If you have been following along, you’ll know that we’ve made tremendous progress over the last 90 days of Violet. I am thankful for Root for giving me the opportunity to invest my time into this project. This project that initially started out as a way to recoup from my divorce has now become a work of art that I truly believe in.
The past week has been pretty tame with the amount of new features added. I’ve mostly been working 80 hour weeks on this project since the start of the leave of absence and simply needed to “catch my breath”. We’ve also needed to do another round of refactoring. Since I won’t be in the code as much, I wanted to get much of it tidied up. That way when I come back to coding, I don’t spend hours scratching my head wondering why something was left with a TODO mark.
Tomorrow is going to be hard for me. If you haven’t guessed by now, today is the last day of my leave of absence from Root. I feel very much like a kid going back to school after a long summer vacation. I am not ready to go back.
What I Have Discovered
What I’ve discovered with my time off is that game development is what I want to be doing full time. Like every job, not every minute of it is glamorous. However, the overall common goal of making a game with a small team is something I’ve always wanted to do. And this was fully realized during these last few months.
I’ve also discovered that I like working for myself. I don’t think I could do game development if I was told to “build to this spec”. I love experimenting with ideas and building out systems in such a way where ideas and game play can become integrated in a meaningful and fun way.
I love Root for its flexibility and its culture, but I’ve learned that web development is not what I want to do for the rest of my life.
What’s Next?
Though we have made a lot of progress, the game is hardly near complete. In the next couple months we’ll probably not add major features, but rather take our existing systems and start plugging art and content into it. Just in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen a 180 that the game has taken with world building and updated art. We still have A TON to plug in, and much of that I can mindlessly add after a day of web development.
Also during these next couple months, we will be researching how to market the game so that we can reach everyone who could be interested in this project. This is because I feel the next logical steps are to get funded using a crowdfunding platform, such as Kickstarter. In order for this project to truly be successful, and for our ideas to fully blossom, we need to be dedicated on it. The only way to be dedicated on this is to have a way for the bills to be paid.
We Need YOUR Help
This project will only be successful if YOU help share it with others. In the next week or so, I am going to be hitting the social media platforms and getting pages/channels/etc. added. When these are added, please like/follow/share with those you think will be interested in this project. The more eyes on this, the better chances we have of being successful!
For those who have followed along and have helped contribute, whether with game assets, testing, or simply being supportive, THANK YOU! We couldn’t do this without your support!
