Happy New Year everyone!
In the spirit of the New Year, I decided it was time to finally give an update to what’s been going on with me and Phases. It’s been awhile. Let’s talk about that.
My last post here (and pretty much everywhere) was more than 2 years ago. I’ve pretty much vanished from the internet during that time. So, this is a quick(ish) dev-log to talk about where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing and what is happening going forward. I don’t want this become a long read as I sometimes tend to do, so let’s just hit the big points.
Where have I been?
In short, I’ve been busy living life. As much as I would have wanted my game development efforts to be my main priority, that just wasn’t feasible over the past two years. It hasn’t really ever been feasible over the last 7 years of me doing this. This has always been a side hobby that I work on when I can.
Typically, the cycle of how I’ve been working on game development is a few months of great progress followed by a few months off doing something else. Sometimes, the break is done by choice to get my mind off the game for a while. It’s easy to get burnt out, especially with aspects of game development that I’m less intrinsically motivated by such as art. Other times, I simply don’t have the time to focus on my personal projects and I have to stop working due to something out of my control. Those are always the worst because I never stop thinking about the game, and then I try to fit it into my schedule and end up getting overworked. As much as I love game development and want to see the game done, at the end of the day, it is still work.
My point is, I’ve never been consistent about my game development. Just to give some perspective, a game with the complexity of Project Phases could be done by a single full time developer in probably a year or two, maybe even less if stuff like art, music and writing were outsourced. Contrast this to my journey, which is 7 years in and I still don’t have a complete project. That used to bother me more, but I’ve come to terms with it. Those first few years were mostly me learning. I made the mistake of making Project Phases the fourth game I had ever made (right after an Asteroids clone and two other small prototypes). Quite honestly, very little if anything from those first few years still exist in the game. All of it was terribly written and impossible to build upon. I didn’t know what I was doing and I was just figuring stuff out as I went along. In other words, it was a terrible foundation to actually make a game since I made it as a tech demo. I pretty much rewrote the entire battle system for Update 9 because of this. However, all the knowledge that I have now is from those first few years of Phases. Though they were unproductive in content, they were invaluable in allowing me to continue my efforts, so I wouldn’t change a thing.
The final nail in the coffin was that 2023 was a very strange year for me, I worked on Phases less during 2023 than any other year. During the latter half of 2022, I was working hard on creating a roadmap for finishing the game. I had the entire game planned out, and was trying to complete all the systems to start adding final content. I even set aside a budget to commission art and even started working with an artist. I was working hard and started to limit how much I was posting online until I had a substantial update to provide. However, when the new year rolled around, things fell apart a little bit. I was getting overwhelmed with everything I had set myself up with. In short, my scope was too large. Though I had far more experience, this was still my largest project ever and I overestimated how much I could handle as a solo developer working on his free time. By March, I had decided to take an extended break from Phases. Any previous break had been unplanned, but this one I was actively choosing to do. I had some pretty big changes that were happening in my life and I knew my game development time would be very limited. Knowing that, and my current state of mind towards the project, I felt it was the best thing to do.
So that’s what happened and why I’ve been so absent. In summary, my already inconsistent schedule, resulting in a lack of tangible updates and my complete voluntary break from Phases in 2023 lead to nothing to report. So, what now?
What have I been doing?
Around September of 2023, I felt I was ready to try again in finishing this game. I realized the first thing I needed to do was completely rethink the game and, most importantly, lessen the scope. My goal now was to finish the game. I was willing to cut features, story, characters etc. I just wanted to make a plan to finish the game. So I re-did my entire roadmap. Maybe another day I’ll go into more detail about what I cut, but I left a lot behind and reworked a lot of elements to be simpler. Now, this almost sounds like I’m making the game worse, which is not the case. In reality, I’m making the game much smaller, about a third of the original size. This, in theory, would actually make the game possible to develop given my resources.
So with my new plan in mind, I started work and I’ve been doing that ever since. As always, my progress has been very on and off, but I’ve been making steady additions. Most importantly, Phases is not cancelled! I’ll keep the details of what I’ve been doing to myself for now as I hope to expand on those at a later time, but here are some big points.
One of the biggest hurdles in my game development journey has been art. I suck at art, and personally making the art for my game is just not very feasible. I tried commissioning an artist, but in the end, that didn’t work out. It also wasn’t very financially viable, even with my smaller scope. Instead, I’ve switched to using a pre-made asset pack for the overworld. I initially never considered using one because I didn’t want my game to lack an artistic identity, I wanted it to be it’s own thing. However the reality is, this game would not exist without it just given my skills and resources. Having worked with the assets for almost a year, I am really happy with how it’s turning out. The game looks really nice and it has saved me so much time. It’s something I really wish I realized and had done sooner. The battle sprites are going to be the same as they were before because they looked pretty good and were already 75% done. I won’t show anything right now, but I’m really excited to show how the game looks now.
I would say about 90% of the world layout is finished. You could walk from the first area of the game to the last, every room is mapped out with collision. Many of them have NPCs and enemy spawns in place, albeit with placeholder data. This was a big undertaking, but just having every room ready to go makes adding each individual detail so much easier.
The majority of the core systems are finished which has allowed me to just bunker down and add the content. Luckily, I’ve done a lot in the past year. About 60% of the dialogue and cutscenes are in place, including the majority of the main journey. I’ve started to work on finishing up side quests and unique NPC interactions. Once that’s done, I have a lot of balancing to do in regards to items, shops, enemy stats/levels etc.
Then lastly, I need to finalize enemy AI and implement unique boss battles. After that, the game will be functionally done, though I will have to go through and do a lot of polish and bug fixing to make sure it goes well. Hopefully a good bit of playtesting can happen too. A lot of that is also already planned out so it’s just a matter of implementing it.
All in all, there has been a lot of good progress in the past year. There is still much to do, but the game is closer to completion than ever before!
Website Update!
You may also have noticed that this website has gotten a big refresh since the last dev-log. This is a change I made at the end of 2023 in preparation for Phases’ completion. I was starting to get really annoyed with my original website. It worked but it wasn’t really ideal, and I had the skillset to improve it so I decided to bite the bullet. I spent a few days setting up the site and the basic layout of everything. It actually took a lot of time to move over all the old posts over. The original site simply used HTML and CSS while this new site is built on WordPress. I couldn’t find any way to transfer content from HTML to WordPress posts that worked the way I wanted, so I just did it manually. I took the chance to go through each post and fix errors and even rewrite a few things that I felt were written poorly. It was probably way more effort than was necessary for something that very few people have/will ever read, but I’m happy I did it. Here’s a comparison of the new vs. old site, just to get some images in here.
Anyways, I think the new site looks great so I hope you enjoy going through it in the future! This is the first new post I’m writing on here (even though I’ve had this site for a year), so this is exciting.
What’s the plan?
To wrap this up, let’s talk about what’s next.
As mentioned, I am currently working hard on finishing the content of the game. There is still a lot to be done. I’m hesitant to say when it will release, but I feel it will happen in 2025. I’ve made release promises before though, so maybe don’t take that too seriously.
Until I feel I am ready to show what I’ve been working on, I won’t be posting any updates. So just know that the game is not cancelled and it is happening. If for some reason that changes, I will make sure I make it clear. In my mind, I want to have a release date in place before I start posting updates again, so it may still be awhile. So don’t freak out if you don’t hear from me.
As always, thank you so much for reading. It’s been too long since I’ve done this and I’m really excited to get this project finally finished. I hope you are too! See you soon(ish).
Thanks for reading,
Andy