Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-03-07

It's the Friday Rambles.

Gamedev Stuff

A productive week, all in all.

The Steam Visual Novel Fest has started! Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines is on sale for 33% off, the biggest discount ever! No, the Overtime Update isn't out yet!

And so, the pic survives for another sale.

I'm still waiting on the localized script for one language. It's giving me heartburn. But whatever, I'll just have to accept that the update won't be ready in time for the Spring Sale, and hope I wasn't a big fat liar when I said all week that the update would be out in March. It's still a problem for my big marketing push when I can't discount the game again till late April, but I'll figure it out. There was at least some progress, and I was able to finish all the localized sprite assets. They look pretty good. Now I just need the script.

I spent a day drawing achievement icons and added all the new achievements to Steam. They'll be live when the update launches.

That's 26 new achievements! Wow! For comparison Dreams and Deadlines base game has 29 achievements. It's like, almost doubled! And as you can see at least 2 of them are airfryer related.

My initial plan was to leave some of the more "difficult" or "annoying" achievements out of Steam, and just keep them in the in-game achievement gallery. I've been discussing with my playtesters whether I should actually do this or not, but with their input I decided that yeah, in the end, none of them are as annoying to get as some of the worst ones in the original Dreams and Deadlines, so whatever. In they go!

The achievement system is all done now. I added the code for Steam achievements, and reconciling them with the local unlock database, and vice versa. The achievement gallery is totally complete, and there are some nice arts, and some very rushed arts in there. They can't all be winners, as they say.

I built a toast system for the "bonus" achievements but now I don't need that anymore. At least not for Steam. But it'll be handy for other platforms without achievements, like the Switch, so it's all work I needed to do anyway.

The achievement toast pops in from the left side and fades out, all sleeklike. (Yeah, this is a test achievement. I didn't get 10,000,000 logs in this picture.) It also makes a fun chiming sound. This is all irrelevant for people playing the game on Steam, which is 100% of players right now.

Other than that, I fixed a bunch of bugs that playtesters found, some more severe than others. A lot of them stem from my incredibly terrible code from the beginning of the prototype that led to Dreams and Deadlines, and I can't wait to just rebuild everything for Game 2.

All the remaining work for the update now depends on getting the last remaining localized script, so I guess I'll spend the next week waiting for that and whining a lot, while working on the Switch port, or maybe just taking a break and playing some games for "research" or something.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, maybe you saw this.

People kept sending me pictures of this orc. Yeah, feels very Endless Monday-core.

Wait a minute, it's an Endless Monday "reference" now?

It all comes full circle. Posting the "work is da poop" orc all those Fridays has paid off, and apparently someone over on the World of Warcraft team noticed and is a fan and added Skye Ozonefryer as an NPC in the new Undermine zone. Fell out of my chair when I saw. Thank you mysterious wow dev... love you... Thank you unlocking a hidden bucket-list item I didn't even know I had...

Now where's Goodsmile Company with the Skye Nendoroid?

The End

Thanks for your support, as always. Next week I'll be doing this and that. Hopefully finishing the update, but at this point that really depends on "external factors" as they say. I have other things to work on, though, so it's not like I'll be spinning my wheels. Okay, bye!!