First Post (11/18)

So
I'm on Patreon now! Also I had barely been posting anything in the past year, whether it was on Deviantart, Twitter (rip) or now Bluesky, what's up with that?

Long story short, I went back to college for a year, and about 6 weeks ago I graduated! I now have a Master's degree in game design and only a few tens of thousands of dollars of debt in student loans. Which of course brings us here to Patreon. I've been working on my game, the Maya platformer, for years now in my free time, and it's come a long way since way back when I started. But it's still got a long way to go before I can call it a complete game, and the only way I'm going to get it there is to start making some money to support myself. It's not a problem right now, student loans aren't due for a few months and I've got cash saved up. But sooner or later I'll need income, so I'm getting my feet wet with Patreon now so that I might potentially offer exclusive content later, in addition to the usual job searching.

I've also been working on the Maya Platformer this past week, and I plan to use Patreon as a blog to document my progress. This week has been a lot of getting back into the swing of things, refreshing myself on old code and addressing core systems that I had left to rot for a while. Specifically the level editor, as being able to make, play and share your own levels is a major feature I'd like the game to have once it's done. This week my main accomplishment was introducing level size as a variable that can be set in the editor, which meant adding a special case for placing edge tiles, introducing a new UI to set the level boundaries when creating a level, and revamping how levels are saved and loaded in order to account for their size.

The UI for it might be a disgrace to graphic designers everywhere, but it's functional enough for me to start using it to make my own levels. Which brings me to what I plan to do next: My next goal is to address the core gameplay loop, which is currently... non-existent, more or less. As fun as it is just playing as Maya, there needs to be some proper goals and level progression, as well as hazards and obstacles to make reaching the goal more interesting. So that'll be what I work on next, coming up with a goal for levels as well as the first set of unique objects and obstacles for Maya to interact with.

And with that, my first post on Patreon comes to an end! For now I don't plan on offering any Patreon exclusives (I want to make sure I can offer something of value before I promise anything). I also don't expect anyone to become a patron for that reason, though I'd be beyond grateful if someone were that eager to support what I do. If you read this far, thank you for your time! With any luck it won't be too long before the next post, so hopefully I'll see you then, later!