![\"Another](\"http:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/previews\/as2\/log20\/01.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThey say that the road to success is paved with failure, but it’s also paved with lots of sudden and unexpected detours. You may have noticed that I haven’t posted any dev logs in some time. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not because I’ve given up on the project.<\/p>\n
In July of last year I got a new job, and am now working full time. Alas, it’s not in my field, which is really frustrating at times, but it is keeping my bills paid and that’s what’s important right now. Sadly, this means I simply can’t dedicate twenty-to-forty hours a week on this project anymore. Any progress is made in my free time now, and there was even a long period where I didn’t try making progress at all. I’ve been meaning to post about this for months now, but I kept putting it off until I had something new to show at the same time. I shouldn’t have done that, I suppose. I’ll try to get back to making updates semi-regularly again. Sorry about that!<\/p>\n
That also brings me to another subject that needs to be discussed here: cutting content. As creators, we usually hate parting with the perfect vision we see in our minds. But we can’t do everything. Whenever you create something, be it video games or books or movies or something else, you eventually have to part with some of your ideas, even the ones you love the most. Some things have to be cut because they would take too long, others because they don’t work as well as was planned, and still others because they’re just not feasible.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When I first began work on this game, I wrote out an enormous document. It detailed the game’s mechanics, its world and characters, and most importantly it included a very detailed outline of the game’s story from beginning to end. The document is a little over a hundred pages long (and single-spaced, at that). I knew from the beginning that I would probably have to trim quite a bit of fat to actually finish the game in a reasonable amount of time, and that was before I got caught up in pretend system limitations before rebooting the code from near-scratch! However, now that I have so much less time to do things, I’m probably going to have to cut even more than I had initially hoped. A lot<\/em> more.<\/p>\n The question is, what are those cuts going to be? The game, as currently envisioned, contains nine playable characters, ten major dungeons, about twice that number of mini-dungeons, and like the original Another Star it includes countless little side areas to seek out that would consist of just a screen or two. So where do I point my knife? Should I reduce the number of playable characters to cut down on the number of highest-quality sprites I need to pixel out? Or do I just simplify their sprites, or even reduce the number of animations for them? Should I cut out entire dungeons whole cloth, or should I make them smaller, or leave them as intended and reduce the number of mini-dungeon side quests instead? If I streamline the game too much, will that detract from exploration because there’s nothing to find? Or do I just accept that maybe this is going to be a ten year project instead of one that one lasts only another year or two? These are all questions I need to consider very carefully right now.<\/p>\n I also wonder if I should carry on with my “vertical slice” demo that I mentioned before, or simply begin the actual game. I’ve honestly never really done a vertical slice. For better or worse, I usually just start at the beginning and go from there, accepting that I’ll have to come back and polish the early game content later. (Either way, I’d release some sort of demo as early as possible, just not a proper “vertical slice”.)<\/p>\n But regardless of what I cut, I think the harshest truth I must face is this: the game won’t be perfect. No game ever will, of course, but this one even less so. I have a habit of obsessing over little details, wanting to polish every pixel to its finest. I can’t do that anymore. I think I’m going to have to accept that some battle animations won’t be perfectly fluid, that some lines of dialog will be lackluster, that some map layouts won’t be as engaging as others. And then I will have to move on to the next piece of content that needs to be worked on.<\/p>\n Oh! And before I go, I mentioned I was holding out to show my progress. Well, here you go!<\/p>\n I promise I won’t wait so long for the next update! I’m planning to continue working on the battle sprites and animations so that I can get the battles mechanics into place. Look forward to it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They say that the road to success is paved with failure, but it’s also paved with lots of sudden and unexpected detours. You may have noticed that I haven’t posted any dev logs in some time. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not because I’ve given up on the project. In July of last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-another-star-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1200,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions\/1200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Another](\"http:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/previews\/as2\/log20\/02.gif\")
<\/p>\nEnemies are fully animated, and each has a neat little entrance animation at the beginning of the battle.<\/div>\n