Introduction

Don't look at the calendar my last devlog was a month ago trust!! In all seriousness it's been a while. I won't get too into it but many life events have happened and development basically came to a halt. It's more than just that though... Let me trim the fat and just get into it

The Maze Editor

So... What have I learned?  If a development tool takes more time for you to develop than it actually saves... maybe don't create it! Yes, it's quite obvious, but in my defense I didn't actually know what to expect while getting into it, which is still totally on me! I've learned a valuable lesson: Don't get into something without researching how other people do it!

When I started work on the maze editor, I figured I'd give it a week or two of development time to see how it went. I'm not a professional game developer by any means, so I thought it would be a neat little learning experience, cute huh? Well, imagine my surprise when it seemed to be going well! Things were like, WORKING! The maze editor was coming along nicely, though I had to completely rethink it a few times, I found a direction that seemed to be clean enough for me to fully create, and then it happened... it got big. TOO big. It started to consume all of my development time, I barely put any work into the actual game!

I added selecting, copy/pasting, object placing, tile layers (but not in a good way, they were hard-coded and bad), and a bunch of miscellaneous crap. After a while, the maze editor's internal structure became too big for me to handle on my own, mainly because of the previously mentioned "not doing enough research" thing. It wasn't atrocious but the maze editor had so many features and so much code that I started to dread opening up the Klackaroo project. It killed my motivation for a while, I'd get anxious just thinking about working on the maze editor. I definitely bit off more than I could chew as someone of my skill level, let alone for such a small game. After all that, I pretty much abandoned the project in May.

Come July and I had a new project idea, I lost interest in Klackaroo.  That doesn't mean Klackaroo is dead though.

Klackaroo's Future

So Klackaroo isn't my main focus right now, but that doesn't mean an update isn't coming. I actually quite enjoyed play-testing Klackaroo (when I wasn't bashing my head against the wall anyway), I kinda miss it! So me and my team have come up with this:

Klackaroo post-jam, if/when we decide to make it, will be pretty small in scope. It will be less focused on story, though there will be one, and it'll be more gameplay focused. We're thinking that it'll be somewhere in the range of 5ish levels more or less. While some amount of support for custom levels isn't off the table, a full blown in-game level editor definitely is not happening, we just agreed that it wasn't worth the time.