Hey Fellow Brewers!
So I'm not entirely sure how to start this one off. It's a bit of a mixed bag of good and bad news. I'm trying to turn lemons into lemonade. So I'll start with how I start every weekly update and go into what has been done this week.
I've worked more on the auto task system and it's coming out pretty cool. You set up the steps to do a task and then assign the task to an employee. They just go and do it on their own. It has a bit of a logic element in where the player has to think about what step comes first. It also opens up the door to using this system to store a recipe. This is the task editing mode where it shows the steps both in a list and in the game as a line connecting each element.
There's some bug in the system right now, but I've been slowly going through each one. I've been trying to keep a very clean code base. Hopefully v0.3.0 will be here soon.
Now for the harder part.
Draught Kraft started out as a passion project and a bit of a hope to make this my full time job. A lot of people around me have kept this project going with their support. I really appreciate all of you who followed the updates and provided feedback. But the sad thing is, the world doesn't run on these things. I've funded the development out of pocket this whole time, hoping that things would pick up. Unfortunately this hasn't been sustainable.
I've put a lot of time and money into this. Some days I've put 12+ hours and others I've put in no less than 9 or 10. It's a lot of work that requires me to take my attention away from other things. I have many commitments outside this project, to both myself and others. Even in development, I have to take myself out to do stuff on the business side of things.
Admittedly building publicity is not a strong skill I have. I've mentioned before that I realize there are (paid)programs out their to help (to some I've tried) but doing all the funding yourself makes this a tough thing. I've taken a good deal of my development time to do p.r. and the typical things like contacting streamers and reviewers, and many have accepted keys. Unfortunately this doesn't always pan out and really does feel like a waste of time. Although I know it's not and I hope this doesn't seem like I'm passing blame.
I have to take into account the reality of things and that this is an early access game. Not everything is 100%, things do change, and people want to place their money into something they will enjoy not so much what they kind of like now and will enjoy in the future. So I figure that this is a complex situation with no real easy answer.
I've never built anything to this level of complexity before. All the systems, art, music, interaction, everything was slowly built up over a years time. I like to think that I was a pretty good programmer before, but this game has taught me so much about game development. I don't want to just through it all away. This is my passion project as I said before. I still have so many more ideas for it.
Where does this leave Draught Kraft?
So I think the only thing I can do is put it into a hobby status. This means that I'll still work on it when I have free time but this will extend the time between updates. I most likely won't be able to do weekly updates. I'll keep updating and bug fixing in-between real life obligations. And from time to time there will be major updates. The last thing I want this to become is vaporware.
Now maybe I'll release that one update that really catches the eye of the public and I can go back to full time development. I'd like to have a bit of hope for the future.
For now this will be the last weekly update. Whenever I work on a new feature, I'll come back here and share. And I hope those of you who have been here the whole time, will be there in the future. I wouldn't have gotten this far without all of you.
Happy Brewing!
-Vertnacular