Electric Noir .plan 10

Jeesh, a lot has changed with EN since the last update. Just looking back at the .plan files I was writting and looking through my own journal entries since then... it's a lot to try to sum up here in just a few sentences. But I'll do my best.

Basically, everything changed. Everything.

A pivot

It's more like I yanked the e-brake mid-mach-10 and spun the wheel hard to the left.

Somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year I realized a few things. First, the scope of Electric Noir was way too big. Second, a turn-based rpg doesn't fit with the type of story and experience I want Electric Noir to be.

So I pivoted. I started fresh, in a brand new Unity project, with a very basic idea and I spent a few days building and tweaking gameplay until I had something that felt good. Movement was enjoyable, combat had a good feedback loop and I was confident that I could start extending the code to build out the rest of the game.

After that I started building out the core features of the game following these principles:

• No more fighting Unity. Lean on unity features, do things "the unity way" instead of inventing my own solutions.- Build the simplest solution and iterate as needed instead of building the "perfect" solution up front.- Fun above everything else. If something isn't fun to do, it gets removed.- Make debugging easy. Tests are great, but I need a way to ensure that I can figure out why a bug is happening without the unity editor. This means I need to build in-game tooling, test levels, etc to make finding bugs easier.

So, it's been six plus months since then. Where am I now? It'd honestly take me a long time to list all of the things that I've built since the pivot but the good news is that I'm incredibly close to releasing an alpha of the game so I can get playtesting feedback on what I've built so far.

I've got some ideas for posts in the future to highlight some of the more interesting things I've built for Electric Noir and I'll definitely be sharing the download link for the alpha here.

Until then, I'm going to head back into the game and get heads down to wrap this alpha up as soon as possible.