You may notice that another project has been added to the roster - Book 2 - House of Thoraz, and you may now be thinking the above even if you weren't already...
Time management, pure and simple. Along with throwing as much personal time as I can get away with without leading to a divorce, my working day gives me a reasonably heft commute (4.5 hours) and 2 of those are nice, quiet 'do my stuff' time. Back in the day of the original kickstarters, my commute was 5 hours plus, 1.5 hours of that was on the tube which I used to write the original draft of Insurmountable Odds on my phone, along with a goodly wedge of the second book, and 2 hours was on the train used to do Dom-dev. Now I only get that 2 hours of train time, which has been (largely) for Dom-dev, so there's little time for the book at the moment.
So, now, to work on Book two - I will have to split some of my dev-time up, but the majority will still be on Dom-dev. It's going to be an interesting challenge for sure - but rest assured that I won't be parking Dom as a game project, and it is definitely, categorically, priority number one on my list!
As a general checkup on progress overall, well in my own brutally honest opinion, it's way, way, way, way too slow.
But, that's a given (given the above) and not being able to dedicate full time effort to the project whilst paying the bills. A problem everyone has
However, there is a weird 'silver lining' to the dev effort... short, sharp, concentrated blocks of dev time mean getting the most out of each. All the time in-between I can think, ruminate on and cogitate on choices and options for solving many of the technical challenges of a vast, seamless, open-play space game. I have solutions (in my head) to many of the things which cause problems, procedural levels to walk around, cities on planets you can walk in, decks on ships, space stations, your own bases, populating all that with flora/fauna/characters, character/ship histories, atmospherics, flying into gas giants, even stars... time will tell if these solutions are worth anything of course! Sadly for me(us) they just have to wait until I can get to them.
I can't speed up the dev process without funding - not only for myself to dedicate more time, but to be able to hire others to add content, take up the code-slack from myself, etc. And I can't get funding without having more to show to encourage funding. That's why I'm more than happy to encourage funding on other worthy projects (like Infinity Battlescape), which are far further ahead and deserve to get funded.
Ah well! Onward!
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