This is the week I begin regretting implementing this in C++. In short the display part is compiling just fine now, but still has a bit of remaining work to get it to start actually drawing stuff on the screen. Since most of this week was spent fixing rote (but painful) errors, there isn’t much of anything to talk about here. Looks like this UI overhaul is going to cost 3-4 months instead of 2. Really hoping for that 3.

I’m aching to get back to work on the game proper. I might even sneak in some work on it on the side? After being away from it for a couple months the biggest bang for buck that sticks out in my mind is cleaning up the main quest to make every portion of it potentially game winning. I’m starting to warm up to more player choices in quest lines to provide an initial sense of “wonder what happens if I do the other choice” to keep players coming back, though I worry that using it too much will result in players assuming each choice always results in the same thing. Something about side quests still seems off to me, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. Suspect that time management will start to fall out of the main quest changes and give me a better idea.

Right now the game is on the verge of a very big choice. We can either lean much heavier into multiplayer, or we can keep it at a distance in the hopes of also having an engaging single player mode. Leaning into multiplayer has a lot of benefits for the game proper: the more places we put players the more replayable the game as a whole becomes, having battles built around pvp makes the game better in multiplayer, and the more places we put other players the less boring the pacing of turn based becomes in multiplayer. Basically the more emphasis on multiplayer, the better the game becomes at multiplayer (duh) and as a whole. But putting out a multiplayer-focused indie game is basically playing with fire. If you successfully gain a long-term player base, you will warm your house for a very long time since that player base will naturally expand itself. If you don’t gain a long-term player base you will have burnt down your house because no one wants to buy a multiplayer-focused game when there’s no one else to play it with. Given all the niches this game hits (JRPGs, turn based, etc) that are traditionally single player games it’s really hard to tell if hitting these niches with a multiplayer focused game is brilliant or suicide. At the end of the day the choice is obvious: we started this game because we wanted to play a multiplayer version of these, so we should just make the best possible multiplayer version of one. Even if no one else agrees.