Goals for This Week (Oct 14-18)
- Prototype “crowdfunding with baked-in accountability” website. (accomplished)
- Playable alpha for Nothing to Hide. (incomplete)
Goals for Next Week (Oct 21-25)
- Playable beta for Nothing to Hide.
- Show & Tell blog for Nothing to Hide.
Three months ago, I published So You Want To Build A Crowdfunding Site? on the Mozilla Hacks blog. It's a tutorial for making a basic crowdfunding site using Node.js & Balanced, and the demo website's source code is readily forkable on Github.
Initially, my only goal for this week was to prototype a “crowdfunding with baked-in accountability” website. But because of the aforementioned tutorial, I just copied my old code, made small modifications, and my Progress Pledge prototype was complete. Only took one day. Not a good weekly goal, in hindsight.
If you're wondering who Casey Cat is, I have a list of Placeholder Pets I use whenever I prototype a new thing. Other Placeholder Pets include Dance Monkey, Tiger Durden, and Lauren Ipsum, the quick brown fox.
The next logical step would be to turn this prototype into an actual crowdfunding campaign. All I needed now was a guinea pig - what would the campaign be going towards? Because this is about baked-in accountability in crowdfunding, I needed to test this on a medium-sized project that would take at least a few months to complete. I thought about the myriad of previouds projects I've dropped for some reason or other, and decided I would resurrect my relatively recent game project:
a surveillance state survival horror
By the way, I was pretty happy with that background. At 1280x800, it makes a great desktop wallpaper too! Here you go, a CC Zero licensed wallpaper. I hope you have a 1280x800 screen.
In an ambition-fueled frenzy, I said, you know what? The StopWatching.Us rally is on October 26th. Halloween is October 31st. If I go into crunch time for the next couple weeks, I could create a small polished demo of what the full game could be, and launch my crowdfunding campaign at the end of this month!
And crunch time I did.
I went from this:
To this:
To finally this:
All in the span of the last five days.
Of course, crunch time's not healthy to do for too long at a stretch. I'm not trying to paint myself as a martyr for my work, because past some point, I was so tired I was unproductively scatterbrained. It was hurting my work. That might be one reason why the alpha is still incomplete.
So, I'm taking this weekend off to unwind. Maybe do a bit of casual writing like I'm doing now. Next week, I'll try to stick to a proper schedule. Sleep early, wake early, and force myself to take breaks. (No, browsing through Hacker News or Reddit does not count.)
Speaking of which, here are my next week's goals.
Goal: Show & Tell blog for Nothing to Hide.
I want Nothing To Hide's development to be completely open and transparent. I'm going to start with a Show & Tell blog for it, and post my progress there. (Such as the above sections and screenshots!)
In the future, I'd like to post more than just progress there. I want to also open up discussions on designing the game itself, tutorials for aspiring gamedevs, and my personal stories of having lived half my life in Singapore, the most Orwellian developed country I know of.
Making this Show & Tell blog should take less than a day. After all, like the progress pledge prototype, I just need to take the existing code of the ncase.me website, make slight modifications, and publish it!
Goal: Playable beta for Nothing To Hide.
Right now, Nothing to Hide is in half-alpha. Specifically, I've got most of the game engine, game mechanics, and story down for now. My game engine lets me create and modify levels very simply, by just modifying a JSON file in any text editor. A very, very barebones level editor.
What's left to do is to actually use that level editor to create all the damn levels. Oh, and replace all the art and textures with actual art, because the only real art in the game so far is the redhead tomboy character. That's my standard for playable beta. All levels and art are more or less finalized, and all that's left to do is polish & bug fixing.
I haven't decided on the main character's name yet.
Let's call her Red Panda for now.