Hey everyone!
Some personal stuff – you can skip to the technical stuff about the update below if you find this boring
I found myself struggling a lot with how I wanted to start this post. As someone who's been developing the game for years and sharing a lot about my development progress (and more intimate details of how the project came to life), I tend to forget that when I upload the game to a new platform (Steam in this case), many of you just discovered it and know nothing about me or the project.
Long Story Short is my hobby, and I find joy every time I work on it. Besides that, I also have a family and a full-time job. I work on the game whenever I have free time, and sometimes I forget I should step away from development to write these updates so you know I'm actively working on it. I guess that's just my way of saying that if I'm ever quiet, it means I'm working as hard as I can to pump out more content.
I always promise myself I'll try to write dev updates more frequently, but because I'm not a native English speaker, these posts take me quite a while to draft—sometimes a whole day—without any progress on the update, which can feel like a waste of time. But at this point, I should know better. You don’t really know what’s going on behind the scenes unless I tell you, so I should remind myself (again) that writing these dev updates from time to time should be a priority.
What I've been doing since I first uploaded the game to Steam
The first couple of weeks, I spent most of my time fixing bugs, reading feedback, and getting used to this new platform. Then I started implementing translation into my engine.
For those who don't know, I'm using my own engine, and why I decided to do that is a very long story I don’t mind sharing in the future if you’re curious.
Anyway, the game is already being translated into multiple languages, but I found some bugs here and there that cause certain lines (especially those with game variables) not to be translated. I was hoping to upload the game with translation support weeks ago, but I decided to delay it to make sure everything works smoothly.
Second, I'd like to say the update is progressing really nicely! It’s hard for me to say exactly what percentage of the update is done, because I tend to add or remove things as I test it from start to finish. This part is always a bit awkward for me, because on one hand I want to tell you exactly which scenes I’ve finished, but on the other hand, I don’t want to spoil anything—so I’ll just share some previews, and you can try to fill in the gaps yourself. :)
Last point I'd like to address
I know early games are scary because you don’t know what you’re going to get in the end. But at least for me, I don’t see a reality where I won’t finish this game, which has become a huge part of my life at this point.
Let’s finish up with some previews!
Cheers 🍻,
TTrick!