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At this point I think these logs are pretty solidly non-weekly. That's ok, I am getting lots of work done regardless! Right now I'm wrapping up the last few things before the release of the demo. It's a stressful period, I've been rushing back and forth between different modes of design, testing sessions, trying to wrap things up with my collaborators, a lot of dotting t's and crossing i's. Here's the current status of each aspect of the game:
DESIGN: Done, but less carefully vetted than I'd hoped. The level design is fairly solid, but a few mechanics updates are being thrown in at the last minute and I won't have time to test them much before release. For example, just today I added a new cross-level ability granting temporary invincibility mode once unlocked; I expect most demo players won't need or access it, so it's ok if it winds up a bit janky. I also added a new mechanic to the Game of Life where infected tiles are destroyed on contact with the player. I think this will add more interactivity to the sequence, making it feel less random and giving the player an out in otherwise-impossible layouts. It's also going to change the difficulty balance, though, possibly making that path too easy relative to others.
PROGRAMMING: I'm committing to considering this 'done', though the programming of a game is never really done. I'm confident by now that the demo contains no major softlocks, and if there are minor errors of that nature, I can always fix them after release. There are some performance bottlenecks, especially regarding video streaming, but not bad enough to seriously harm gameplay. There are additionally some small visual errors on things like textbox spacing, but these too will likely need to be fixed after release. The last thing I really need to worry about is the Mac export -- the game currently isn't "signed", so it refuses to run on Apple computers. Unfortunately I don't own one myself, and the process to sign on Linux seems convoluted and frustrating. Alas, I'll still need to do it to make the game functional on every major OS.
ART: For the past couple months this was the last major holdout preventing me from publishing. Because I can't draw, I rely on other artists, whose schedules generally aren't oriented around full-time gamedev the way mine are. I am relieved to say that, after much gnashing of teeth, I now have what appears to be a sustainable art pipeline. Right now there are still a few assets missing: two NPCs plus a tileset revision for the Nasty Overworld, textures for textboxes, and the angry ghost at the end of the Discourse Pit. I also don't have a sprite for the announcements guy right now, but people seem to think my placeholder (the Colonel from MGS2) is funny, so I'm not rushing to replace it. I'm hoping these last few assets will clear up in the next couple days... otherwise I might just stick with placeholders and palette swaps here.
MUSIC AND SOUND: Done. The TVIS song was only finished very close to release; I wish I'd had more time to test the new arrangement, but I'm confident in the quality of the current track and don't see this as a high priority. The only thing I'm shaky on is the mixing for the player death sound... sometimes it seems too loud, other times too quiet. Testers haven't mentioned it, so I'm not going to worry too much.
WRITING: This is the last big sticking point. The Doomer Overworld is due for a pretty significant update here; I intend to rewrite several of the NPCs and replace the TT/TG terminal entirely. I'm worried about having an epicenter of relatively-shitty writing so early in the demo, and have been considering adding another delay to improve this aspect. On the other hand, the demo has been delayed so much already! I suspect that for me, good writing -- which is hard enough at the best of times -- just can't be forced out in the stress of pre-release crunch. I wish I had focused more on this earlier, especially while the art pipeline was still uncertain. By this point I may need to accept that it's not my best work on display and just ship the motherfucker already.
PRODUCTION: My focus for the past few days has been here! Itch and Bandcamp pages, artist credits, screenshots, build prep, tying up the last few tester sessions. At minimum I currently need a public-facing logo and some means of spreading the knowledge of the game's existence. But there's so much more I could be doing, and the biggest bottleneck is basically motivation. I have a clear concept for a trailer in my head which I really should put together soon, but right now I don't even know any good video editing software for Linux. I'd also like to get a header image set up for the itch page, not to mention I've been meaning to speak to an Actual Marketer about all this shit. Most of my remaining time pre-release probably goes here, but even then, who knows if I'll really be able to get every possible thing done before the time comes to hit publish.
After all that it's a matter of getting the game in front of as many people as possible! I'll probably need a 1.1 build too once players inevitably discover a bunch of new problems I missed post-release. Still, it feels good to be this close to a finish line, especially since there were so many delays along the way. I'll try to write another devlog once the demo is shipped and the post-release updates are cleared.