I finished making (most of) my next game!

I finished making my next game! Except for the parts that I haven't finished.

Aside from the music and sound effects (and a tweak to the world map that I'm going to do tomorrow morning, and some other things I talk about later), I have finished my next game! The code, art and levels are 100% complete. It's surprising how many tiny things you have to do to take a game from "almost done" to fully done, such as:

• Making sure the unlockable post-game features work with all the different menus (e.g. restarting from the pause menu, restarting from the results menu, skipping a stage from the pause menu)
• Fixing an annoying 1-frame flicker that used to happen after the end credits
• Improving the process for dealing with corrupted save files
• Removing leftover code from older prototypes, such as enemy pathfinding and weapon targeting
• Removing all of the unused sprites and text from the game, which involved making a tool to automatically track which sprites and text were shown on screen while I played through the entire game from start to finish
• Making some final optimizations to the code
• Renaming the game's exe file from "copter.exe" to the game's actual name (which still isn't 100% final)
• Coming up with the final names and descriptions for all of the achievements
• Making sure all of these changes work on console, not just PC

This is a bit of a tedious process, but I'm so glad I got to do it at my own pace instead of crunching all night to hit a deadline like at most game studios. It's amazing how much more fun it is to make games when no one's forcing you to overwork!

So what's left? Is the game coming out soon?

There are only a few things to do on my next game, but they'll each take a while. I still need to compose all of the game's music and make all of the sound effects(!) which I finally want to start doing after I set up my music software on my new PC. I also need to show the game to some friends and get their feedback, which might result in having to make some final tweaks to the mechanics, tutorials, level design and so on.

When I've finished making changes and I know that the game's text won't change anymore, I'll have to spend some time hiring some translators to get the game localized into other languages. But before I do that, I'll have to go through my game's entire spreadsheet of text and write some notes to help the translators know the context for how all of the text is used in the game. Here's what this looked like for Chessplosion:

I imagine I'll need to do lots of extra work on the console version of my next game too, because I've never gone through a console manufacturer's approval process with one of my own games before but I hear all sorts of stories about how strict they all are. And I need to make trailers, take screenshots, draw the game's final logo, and all of those other things that don't technically count as making the game but still need to be done.

So even though most aspects of the game are now 100% complete, there's still a lot of work to be done. My current guess is that I'll be able to release the game in July, but we'll see how it goes!

That's all I've got!

Sorry that today's newsletter isn't full of fun pics and videos, but I've spent most of this week setting up my new PC, working on last-minute bugfixes, and dealing with various frustrating and time-consuming healthcare-related issues. Next week I should be doing better, and hopefully I'll have some cool stuff to show. I might even have the time to try some modern games out on my fancy new PC. See you then!