Hi.

That's all there is to it, folks. My bachelor's degree is complete. The act of learning will never cease, but that stage of my education is complete. I won't lie; it feels odd, but I'll continue pushing forward. Let's start with the Bombling in the room. School Days was my final school project, and while I like the idea,  the execution is rocky at best. The most crucial thing I can say about it is that it works as a prototype. I learnt a lot while working on it, and the time I spent on it allowed me to truly think about what I want to accomplish with Sap.

Sap: School Days

Speaking of S:SD. I have a little tracker with some bugs and features that were squeezed in before the final deadline. The goal for now is to take stock of my life and get serious about being a professional (it's long overdue). When it comes to S:SD, I'll fix up the bugs and features that I find most weak. After that, I'm happy to announce that Orbis Production will be publishing Sap School Days on Steam, so I'll have some work to do getting materials ready for that. 

The fact that S:SD may be meditative is a large part of why it works for some individuals. Two things I intended to emphasize were accessibility and personalization of the play experience, and I believe I fell short in both areas. Some of that was due to time constraints, and some  a reaction to the shifting sands of the overall project idea. The point is, I've come away from the prototype with a crisp sense of what I want to do. Finally, I'm not totally abandoning it—there will be one major content update to fix some of the glaring balance issues and omissions. If you like the game, look forward to that. I still encourage you to play whatever version you can get your hands on and tell me what you think. I've taken at least one little idea from everyone I've talked to concerning their experience.

Sap

Now, Sap is the real deal. There's a lot of time and space between now and its release. I have a rather large list of ideas and concepts to flesh out and subsequently pare down.  What I don't want to do is be a Peter Molyneux and promise the world, so I think I'll keep things close to the chest at the moment. I can say the first task is to start over. The code base needs a ton of work, and my experience tells me I'm better off with a fresh project. In addition, the visuals will be in 3D (which is something I wanted to do originally), though still tile-based and top-down. Overall, the tiles will be well lit and cozy, and yes, I am calling them tiles now. The sound design was another massive failing. I have some experience with sound design, but even for a small prototype, I didn't do even 1/100th of what I should have. Sound design often makes or breaks the moment-to-moment experience in many forms of media, and certainly in games. Finally, though there is what I would call "babies first" simulation under the hood of S:SD, it's nothing like what I want. A big part of my current workload is figuring out how everything will work in Sap. More to follow on that, but I have some ambitious ideas.

Look, I'd love for you to be part of the process in some way, even if it's just stopping by once a month to leave a comment or popping into the discord to say hi. To that end, here are the

Links

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope to hear from you,

Eli