Monthly EOA1 grind report. (Patreon)

Ah, to be me 3 months ago and think "Yeah, it's fine. It's cool. I can totally hit 6/12 for this.".

EOA1A2 flash: ~70%. EOA1A2 walkaround: ~60%. Broken into smaller pieces: 70%, 90%, 20%, 50%, 10%, 50%.EOA1: 10%. 

Maybe if I throw enough contextless numbers, it'll not seem like arbitrary bullshit? It is kind of arbitrary bullshit though. These are gut feelings. There is, of course, a public Trello board, in case you want pebbular (one step up from granular) details. But putting to-do cards more specific on there would spoil the fun. So you'll just have to trust me.

The structure of EOA1 is this: Panels -> animation -> walkaround -> panels.

Being generous, the EOA1 walkaround will be... maybe half an hour? A more nuanced way to frame it is, the critical path for the walkaround doesn't require you to see all the stuff in the game, and the critical path therein likely won't be more than 30 minutes. The plan is to just go fully maximalist and stuff it full of whatever springs to mind, so if you're meticulous, you could get several hours out of it. 

I hate quantifying games in terms of playtime though, so I'll say this: There's a lot of unique dialogues. There's secrets. There's character interactions you've never even DREAMED of.  There's Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 GUEST AI.  

To put things in perspective, I tried setting up an in-game dave_ebubbles clone using GPT-3 trained on Dave's dialogue. The only thing that stopped me was that all the neural network generation stuff with usable APIs cost money.

But that does kind of elegantly express how bad I am at stopping myself from scopecreeping this game, and how bad I am at stopping myself from scopecreeping this comic. I think that's all I have to say about that. 

Here's some previews: 1, 2, 3.

On more personal notes, I do feel bad about EOA1 inevitably missing the 6/12 release, unrealistic as it is. I think I spent my one "sprint to get a big update on a significant Homestuck date" coin for the time being on getting GTOW out on 10/25.

I'm no astrologian or nothing, but shit has hit different lately! There's been a lot of real life happening around me. A death in the family amongst other adjacent familial emergencies, general sickness, other work, it's just a huge maelstrom of shit happening to and around me while I try and just make cool stuff.

And while the more lurid details are certainly not going in this Patreon post, I think we can all agree.

Everything happens so much.