In today’s fortnightly update: steady progress, with only minor breaks for despair, and a new build of the game out by the end of the year

I’d give this fortnightly sprint a solid ‘pretty okay’ out of 10. I’ve finally finished rebuilding the game from the ground up, and have now set about playtesting and bug-fixing. It’s boring, but it’s okay. I kind of hate it. But it’s necessary, and I know it’s good for me. Eat your vegetables, and so on.

I’m also moderately excited to announce that I’ll almost certainly be able to release a new build of the game by the end of December. I’ll be taking a break from work for Christmas, of course, but should have enough time to quash any remaining bugs before 2018 is (finally, thank god) over. After that I’ll update the game on itch.io and everyone can play it and tell me about all the obvious bugs I missed.

There isn’t really any new content in this build apart from some cool new flavour text, but it should be a fair bit more stable (with slightly better UI) than before. After that it’ll start work on the game’s new content, and I’ll aim to release a new build every month or so until I’m finished in early July.

After that I’d like to continue working on the project. I’m fairly certain the final game is going to be just in Ink (I’m still plugging away at my Unity studying, but I’m not quite there yet, so dreams of a Unity version will remain just wonderful dreams for now). After development’s finished I might spend a few months working on a Unity port, and/or making even more content for the game. I have loads of ideas for expanding the game, and think they’d be fun to work on.

That, or I might decide to put further development of The Red Market on hold and work on another small project for a few months to build up my game making/Unity skills. I’ve got two ideas on this front: (i) Early Christian Church Deck-building Game, and (ii) Rare Book Seller Game (I’m deadly serious here). Not quite sure which I’d like to do more, yet – I’ll update you when I figure everything out.

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Anyway, thanks for reading again! And remember, you can follow me on twitter through the magic of hyperlinks by clicking here. The prototype of The Red Market can be played online here, if you haven’t already!

Nick