Hi everyone, I wanted to give a little update about the game. I'll just let this be my outlet because I don't have anyone else I can really talk to about my game.
First of all, I wanted to thank all the YouTubers that covered the game. I am so accustomed to a complete lack of attention that it is quite shocking to have the opposite suddenly happen. I feel a lot of responsibility and pressure to make the game great because it seems to be somewhat popular.
So I've been working hard on the game for quite a while and I may be biased but the game is pretty amazing now. The dopamine levels released are second to none. I did a lot of experimentation adding things to the game. Some things worked some things didn't. I've added some more things to cut besides just grass. I didn't want to stray too much from the main pillar of the game - cutting grass; particularly making that feel very satisfying. The new things add to that feeling quite a bit and I think you all are going to love it.
I also added a prestige system to the game. Initially it was not part of the plan but I think it's become expected from this genre now. It's been a lot of work but I think it's turned out well. Some upgrades and special abilities have been moved into the prestige system and I think they make more sense to be there.
I basically just need to polish a couple things and then I'm going to do a lot of number-tweaking to try to make things balanced so I hope to announce a release date soon. The game will hopefully release in 3 - 4 weeks!
Things have taken a bit longer than I expected because I'm not using an engine. The downside of not using an engine is things generally take a bit longer to prototype and some players are still reporting issues running the game. I hope to fix most of them in the next demo update - probably within a week or so. I'm waiting on a device that will let me digitally sign the .exe file so that antivirus issue will go away (hopefully).
The upside of not using an engine is the game runs like an absolute champ. I should probably test it out on a lesser computer but on my computer I get 144 FPS with some dips to 100 when a lot of crazy stuff happens. I grew up on the NES and that had some limitation where it could only draw 8 sprites horizontally at the same time. So this is pretty incredible that I'm drawing tens of thousands of sprites and the game is running so well. The grass field alone is 7000 sprites when maxed out. I can't wait for people to see the full version. It is totally insane.
Anyways, I'll keep you posted on the release date! Stay tuned for more news!