Tonight was the East Bay indie developers’ meetup in Berkeley at Au Coquelet, an intimate gathering of about ten locals, about half of whom didn’t come to last month’s gathering. It was an awesome time. To those of you who couldn’t make it, another one will be held in the last week of August, so follow me on Twitter if you want to be informed!
Meetups like these are essential to me. Working alone is a great way to get stuff done, until I reach that stage where I feel like I’m floating off in orbit. After enough days go by without real professional interaction, I start to raise existential questions about game development, my career, my life, and that’s just never helpful. Talking to other devs is really inspiring and energizing, and gets me back focused on the small, individual tasks that actually get the project done. It’s also great to have playtests planned ahead of time–when I know I have to show the game in 3 hours, it changes the way I work. I’m much less likely to be chasing a weird bug down a rabbit hole, and more likely to put in a quick fix to get through the day (often the better approach in the long run).
So where do we stand with Escape Goat? I’ve got pretty much all the gameplay bugs fixed and features locked, and the file system for user created levels is also pretty solid. (I don’t have a sharing system in place yet, that’ll be explored next week.) Since I’ll be having a playtest party this weekend, tomorrow is going to be a good day to remake the levels from scratch again. I’ll browse through the previous versions of the game and harvest the best room concepts and puzzles, and string them together in a logical way. I also haven’t explored a lot of the puzzles that use the later mechanics and abilities.
Also on the radar for tomorrow is a chat with long-time comrade and audio sorcerer Matt Piersall. I think I need some advice from him on how to design the soundscape for this game. The music is not a problem, but this game presents some unique challenges in that field and he’s going to have the answers. I know this.
Also, tomorrow I get to see Mary for the first time in a week!