3/12

Aching Dreams 3: The Dark Planet, delayed until tentative October release.

Ready for a trainwreck? Here it is. The main programmer left. Art and Story assets are mostly done. By last February, I expected him to pick up the slack on coding, and he's just not here, so I'm taking over his responsibilities. Where did he go? Well, I'm sure he'd love it if I wrote that he died, but he didn't, and it's probably a very bad idea to shame him on a professional level, so we'll just say "He's just not here", and we'll leave it at that. I'm replacing him.

When I made the announcement of a February release date, that announcement came with the self-assured assumption that the programmer would be finished with his half of the code (the hard stuff), and we'd merge it with my half (the easy stuff). But he's not here, so I'm going to finish the rest of it. It's going to take a lot more time than originally anticipated because I'm still figuring this out. I basically have to go level 2 Super Saiyan.

This blog has been quiet, and I've two reasons why: First, it's inherently difficult to show the progress, because the nature of code is itself not easy to show. If you take a gander at any other developer blog from a different game, you'll see concept art, game design decisions, and posts on the story or the lore. Given that this is now a one man show, concurrent development is impossible.

The second reason is embarrassment. I wasn't showing any code from the lead programmer because, well, he's not doing it, and I wasn't very particular on showing my side of things, because showing any of that shit would have given you the impression that we had no idea what the hell we were doing. I'm going to go ahead and ditch that embarrassment from here on out, because the product is late, and the customers deserve to know what's up. As a first gesture of transparency, I will go ahead and say that I now have some idea of what the hell I'm doing.

With that second reason gone, I'll be posting more often, so you can read what I'm up to, but I cannot assure that the posts will have much of anything interesting to say. Hell, just the other week, I spent all day and wound up writing a single line of code. Since it's safe to assume he's not helping, I can go back and finish up the remaining 5% of art/story because they're of equal priority as code is now.

We were mistaken. I apologize. If you can't accept that apology, then I suggest you stow your anger 'til October because I am still very much at work on this game. October is a guesstimate. Out of all the things I've worked on for this game, programming is definitely the hardest to give a concrete estimate on how long it'll take to finish. When I say "October", I'm saying that's when I'll understand wtf the Matrix is, and I'll apparently be able to see everybody as green lines of floating code....and then I'll finish the damn game by then.

Also, if you haven't seen it, I posted up some cancelled content from AD2 here. It's old, so it's kind of shitty now, but I assume you somehow managed to fap to my old art, so I posted it as is.

4p0- Woke.
5p1- Ate brekka. Told Ex-lead to put more comments in his code. (in programming, comments help programmers that didn't write the code understand what the original coder was intending)
6p2- Wrote the stuff above.
Difficulty 1/10 Efficiency 10/10
7p3- Packed up some story stuff for a friend to read and critique.
Difficulty 1/10 Efficiency 8/10
8p4- Posted up a programmer job query. Studied programming. I have to go back and read things that I skipped before.
Difficulty 4/10 Efficiency 8/10
9p5-Did some autohotkey scripting, to improve scripting speed ofc.
Difficulty 1/10 Efficiency 10/10