I've spent the past few months revising and reworking some core mechanics, filling out skill sets, and improving the GUI and QoL. This week I am starting design on the final dungeon, which has been challenging to work on. Since it's the final dungeon, I feel like I need to step up the complexity while still keeping up with thematic elements, so it's going more slowly than the simpler early levels.
I'm working on a traditional (Wizardry / The Bard's Tale-style) dungeon crawler with magical girl and horror themes. This is only my second RPG, building on the groundwork from the first, so it is still relatively simple. It's decently far along, but it is my biggest project so far by a wide margin, so there is still a lot left to do. I realize that it's a niche game that probably won't appeal to most people.
I mostly post bits and pieces on Mastodon. Occasionally I post a bigger devlog on Itch, but I'm not very good at those and I don't know if anyone really reads them anyway, so I don't do it that often.
The Scratchware Manifesto
If you have been around for a while, you may remember this article. It was written in 2000, right about when games were getting to be really big business, but long after the age of shareware, and long before the indie explosion (which I would put at starting around 2008 or so). It is basically a screed against the state of the emerging AAA industry, much of which is still true if not even worse, and a call for smaller teams making cheaper, smaller games.
The term scratchware never caught on, but I think a lot of modern indie and hobbyist works fit into it. On the other hand, some of what we call indie projects are now as bloated and expensive as the AAA projects of twenty years ago.
The central summation is this:
The phrase scratchware game essentially means a computer game, created by a microteam, with pro quality art, game design, programming and sound to be sold at paperback book store prices. A scratchware game can be played by virtually anyone who can reach a keyboard and
Doesn't interoperate well
It seems that Lemmy instances don't work well with each other. Following a community from another instance is finicky, and after following, threads and comments still don't show up unless you manually pull each individual URL into your own instance.