Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-05-09

It's the second Friday Rambles of May. Still trying my best, as they say.

Gamedev Stuff

It's been a little over a week since the Switch launch for Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines.

Pretty cool! Can't wait to see it run on Switch 2. Which is now less than a month away! Still have my pre-order, baby.

The Americas store page finally showed up on Saturday, so I sent out an email newsletter blast to let everyone know I made a Switch version. If you're reading this, you probably already saw it. Reminder: The launch sale is over in like 3 days!! Tell your friends.

Beautiful!

As far as sales go, it's selling okay, but I think it's mostly all just true fans who are buying the game again, because as far as I know the Switch eShop kinda sucks for discoverability. But if it really is all true fans who will buy the game twice because they're so cool and awesome, then it bodes well for Game 2.

The second patch (the first after the day-one patch) went out this week, which fixed auto language setting for players with system languages set to something other than English. Somewhat urgent, especially for the Japan and Korea eShop regions, so I had rushed it out as soon as I could, saving the somewhat less urgent bugs for Patch 3.

I finished Patch 3 this week (and fixed a few new bugs found while watching streamers lol). This is the list of bugs fixed:

• - Lumber Lass Fever hard cap removed (and turned into a "prestige" system)

• - Fixed text beeps overlapping in rare cases and making this awful squawking noise*

• - Fixed a line in Japanese having the wrong translation (which, luckily, didn't completely not make total sense, so a lot of people didn't even notice it was wrong)

• - Fixed text speed setting not updating the label (ie. normal, fast, instant) in the settings window (on the title screen only)

• - Probably some other small stuff I forgot

* this bug annoyed me ever since I started working on the Switch version, and was driving me nuts because it only happened on the Switch version, but now I can full-heartedly recommend the Switch version to everyone as it performs perfectly as well as the PC version now. As far as I know. If you're curious, it was fixed after I updated the text rendering library used for the game to the latest version. So it goes.

Of course, all of these issues were fixed in the Steam version immediately, but I have to wait till next week (or longer) for approval to patch the Switch version. But none of these are particularly game breaking, so whatever.

But I think other than that, I don't really have anything else to do for Dreams and Deadlines. It's pretty much "done" now. I'm finally ready for Fangamer sempai to notice me and make a physical version.

Anyway, I can move on!!

I started Game 2 development work in earnest. As opposed to my previous attempts at new game prototypes, I started completely from scratch, throwing away my entire codebase so it's not tainted by my bad old code. It's time to start anew, with new bad code. I'm not even using my old sprites as placeholder graphics. Yes, the title screen menu above is final.

But already, I can tell it's gonna be a lot easier to work with what I've built. The framework is making sense, and I can add new things easily and not have to mess with a million magic numbers for drawing UI elements and whatever.

I made a rudimentary settings menu. I can add or remove settings painlessly, unlike before, where adding a new thing meant having to update literally every other setting to make sure it displayed okay.

As you can see, one thing I want to implement this time around is being able to only skip text that you've already seen, so that when dialogue changes due to some new flag being set, you won't miss it if you're running through the game again to find secrets or whatever.

Unlike with Game 2, I'm building all my systems with settings, localization, maintainability in mind, so hopefully when it comes time to tell a story with the game, I can do it without battling my bad code. Which saves a lot of time and energy in the long run.

Speaking of telling a story, I've written out the intro and started coding the intro cutscene. It's certainly not final, but mostly meant to provide something to build necessary systems around. Like a cutscene system.

Very dramatic.

I have a premise for the game that I think is fun and I'm going to see if it ends up working out. The cutscene has music and sounds and everything. Yes, I made music and sounds this week. Of course, Chance Thrash will make the actual music. Probably.

I'm going to try to have something presentable by TGS. That gives me about 4 months to finish a demo. Maybe a little bit (okay a lot bit) of a tight schedule, but it's good for lighting a fire under my care pants, the pants I wear when I need to care and put in real effort.

Other Stuff

For some reason people started buying my stickers again this week. This means I can buy more rice and dried seaweed. And do some exercising and podcast listening as I walk to the post office. Nice. I do need to make more stickers, because I don't think I've updated my inventory since like, mid last year. Maybe I'll make more stickers some day. Maybe I'll make another zine. Maybe.

Oh yeah, the 2 year anniversary of the game coming out happened, and I didn't do anything for it besides make a half-hearted Bluesky post. I feel kind of sad and wistful, but whatever, I think my time is better spent working on the next thing, anyway.

The End

It was a pretty productive week, all things considered. I think next week I'll have the dialogue systems implemented for Game 2, with some initial lines written. And some placeholder sprites for characters too. I'm also hoping that I'll hear from TGS about whether I made it into their indie zone, but that might take a little longer. It'll be sometime this month.

I also think if Patch 3 is released next week I'll celebrate the completion of Dreams and Deadlines development by taking a day off to play some video games for once. I still need to finish FF7 Rebirth. Not to mention play Clair Obscur and Hundred Line (wishful thinking).

Okay, thank you for your support, as always! See you next week!