Hi! Aaron here. I wanted to give an update on the state of things.
The Game
It’s the beginning of August now. I’ve been hoping to get the Game Demo (v. 0.5) ready by the end of August.
I want the demo to include three game zones: Calivegas, Mexico, and Chicago. Calivegas is almost entirely done. Mexico’s base assets are established and several maps are drawn, but we haven’t made the monsters yet, so there are no functional areas apart from the quest hub. And Chicago is still entirely an idea.
So…end of August might be too soon. Especially because we took a break from game development this week to learn web development!
The Website
So that’s the biggest news right now: We have a website.
That’s a bit of a stretch. We’ve had a website for several weeks now, because the game itself is a website. We can export the game “For Web” and it packages up a fully functional HTML/JS folder that you can upload to a server and, bam!, you’ve got a game.
So we did that at first, but there’s nothing but the game. There’s no borders, no branding, no links to my author pages….
As you can see, I had grander ambitions. I wanted to embed the game in a user-friendly site where I can also provide gameplay information and maybe build a little community.
My personal life played a role, too. I’m homeschooling a couple of young teens at the moment, and they happen to be the artists providing much of the content for this game. Also, my wife just finished the training to get her Private Investigator’s license and start a new agency.
That’s how we ended up doing web development this week. I got four new domain names, set up four bare WordPress installations, and then walked everybody through setting up their own sites.
The hardest part with this one was figuring out how to embed the game website within a frame on a WordPress page, but I think I have it working now. I just got that going last night.
The Future
We always take Saturdays off work, and Sundays are mostly self-directed, so we’ll get back to our daily work on the game content next week.
I’m hoping make major progress on Mexico. If we can get it finished this week, we can probably do all of Chicago by the end of the month. My guess is Mexico will take two weeks, Chicago will take five, and we’ll release the demo the day before my son’s birthday.
That’d be fun.
For now, you can play Calivegas all the way to Mexico, but things stop working pretty quickly once you get there.
Watch this space for updates. I’ll let you know when Mexico’s done.