Now on itch: The Sky Sailor's Logbook

I decided to change how changing party member equipment worked from the traditional “drag and drop” to “click and swap”. This is inspired by Fantasy Life i where you first click on the equipment slot you want to change and then continue to select new equipment in your inventory to decide what you want equipped. Overall, I felt like this was a streamlined way to handle equipment in addition to having the items currently equipped by party members show up in the inventory as a darkened image.

After I went through and updated the UI for the blacksmith and mission selection, I thought it made sense to use the logbook UI for this screen as well. This rooted the fantasy in the logbook being one of the main characters across activities. My hope is that it adds to the sense of exploration and progression where the player feels like they are writing into this book as they play the game. Overall, I’m happy with how things went and I feel like this goal was met.

As mentioned in the previous section, this menu was redone to be placed within the logbook as well. I also made some changes to how the missions are simulated to make it feel a bit more dramatic. If you have any thoughts on how I did, please share them with me!

Missions are now designed to give better rewards with higher ranks and will give more of a stat boost to help progress toward clearing the earth crystal mission. It should feel significantly easier to clear that mission by clearing rank 3 missions leading up to it. What may change is which locations you pick on the way since each gives different types of boosts. This was another goal met this week.

Part of my game development cycle will require me to be patient and wait for data to come in. Now with the game up on itch for people to play, it’s a good time for me to take a break by shifting to other activities. This doesn’t mean doing nothing related to game development. Instead of putting my focus into creating a specific game, I want to take some time to start exploring again to find inspiration for the next idea. This may include studying and implementing a standalone system, doing 3D or 2D art, reverse engineering UI screens from other games, polishing up my plugins, going through sound and music files to curate my favorites, or maybe just playing games with the intent of studying design. I believe that finding a balance in both exploring and creating games will lead to faster improvement overall. Most importantly, it will be a key strategy for my transformation into a lifelong game creator.

In my classes, we have been conducting anti-yes tests as a form of early qualitative validation. The main idea is that it’s much cheaper to find out through intentional interviews that no one will buy your product before you make it compared to making the product and then figuring out that no one will buy it when you go to sell it. This works well for a lot of products, but the creators of the test identified video games as one kind of product where this early qualitative testing doesn’t really work. Video games don’t solve a problem, so already a person can’t imagine or articulate how their life would be different if they had your game. Even if they can imagine something, it may end up being very different than what they imagined. Unfortunately for game creators, this means that it may require putting the game into player’s hands to see if you have something special.

Not all is lost though, because there are many examples of studios who take the approach of testing early and often with a trusted community of players and cite it as a reason for their game’s eventual success. While this doesn’t address the issue of first needing to build a game, it does change my mindset toward experimenting and testing games out. Even though I’ve only been surfing once in my life, it serves as the analogy in my mind for how I should treat game development. There may be a good amount of waiting in the water, watching how other surfers are approaching it, falling off my board, and paddling back out to do it all again. If I can commit to doing something like this, eventually I’ll have a game that is special. It’s just a matter of being out in the water and aspiring to improve once wave at a time.