Day 3: Marathon, Not Sprint

Chard on 2021/03/31 05:12 of Paper Dragon 31

Today was another slow day and I'm starting to get worried about the eventual shape of our game. From experience I know these things tend to pull together late in the process. All the same, it's hard not to be nervous. So what do we have so far?

• We have a fairly complete model for the MVP.
• We have a library of tests ensuring that the model works as intended.
• We have a scene that faithfully maps the model into sprites.
• We have a lightweight animation system bringing the scene to life.
• We have an API for interactions in the scene to be translated to the model.
• We have a dialogue system for which there is currently no content.
• We have a growing collection of adorable hand drawn images.

And what do we need to do? Well there's a long list I suppose but first and foremost we need to nail down the gameplay. This is the main reason I haven't shared anything about the game as whole just yet; it's mostly just a toy you can mess around in right now. After that there's a laundry list of things that are needed for the MVP that aren't related to gameplay: a simple menu system, progress saving, testing distribution, etc. All the things it's easy to ignore during the rapid development cycle.

But after that it's all about content and testing. Little bits of coding where our content exceeds our current model, and of course where we identify bugs, but really just filling it up and fleshing it out. In the meantime please enjoy the lovely farming village scene below. Good luck everyone!