hello hello,

We wanted to try something new to help communicate our progress to everyone following us. This will hopefully be the first of many Dev logs.

As stated before, we are not currently running posts on our social media. This will more than likely keep being the case for a long while, and we do apologize for that. One of our major reasons for starting these is so that we don't leave any of you in the dark for many months at a time. We also hope to be transparent with all of you on how we are progressing over development.

The reason we have put a hold on social media, to be frank, is that we found we started it up too early. This game started as a senior college project and has developed into so much more, but we started creating our social media before we had even graduated. When we were in college we had a lot more time to dedicate to putting out content and updates of the game. When it came time to transition out of college, this became a problem for us. Many of us had to look for jobs, so work slowed down, but we had already created an expectation for our posting habits. As a result we ran out of things to post, and we found ourselves scrambling to provide content. At first we thought this was good, since it gave us more reason to work, but we later learned that it was really hurting us. We had some of our work split just working on things that probably wouldn't end up in the game. If it did, it might only be in some reference wall art or an art gallery, ultimately nothing meaningful. Unfortunately, these problems also worsened with the start and continuation of the global pandemic. 

Although, this isn't to say that it was all bad. We've received so many happy faces and excited people looking forward to our game; we've even had the pleasure of getting to talk with some of you. You’ve given us feedback on places where we might improve, and what parts may have enthralled you. We've found communities and other developers more than excited to help each other and welcome us like family. All of this has helped us so much, from the direct feedback to keeping us motivated and excited to continue working on the game. So before we continue, we really want to thank each and everyone one of you for everything you've done for us! It's because of all of you that we don't regret starting any of our social media or going to the events we have been able to go to, but also why we want to learn from our mistakes to improve ourselves and our game.

To those curious about an updated build or a demo, we don't currently have defined plans for a release. Our hopes to build a demo has had similar results as with our social media, although to a much lesser extent. In our hopes to build a demo we've made a lot of assets, created tools and features for the game and uprooted a lot of our more… college level code. However, this has affected our implementation and project planning as, in a sense, we were trying to build 2 separate versions of the same game. Our current plan at this point is to stop worrying about building a demo and just work on the game, but this doesn't mean there won't be a demo. We're just going to eventually find a slice of the game later in its development to pull out and touch up, and that will be our demo.

Doom and gloom aside, as a team we've been learning a lot and figuring out how to better ourselves and the game’s progress. We don't want to keep everyone in the dark but as mentioned, we had issues with keeping things like our social media running. We're hoping that doing something like these dev logs can help accomplish this without taking too much of our time away from the game. We are again uncertain on if this will be an occurrence every month, but rest assured it'll certainly be more than twice a year. And hopefully with these, we might be able to show some of our game’s progress along with our experiences. We hope it’ll help spice things up that much more for you guys! Thank you very much for your time and for checking out our game, and we hope to share so much more with you in the future.

-Snek 🐍 (Producer TJ)