Getting back into it
– July 26th, 2026 –
Hey! I remembered to write another one!
So, over the past month-and-a-half-ish I’ve been making some slow progress on Scribes. I’ve mostly been juggling my schedule and trying to find some time in the day when I can squeeze in some devving. I want to say that I’m starting to fall into a proper working schedule, but it’s only been for a few days. So, it needs a bit more time before I can say it actually works.
Summer is a somewhat busy season for me. There’s a whole pile of things that need to get done before winter, which means I have less time to work on the game. Plus, I have to start taking my marketing a bit more seriously, which also takes time.
Plus a whole bunch of other excuses I’m too lazy top come up with.
Anyway, the point is development will probably be a little slow.
– Scribes –
So, where’s the game at now?
Well… it’s still super early on.
There’s a placeholder main menu, a basic “play” mode where you can walk around and interact with the spell wheel (no spells have been added yet), and I’m starting to build out the map editor (On that note, I’ve been struggling with constantly changing what I’m calling the map-builder-tool-thing. Sometimes I call it a map editor, sometimes a level editor, sometimes a level/map builder… It’s been a weirdly frustrating thing for me.). The editor is needed so I can make the map-data that the game is quite literally built on. And, like, when I say that, I mean a lot of the spells interact directly with the map data. So I can’t really build the magic system without it.
I’ve been doing a bunch of work on designing how the custom map data is saved and loaded. Specifically how it’s organized within the world-map’s file structure. I’ve also done some work optimizing how the game accesses the various tile sprites used in rendering the map. Plus, I’ve added functionality to some of the tools used in the editor.
Things are still pretty bare-bones, but I’m happy with how it’s progressing.
While I do need it for the game’s development, the idea is to also include the map editor as part of the base game. I want players to be able to create and play their own dungeons, and even share them with others through Steam’s community feature.
Really, I’m just dreaming of the day somebody makes a kaizo Scribes map.
– So, what else is going on? –
I want to try to give more attention to the marketing side of things. I’ve never been good at keeping up with posting, and the visibility of my projects has always suffered for it.
At the same time, I don’t want to fall into being one of the typical gamedev-influencers. Like, it’s difficult to put into words exactly what bothers me about them, but something about the vibe of their content has always rubbed me the wrong way. There is, of course, plenty of excellent game-development content out there. But the whole “I’m making my DREAM game”, “being an indie game developer is SO HARD”, and “Actually, this popular game is BAD, here’s mine that’s GOOD” crowd never really sat right with me.
I know it’s a proven method to get clicks, and maybe that is what bothers me so much about it. Since I’ve seen the same kinds of posts from so many different game developers, none of it feels genuine. Every time I see a post covered in buzzword vomit, I immediately check out.
Anyway, I’m going to cut the rant off there. The point I was getting distracted from is: I want to start posting at least somewhat regularly again. I’m not entirely sure what that’s going to look like, but I do know that nobody’s going to play a game if they don’t know it exists.
I think I might start making videos like this old one again, but these kinds of edits take time to make, so we’ll see.
So… uh… stay tuned, I guess….
(oh, and I’ll see you in the next devlog)