Almost always when you’re up in the wilderness climbing a mountain the terrain changes with each passing trail marker, sometimes step by step, definitely hour by hour. You may start off on a wide trail with a gentle grade surrounded by rich forest, and that may break out into a rocky traverse along the dog legged trail through a centuries old rockslide, which around the next bend becomes a narrow clamber up and down through some root-laden single track all of it leading to a steep cliff where you need all four limbs coordinated and strong to reach the top.

If I ever needed an analogy to write about indie game design and development, I think one of  the obvious options would be to compare it to climbing a mountain. It changes with every step, and you need to be prepared for what’s around the next corner—and that could be anything.

My life has been cluttered up with non-game work these past couple weeks so progress on development has been a bit of picnic stop at a scenic viewpoint.  I’ve been swatting bugs, changing my socks, and enjoying the view from my efforts so far, but I’m not getting much closer to the top. Yet, this moment of pause and assessment is, as any seasoned mountain hiker would tell you, might be as important as any forward step up the trail.

All that said, as I write this I’m getting fueled up for the next few days of knuckling in and pushing on.

Sadly (for my forward effort in my education) my weekend round of lectures was postponed and rescheduled. This sets me back by about a month in my professional training, but—lemons made lemonade—frees up three solid days for some game coding.

What have I done since last checking in?

A lot, actually, but only a lot if—again to the mountain climbing analogy—if you consider squashing bugs, play-testing, cleaning up code, and poking around in my supplies an important part of the journey.

It had been over three weeks since I loaded a snapshot on my SteamDeck, and doing so with my bug-tracker sitting open next to me gave me a full day of work tuning controls, stabilizing code, and catching other little UI quality of life  fixes.

I also dug into the back end of how I’d built things at the beginning and did some refinement. My understanding of Rust and Bevy both have grown exponentially since December and I look at the ways I built some of those original functions and see significant improvements to be made. And maybe this is a little disheartening to rewrite stuff that was already working, but then at the same time I’m tweaking stuff so that it can be expanded to to ten more things in addition to the thing it was originally written to do.

I’ve also made a lot of art. 

Art is time consuming. Heck. I figure I need somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300-500 more art assets. I’m able to make about four or five an hour. So, mathy time, that is something like a hundred plus hours of work drawing little pixel sprite carrots and tomatoes and blue cheese. Fortunately I can multitask my art (unlike my code) by which I mean I can draw with the “distraction” of the TV on, so I’m simultaneously getting my fill of classic Simpsons episodes while I draw.

After I write this I’m going to do a couple things.

I’m going to record a video of the game-play and grab some more screenshots. If that goes well it should get dropped about here…

And I’m going to go into GitHub and reassess my issues. I’ve pushed and nudged and swept all the fiddly jobs into a pile and that pile is sitting in the middle of me finishing this latest milestone. So I need to reassess some of the things I said I was going to do and either say frak it and just do them today, or figure out where to shuttle them off to a future state again.

Either way, I’m closing out 0.4.8 today and moving onto 0.4.9–and bound and determined to move into 0.5 by the end of the weekend.

Stay tuned.