Delvers Inc : Resume Game

Good morning (or whatever it is where you are)! Just wanted to pop on the devblog and let you all know that Delvers Inc is getting back into the groove again. The buying/selling & moving interruptions are mostly behind me now. We still have some stuff to unpack but the important stuff is done and the rest can be done little by little. I am digging back into the code base to re-familiarize myself with where I left off. It was 3 months ago! That's wild to me just how long it takes to do a couple real estate transactions these days. However, that also means that I have lost track of exactly where I was working and what might have gotten left in an unfinished state.

With the change of venue I have also decided to bite the bullet and dig into all the necessary but not nearly as fun and enjoyable business aspects of game development. So some of my time is and has been spent dealing with the drudgery of forming an LLC, tax IDs, bank accounts, and ledgers. Very unsexy but also very necessary. Ideally I would have done this months ago, back when development on Delvers Inc first started, but that isn't the fun and sexy parts of game development and I very much wanted to immerse myself in the fun and sexy parts.

Let me take a moment to thank you, dear reader, for keeping a watch out for Delvers Inc updates here and not thinking I had just given up and walked away as so many of these projects end up. Your continued interest in the game is what makes it all worthwhile at the end of the day and really motivates a person even when they are down.

When last we were working with Delvers, we were trying to bring some of the eye and ear candy to the game. We have done a fair bit of that, I've got a bit more I can do now and some ideas for the future. After I tidy things up and get back into a working state I want to get a multilevel dungeon working. This is not just multiple maps, but will also have to change some existing logic for moving around the game world and will require a checkpointing system to be developed. Right now, if you enter a dungeon you start at the very beginning of the level but with a multilevel dungeon I want you to have the option to jump back to a spot where you left off. So for example, if you were on level 3 of a 5 level dungeon and you had to go back to town, I want you to be able to start back on level 3 not all the way back on level 1 again.

Productivity experts will tell you that setting a deadline is key to getting things done, and honestly I don't disagree. However, I have resisted setting deadlines for Delvers because of the somewhat unique situation that I am in. Life has continually found ways to creep in and mess with development and there has been a whole lot of learning that has had to happen which always seems to take longer than you think it will. I have been an engineer for 30+ years and a game engineer for almost 20 at this point, yet still I am learning new things all the time. Not just about technical art, audio, or business aspects of game development but the engineering pieces as well. Just as an example, at some point I am going to need to integrate the various store fronts in with the game; Steam, Google Play, and Apple. This is something I haven't done before and so will be yet another learning process for me despite how long I have been doing this.

So I am still going to resist setting myself deadlines for now. When I get a comfortable view of the end game I will sit down and work out a proper timeline but for now, the only deadline I am setting is that I want major development done and a build ready "before the end of the year"... which is pretty vague but the most I am willing to lock myself in to right now.

That's all for now. We'll talk again soon! In the meantime, follow us on X or Facebook for updates or sign up for our newsletter so that you don't miss a post!

-Arakiel