes what happened in the previous game while also letting players pick key points that will affect the current game.  Now, I believe RenPy does have an option that lets a game read an older game and glean decisions from that...but that's too much work, I like my way better.  Just need to find a way that provides all sorts of summary while not overdoing it; I still want people to buy the first game, after all.

Biggest problems I'm facing right now are devtime and game length.  I grossly overestimated how long one route would take people in Clash 1.  I'm a fast reader, so I tried to slow it down to what I thought was a more average reading speed; this method timed one playthrough at an hour.  Then if a player wanted to get all the achievements, that would be at least four hours total playtime.  Right now, according to Steam stats, average playtime is...not that.  Which is a little embarrassing on my part; game length was part of the reason my first Steam attempt failed, so here I am doing it again completely on accident.  So I'm determined to make Blue Mirage a good length, measured against my normal reading speed.

And devtime is a problem that was starting to crop up at the end of last year; my day job and responsibilities are quite a bit right now, more than I've had in a long time.  So I am rebalancing pretty much everything so I don't overexert myself and come close to a mental breakdown like I did back in November.  That ain't good, I don't need that, I don't have the time to waste on that.  I am purposefully not giving myself a deadline for Blue Mirage or submitting it to a jam (unless its close to finishing, I can safely set a release date, and there's a jam that allows finishing up projects running at that time; I might join then just for that last bit of motivation) so that it can just be something I work on when I have time.  Which might only be weekends and holidays.  Ah well, that's the indie visual novelist life, I suppose.

That's it for this week's update, we'll see how this all turns out.