Let's Look At SMS Development (Patreon)

For a while now I've been wanting to make a post about the development of SMS, to help give insight into how I want to develop the game, as well as explain where I'm trying to take the game. I'm hoping this post will help encourage suggestions, comments and some more discussion. SMS was originally a silly little project, and was intended to be a short and quick development project as a test for future projects and games. Since then it's become a much larger undertaking then I'd expect for a variety of reasons, and as such this project has started to become much more important to me then just a silly little erotic game. My original vision was relatively simple, "Here's Jesse and some tools, have fun messing with him and earn points." but the more I've worked on the game, the less I've wanted it to be a game in the same sense. I don't want the core focus to be "Earn points, upgrade, earn more points, upgrade more, rinse repeat." I want this game to be an exploration of a character. I want to have Jesse react naturally, and organically. I want him to feel believable, and in doing that, I'd like there to be a variety of secrets and hidden reactions. I want this game to be less about upgrading, and more about testing your boundaries, and discovering secrets and Easter eggs. Which is much more fitting with the mad science theme. In spite of my attachment to this project, I've been trying hard to develop things with the mentality of "nothing is permanent". I have a tendency to become overly attached to things that I create, which isn't a good thing when it comes to developing a game, or really anything. For instance, the original inventory system, and UI. I spent days developing the animation to have the UI draw itself and fade in, because I thought it would look cool. It was a first idea, and I immediately latched onto it, and didn't let go. After I posted the build publicly, I got comment after comment from people who didn't understand how the inventory and hotbar mechanic worked. The reason for that is it wasn't intuitive. I spent all this time trying to make a bad idea look pretty, and finally scraped it recently. I still made the same mistake with the new inventory as I spent time prettying up the UI, without doing a mock-up first. I feel like this new design shouldn't be a problem as it addresses several of the issues the first design had, (ex. not highlighting the hot bar, and covering Jesse to prevent people from trying to use tools directly from the inventory) It's only with the equipment menu that I've really started to understand "It doesn't have to look pretty right away, it needs to work first" which is why the equipment screen currently looks completely bare. It was the quickest thing I could throw up to see if it was a useable system. If it wasn't easily understood how it worked just from the very basic buttons and layout, prettying it up wouldn't fix that. My "make it pretty" mentality has been a huge stepping stone all through this development. I have hundreds of lines of code that are just there to make things fade in and out, and it's so subtle most people probably don't even notice or care. Yet I've poured hours into these little details that just make the code and working a mess. I've been working on this so closely for months now, and I've lately, more so then before, been overlooking the fact that not everyone who plays this will have been playing since it first was posted. Blade had pointed out that the new inventory system doesn't have item labels anymore, which I hadn't even considered until he pointed out that the hand tools in particular are all just random hands. They don't really explain what they do until you try them, and even then it might not be immediately obvious. From now on, I'll be trying to develop things more organically, and at a simpler pace. I'll release more incomplete content, in order to gather peoples opinions and suggestions. Rather then spend hours or days on something that might not even work as intended. I know several people have been interested in the 'behind the scenes' stuff, so I hope this counts somewhat. I'm sorry if this was boring or pretentious in anyways, believe me, I know this isn't like the development of some high class artsy game like Journey or Brothers or anything like that. However this project means a lot to me, so I'm trying to approach it at least somewhat professionally because it's just good practice, and I'd really like to be able to continue to develop games in the future. Also to the people that aren't in the beta release, spoiler alert, I'm adding an equipment system X3' it's still REALLY ugly which is why I didn't post any screenshots of it, yet, but I'll be sure to post at least one more art related thing in the next few days/week. Also as another side note, I'm trying to organize a stream with Blade. It won't be till early-mid October unfortunately, but it will mean a bunch of new art, and /hopefully/ getting Roni all prettied up and ready for some fancy cutscenes. =3