For the past several weeks, besides working a bunch of Saturdays at the day job, and chopping up a bunch of firewood (I rely on wood heat in the winter), I’ve been busy with some logistical behind-the-scenes stuff on the game. Unfortunately, that means not a ton of progress has happened on the game proper.
The project is reaching the stage where the list of planned tasks is ballooning faster than I can keep up with it. Although I have quite a few new ideas and mechanical changes that I’m excited to implement, I need to address the problems that I already know about before I add any new ones to the list.
Therefore, the next step will be to focus on finishing a test build. It’s been over a year(!) since I last sent the game out to testers. I’ve done a tiny bit of spot testing here and there, but the game just hadn’t changed enough to make a full test worthwhile. There are still large sections of the game that I know how to improve but I just haven’t gotten around to yet.
Music
I also started working on some music sketches, and I’m relatively happy with the initial direction there. I’ve attempted music for the game a few times already but never found anything that really clicked. There are also some pretty harsh constraints on the things I am even allowed to do with the music. I don’t want to spoil things too much, but Taiji can be very subtle with the clues to puzzles so it’s quite easy to accidentally create red herrings while just trying to make things look or sound interesting.
Now I have a few pieces in various stages of completion, but it will be a while before I want to share anything publicly yet.
Taiji 