state of the beta (Patreon)

i was really hoping testing would not take the entire month of november. 

it drives me a little crazy, you know, cuz like, i feel like i need to be doing things, why am i not making anything, i want to be done with this now that most of the people in the immediate community have played, so i can go back to actually creating instead of whatever the fuck i'm floundering about with now

there is some arguably self-critical language in there. there are some arguably self-critical feelings in there. they don't come from a place of pressuring myself for others' expectations, but just because i get stir crazy myself. i don't know whether that's better or worse, but at least i can enjoy the day-to-day for the most part

the 'most part' does not really include QA and bugfixing. i don't mind programming. i can view it as a neat little puzzle to figure out how we want to get all the stuff to fit together. some bugs are more interesting puzzles and then some you realize you have to rewrite a whole system.
and then there's compatibility. 

despite my earnest desire to make this game accessible to as many people as possible, i distinctly do not find enjoyable. partly because of an inability to test properly and partly because these were all things i had done and gotten working only to find out that linux handles javascript a little bit differently than other systems and that just breaks everything to pieces.  

i have had to let linux support go for the time being. maybe in the future, but i don't feel like i can make the changes necessary right now without likely breaking windows/mac versions.

then there's the people who come out of the woodwork with 32 bit windows, or macintosh's arbitrary security limitations, or hey did you know that everything breaks if you use a graphics card that doesn't have Open GL ES 2.0 support?
a week ago i didn't even know what Open GL ES 2.0 is.
i still barely do.
(but basically openGL is a language that allows programs to send instructions to a GPU-- and ES is the mobile-friendly version of it, i guess?)

i have reservations about making a post that is effectively just complaining, when i am also so incredibly grateful just to be able to do this and have made this game at all
and i have been especially moved by the patience and support the community has overall shown to me and it, not to mention our team's support in even getting to this point,
and it's very important to me to honor that by releasing an at-the-least acceptably accessible and functional game
but hhhhhhhhhhhhh

i don't think i've enjoyed most of the past week. i just want the game to work. i want to go back to doing anything creative, rather than technical, which i feel like i am decidedly not cut out for based solely on how exhausted it all makes me.

and i have that whole other project waiting, right? why not work on that?
i've meant to. started sketching some things. getting ready to make some forward progress for the first time in a while. really want to push it through and be done with it.

it is difficult for me to focus on it mentally when i also have to deal with all these other bugs and compatibility issues each day though.
it's difficult for me to commit energy to it when i feel like i should be committing energy to fixing the last few things we need to do to jump from beta to public release.

there's just a couple things, i think. we have a new patch that's almost ready to do, which after a week of a lot of research, should add a 'low spec mode' for computers that end up hitting a black screen due to hardware limitations. the game will be slower on low-spec mode because it uses a slower rendering method-- but it's more widely supported than the default, fast one, so it works on those older machines and integrated GPUs.  the mode itself works, there's just a couple other kinks we need to work out. 

there has to be room to continue improving that too, but i can't do that without stalling out reborn forever. and i can't stall out reborn forever, primarily for my own mental wellbeing.

it's gotten more polished, more complete, and higher quality over the years since then but the majority of the relevant content i've made, not counting starlight, was still done in like a 2 year time period.
quality is important too. but i kind of enjoyed that more. 

my personal deadline for public release is the 30th. i hoped to have it out today, but.
compatibility.
incompatibility.