So, i've gone quite quiet on this little project rather suddnly. There is a bunch of reasons, and i'd like to share them.

1. University

The new semester started back in october. Usually that has little effect on my projects other than slowing them down a little. At least not until the preparations for the exams come up, which would have been end of January 2022. But there is a catch this time around: Firstly, i do study computer science: games engineering. That means, a lot of the stuff i do at uni is on the topic of games already. Secondly, i do not have exams this semester, but rather two larger game projects and one paper+game project relating to various levels of game design and engineering tools to make games. And i don't want to run into an oversaturation by doing the same thing at uni and most of my free time.

2. Covid and being Creative

Looks like it finally caught up to me. I initially was pretty resilient and unaffected by the socially isolating effects of the pandemic, but my patience has kinda worn thin. While i still am creating things and making stuff, that has taken a turn to more art like sketching and at least trying to make some music. This helps balance the emotional impact this blasted virus slowly starts to have. In other words, i do make more stuff more for the process, and for me personally. Games are not that. Well, at least PortPoly isn't, unless i ramp that  melancholic/dark  tone the music has up to eleven...

3. Issues in the refactor

Well, and, don't we know it all: reworking the game jam into something scalable initially worked out pretty smoothly, but i ended up running into a thing that would need totaly replacing: The turret point representation and selection. In the game jam that ended up being a more or less "fire and forget" type of deal: there is nothing managing the turret points, it's just dumping turret instances in the 3D space which do their shooting. And on top of that, i already did the one ripping out and replacing thing i planned: i ripped out the entire GUI. and, uh... turns out... i don't like the result half as much as i had hoped. The wider the screen is the worse it works. 16:9 is just barely fine, and while the GUI does work nicely for touch input, the level itself is just way too small.

So. where does that leave this project's future? It is still on number one or two of my game projects each month that passes. I do think that i'll walk back the scope though from making it a proper game back to just slightly touching up the game jam version, mainly in the balancing department, like a second type of turret and a little asteroid variety.

When? I don't exactly know, but i plan to use the christmas break to at least sort through the plans i had and make a new todo-list, so the entry-effort is as little as possible.

In the meantime, good luck everyone and stick the landing in this damned year,

Wrzlprnft