My goal this week was to have a playable build of OTS, with a few final additions included. It's now 11:45pm on Friday and I'm happy to report that the game is ready 🎉 If you'd like to give it a try, get in touch and I'll send you a copy! I'm looking for feedback on anything and everything - feature suggestions, bug reports, complaints and opinions.

For me, this is a really big milestone. The original game jam version came out in 2019, and nothing substantial has been released since. You can see in the chart below that it wasn't until the start of 2022 that I started making some substantial progress on the game, and that there's a big chunk of work done just in the past month:

My next goal is to take a step back and think about how to approach the project from this moment on. The past month has been very productive and has taken a good chunk out of the feature todo list, but I think the best move now is to design the world layout, flesh out story elements, and take any feedback into consideration. I also want to think harder about how to advertise / market the game, or how to let people know that it's a thing that's happening.

I also want to start writing some technical articles / blog posts that cover the interesting things that have gone into making the game. Off the top of my head, the topics could include:

• Creating the owl behaviour / FSM
• The lighting system and writing shaders in Monogame
• The paletting system (and writing shaders in Monogame...)
• My setup for working with the Monogame asset pipeline
• My project / git / .csproj / versioning / "deployment" setup
• How data is stored (the various binary file "formats" that have been created)
• The timeline / story of how the project got to where it is today
• How library rooms are interconnected, especially with doors
• Covering the level and campaign editors and their features
• Talk about planned features like the shared scoreboard system
• Random library generation and the tweaks to improve the "average" room

If you'd like to see anything from that list in particular, let me know and I'll prioritise it!

In the meantime, I'm going to give myself a short break. I'll try to get something out by next Friday - maybe a bug fix patch, or a blog post, or another rambling post like this one. See you then!