Hotfix delayed long enough such that it is room temperature at best:

• Fixed the infinite loop in the random event in which Old Hickory and President Ronnie argue about the implications of mass produced plastic Rosaries being offered for sale at Food Cougar
• Migrated to a new build system (after much weeping and gnashing of teeth due to Itch's handling of gzipped files) which should feature cleaner, faster loading

Meditations on Crunch

Making the deadline for the NarraScope Showcase was tight. I sort of had to take on this one alone, and in the end I clocked something like 46 hours in 3 days time. That is all time that I had to borrow from other responsibilities, at usury. Essentially all the content that was planned for that patch was completed, but it shipped with a nasty bug that I only found out about today.

This isn't even the first time, either. I did a similar, if not quite as intense, crunch for one of Dream Warrior's patches. It shipped with the content I intended, but you would usually (but not always) encounter the Landlord at level 1. This is a (super weak) hidden encounter that is part of the Demon Path ending (long story). Oops.

This seems to be a bit of a poison chalice: crunch hard and the work gets done, but with a major defect.

Frankly, I wonder if it is worth it. Well into my fourth decade in this vale of tears, I am no longer am possessed of youthful vigor. I'm a bit ashamed to admit it, but that particular development cycle affected me, health-wise and in terms of burnout. Today is the first day since then that I have been motivated to steal time for game dev.

And the result of that effort? Nothing.

Obviously we didn't get shortlisted for NarraScope. The presence of a game-breaking bug will do that. Even absent that issue, I doubt we would have made it. Looking at the titles that did make it, a solid percent are polished products with Steam pages. Part of the motivation for entering was to try to get a read on if the project was worth continuing, perhaps to turn in into a polished product with a Steam page. Had I know that the competition was already there, I would not have entered, let alone crunched. I should have know, but refer to that thing above about being old.

I'm happy for those that did make it. I'm also happy in a way to not be selected: the themes I touch in Grocery (and Dream Warrior, and Dreams of Gold, and...) do come from somewhere, after all. My ability to attend the convention was contingent on successfully finding lodging by imposing on a friend in Philly whom I haven't seen in the flesh since 2017. I genuinely do not have the ability to set ~1 kilodollar on fire to attend a convention. This saved me a little bit of awkwardness.

Competitions are  famously low-probability things on which to stake any plans. Were there any other benefits, like additional traffic? Again, no:

Frankly, if there were more players, I probably would have heard about the infinite loop before today. A forgotten, financially-failed indie game on Steam (like, you know, Dream Warrior) gets Grocery's lifetime views (to a close approximation) every single day. It's a much smaller population base here, but at this juncture, my time with the game no doubt is a few multiples of the cumulative time everyone else on Earth and other planets have spent playing. That's not exactly where you want to be.

Given all that, what was the point of the exercise? Honestly man, I don't know.

Either way, I'm going to think about this the next time I see a deadline that doesn't have clear remuneration attached to it.