And development continues to surge forward then momentarily screech to a halt, only to continue on again

I needed to adjust how long a car hangs in the air after hitting a ramp, so I made some adjustments to how ramps are handled – using distance instead of time, basing it off the length of the visible road, etc. I made all the necessary adjustments and even factoring the initial “thinking about it time” – it happened really quickly. A couple of years ago when I wasn’t working on this regularly it would have taken me a lot longer to figure out how to calculate the jump, decide how long it should be, and implement it. Even though I’ve become much more proficient with making game design choices and doing things in Unity I didn’t expect the whole thing to go so fast.

Then I tried to replicate an animation with some code, and things stalled. It turns out there’s a weird quirk of Unity that wouldn’t let me do things the way I wanted, but once I figured out the problem it was a quick fix.

And so development is moving on after a couple hours of virtually banging my head on the screen. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened of course. The solution ranges from figuring out the right thing to google to just taking a break and looking at it again in a day or two.

I only have 2 weeks of development left before early release, so hopefully things go relatively smoothly now. After that I’ll do a week of testing and bug smashing, followed by uploading the build for Steam to review. And during this whole time I’ll be working on marketing as well – creating new trailers, artwork, and hopefully getting it put in public. That’s the hardest part for me, actually putting my stuff out there for the public to see. I’ve posted on some small discord servers but every time I decide I should upload something, I come up with a reason not to do it yet. Usually because there’s some bug or less optimal thing that I’m planning on fixing in the next couple of days. Which isn’t that good of a reason, but it sounds good in the moment.

Anyway, getting back to development – it’s continuing. Quickly. Except when I’m stuck, but I try not to stay stuck for too long. And getting stuck is a normal part of development, so if you’re a dev and it happens to you – don’t feel bad, it happens to all of us. I’m kinda in crunch mode trying to get things as done as reasonable before this release. Even though it’s marked as an early release I want the core game to be there and fun.

Anyway, I’m rambling, and I should get back to work on the game, just 2 weeks of major dev left!