This idea came from wanting a finished project released onto an official store, be it itch.io, android
play store, or steam/epic. After sitting down and thinking over the requirements and limitations I wished
to place on the project, I decided that aiming for the Play Store was the best bet, with a possible
release to itch.io alongside it. My main goal was to have this project released into the market by the
start of May, as I was to be heading to my sister’s graduation then. With a released product that had
been out for over a month by the time I made it back, I felt I would have a better chance to land a job
once my job search started up again.
Everything started out great as I tore through multiple days in a row working 6-8 hours a day on the project. It was only when I had to take a step back for a day with some other obligations and then I came back to the code that I realized I had really messed up. I was just straight coding, ending up with a lot of working parts, but with no documentation on how they worked together. This led to almost a week of struggling through to try and figure out what I had done and why, only to run into another major blockage.
As every game that comes out now has a save system, I knew that eventually I’d have to put one together. Since the game idea was an idle style, the save system not only had to save the progress when the user closed the application, but also have some way to handle the time-gap for the 24 hour period of afk rewards. This led to me almost restarting the entire project, as in my manic-like coding frenzy the first few days, I had not kept the idea of a save system in mind at all, leaving me with the pieces that need to be saved not being in clear spots to get to. Thankfully, I had reached out to my father and he offered to help with it, as he had handled the saving system of our previous project, Gestalt. However, after fighting with it as long as we had, I still did not have a working save system by the start of April. With only a month remaining, I have begun remaking the systems from the ground up, specifically leaning on scriptable objects this time to enable the saving system to work easier. Also, I still haven’t even considered putting in the login system for the Play Store, so if that does not end up in place, I’ll just end up releasing to Itch.io for the time being and then get the last bit finished after the trip.