2021 Year in Review

This may be a long one, so I'll put a dandy synopsis at the end with the takeaways. Look for the line of ***************** at the bottom!

Hey, all! With the New Year just beginning, I wanted to take some time to reflect on what we at Team Spoon have accomplished over the past 12 months. The baby's also asleep, so I should have enough time to type everything in one go! 

Most of you may know that, with the release of the first Forks demo and most of its assets complete, Toro and I began brainstorming a second project that he could get started on. This project was planned to be larger and more comprehensive than Forks, and has gone by "Aria" during development. Unfortunately, most of you may have also noticed that an entire year has passed without significant releases for either Forks or Aria, and as the lead on both I owe you all an explanation for why the heck you don't have anything new to play.

My home life tends to be chaotic, so my best work is done in the office during downtime. Spending the majority of 2021 working from home greatly slowed my progress, as it made my actual job take far longer. With my limited free time, I started 2021 by trying to address the single biggest issue raised with the Forks demo: the introduction. After several attempted rewrites, I was unable to come up with something better, and while I had initially been excited to continue the story, that failure led to me losing a lot of enthusiasm for the project. Even now, for anyone awaiting the next update, I'm sorry I won't be able to give you a better introduction. There was also a freak data loss with my cloud storage service that deleted about 10 Forks scenes that I had been working on, and I didn't have the foresight to keep a local copy. I had to start again from the demo script, and I thought it would be best to take a break.

While recharging my Forks batteries, I shifted focus to Aria, building the world and its characters, as well as hammering out the general narrative. Sometime later, we finished that (yay!), and got to implementing it within my chosen engine: Ren'Py. Our programmer got to work on custom stat tracking, inventory management, magic, crafting, and modular transformation systems. He had a lot of fun while doing it, pushing Ren'Py to do things you don't often see, and they even worked!

However, they also tanked Aria's performance, and with our programmer busy with his own job and increasingly unable to code the miracle to make these additions work smoothly, we've had to consider making cuts to core Aria gameplay. I worked out how to best to that while helping my wife raise our first child, born in July. I feel WAY too young to be a dad, but it's happened and it's been a ton of work in itself, and keeping the baby alive took up all of my non-work time until I finally returned to the office in late September. 

Once back in the office, solid progress on Forks (with proper backups!) happened quickly. I've since written about 10 entirely new scenes, including a portion of Hannah's route, and was planning to have it ready for everyone by year's end. As bad luck would have it though, successive Covid scares at work mean I've had to quarantine at home since December 17. Just me, my wife, and a VERY needy baby. My wife's unable to help much, and with nobody to watch him, his caretaking's fallen on me. We didn't celebrate Christmas as we hadn't noticed it'd come (and couldn't celebrate with family anyway), and time's lost most of its meaning as, again, taking care of a baby full-time is friggin' hard. There is no day, no night, and no clock aside from crying that needs immediate addressing. It's been simultaneously hard staying hydrated and finding opportunities for bathroom breaks (baby doesn't like to sleep much). 

Fortunately, I go back to the office on Monday the 3rd, and barring any further Covid exposure I expect my work life to get back to normal. Progress on the Forks update is a few weeks behind because of this, but I plan to have it ready soon. There's a lot of content that's ready to go, it just needs an arc ending and general polish.

As for Aria, I still plan to release a demo draft that lets you experience its performance for yourselves. To fix the game, we're considering moving to Unity, and taking this opportunity to largely rewrite the introduction. I'm not concerned by that in itself, Forks had 2 rewrites before it got to the demo available today, so I shouldn't be surprised Aria needs at least one as well. I'll go into more detail on what exactly's being done once I've got more time (baby's waking up and I need to hurry) and some sleep.

I feel like I'm writing this like a robot or a bad AI would, when my updates on WG tend to be anything but. The curse of fatherhood, everyone! Goodnight, happy New Year, and stay tuned for more once I'm back in the office on Monday!

The good thing is that this should honestly make Aria an even better game, moreso than when I rewrote Aria's dialogue to make her more of an individual. Whenever that first demo's ready to play, I think you'll agree it shows more promise than the old demo I'll be uploading soon. Nothing major with the surrounding narrative is changing, and we're not losing any of the wonderful art Toro's drawn. All introduced characters will remain in the game as described in the their bios!

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-Rather than continue Forks, I burned myself out trying to rewrite the intro.

-Baby born in July that requires heavy parental lifting. When I don't have help, I'm lucky to get anything done.

-Made progress on Aria, but stuck at home where I'm a lot less efficient. Returned to work in September and made great progress, had to leave December 17 through today due to possible Covid exposure (I've since tested negative).

-Aria's performance is poor for a VN due to its external systems that Ren'Py likely wasn't designed to handle. We're looking into switching to Unity and retooling Aria's story for the better.

-Forks update's late due to Covid scare, I plan to return to it January 3 and can hopefully release it a few weeks after.