Hey everyone!
I realise it's been quite a while since my last update, sorry about that!
First, I would like to give my thanks to all of you who have been supporting System Recovery - I'd be out of a career if not for you folks! Our successful greenlight campaign has reinforced that my efforts have not been in vain - it means a lot to me!
Admittedly, there hasn't been much to talk about, so I debated whether or not it makes any sense to bring news about the lack of news. Sounds stupid right? Right. Except I'd be ruining my reputation as a developer by not showing signs of life. So here it is.
I mentioned previously that I have found myself working a part time programming job for another game. I was under the impression that the effect on System Recovery's development schedule would be moderate at best. I was sorely mistaken. It wasn't just my job -- sure, I get burned out more often than I had anticipated, but as it turned out I suddenly also had more family duties than ever before, often at the expense of time spent on my passion project. I also slack off a bit more than I should, but that's always been a factor - it is my philosophy as a game developer to focus work on occasions when I'm truly eager to get into the thick of it - or else I will have made a game without a soul. Undertale is a good recent example of a game created with love - that's the direction I've always been trying to keep System Recovery in. I've just not had a lot of push in my free time recently.
Long story short, development has been slow as of late, but I'm adamant about finishing this game and polishing it until it lives up to my standards.
So what HAVE I been doing?
A large portion of game design is to see into the heads of the players, consider a number of features, figure out what works and what doesn't -- One positive thing about my hiatus is that I've been more focused on examining other games, not necessarily of the same genre but in general, to see where and how exactly do they flourish, which aspects encourage the player to spend more time and which ones drive them away in frustration. ...you could say I've been spending most of my creative time taking notes.
Having played my own game a couple of times in the last few weeks, comparing it to other games I play, I see a lot of flaws that I want to correct, features to improve upon... a lot of work to be done. As it stands I don't get many consecutive hours to work on SR, and it has limited my input down to the odd hour-long session of tweaking a feature, writing a story for new missions, trying new ideas, designing the basics of the upcoming level editor, but it's not enough to get me through to the finish line... I have started working on multiple things in parallel (BAD idea) and neither of them are patch-worthy yet, hence the lack of releases.
I look forward to bringing you some good news soon, hopefully. It might be some time after things have cooled down a little with the other game I'm developing, as we are strongly pushing towards its release at the moment.
As always, I'm open to your comments, thoughts, concerns!
-Dan
