At long last, I’ve gotten back into developing Boobie Teeth. I’ve released 0.23, available as always on the Releases page.
In the two weeks leading up to Notacon 8, I worked on Boobie Teeth roughly 16-18 hours/day, making great progress, but had about burned out by the time I got 0.22 ready for the presentation. I really like pushing on a project like this, where I’m interested and motivated, but probably can’t sustain more than 12-14 hours of focused effort a day for very long. I had intended to take the next week or two off from the project and focus on some other things — housecleaning, getting ready to start a new job in May. For a number of reasons, this summer has been full of misfortunes which kept me out of advancing the project as I dealt with various crises. But things have settled enough, to where I can now resume working on it.
This release was actually mostly done between 4/16-4/17. I had a few ideas from playing 0.22 that I wanted to put in quickly during Notacon weekend, and got it done quickly. There are only a few changes in this release, not as much as I probably had intended when I started 0.23, but since so much time has passed between then and now, and I’m not entirely sure what else I might have decided to include had I kept working on it — there are a number of things on my list that I might have thrown into this release if I’d kept working on it, but at this point I’m not too sure what they were.
I briefly considered just ditching what I’d done for 0.23, and going back to 0.22 and start over again on 0.23, but I decided in the end to keep what I’d accomplished in 0.23 and just put it out, then start 0.24 with fresh direction. The additions which I did make to the game seem to have been complete, so rather than drop them and add them back later, it makes more sense to keep them.
I think that in 0.24, I’m going to focus on a few performance optimizations so the game will scale up more before dropping frames. It’s about at the limit of that right now, in my demo level, which won’t do if I want to do a few things that I want to do when the game advances to the next level. I really need to be able to put more objects on the screen at once without things slowing down.