PCG 2022 Shareholders Profits Report

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen of the board. Time is money so let's get started.

2022 has been a banner year for Potato Clock Games. The highly anticipated Version 0.3 of Black Road Sky has finally been released to an adoring public and downloads have soared into the double digits. Subscribers to the Potato Clock Games YouTube channel have increased by infinity percent from 0 to 3 thanks to the resounding success of an obnoxiously long series of drunken tutorial videos. We have prayed daily unto The Whiteboard, and lo it has been updated, may it show us The Path.

We stand poised for global market domination, laughing maniacally atop a mountain of skulls while red neon lightning cracks the night sky wide, revealing the incomprehensible fractal structure of reality folding in upon itself in an ever changing self referential loop beyond time, beyond space, beyond love.

Boys, we're gonna make a fortune.

Ship Redesign Progress

 

Well it's ... not ... nothing?

So 3d modeling is not my thing and this part of the process is kind of stressing me out. I'm trying to use that as motivation to muscle through so I can get back to having fun. We'll get there, but there's not a ton to report this month.

Still, I'm happy with the progress that I've made this year and I am back to working on Black Road Sky every day. I should have a lot of time to devote to development in the coming month. Stay tuned for the 2022 shareholder's report at the end December!

I checked things off, so that's progress, right?

Goals for BRS v0.4

In my original plan, v0.4 was going to be all about implementing ship systems. I'm pretty excited to get started on this, but it's going to have to wait until the next version. My goals for v0.3 were a bit overambitious, and I ended up cutting out enough to justify an additional version release just to make up the difference. The focus of v0.3 shifted at some point from prepping for ship systems to implementing some basic gameplay. I'm still happy with this decision, but it means that there's still more to do before I can move on.

The major thing that I decided to put off was the ship redesign. This didn't do anything to support the gameplay aspects that I was working on so when I realized that it was going to be more difficult than expected I just said "yeah fuck that". It is important, however, that I get the ship interior in order before moving on to systems, and the exterior is just fucking embarrassing. The big roadblock here is that I know fuck all about 3D modeling. I've done a few Blender tutorials, some of which make cameos in BRS (shout out to those sick coffee mugs in the city stations) but I have a lot of learning to do still. If I can get to the point where I'm spending 70% as much time making models that are only 70% as embarrassing, I'll consider that a reasonable success.

This will also be a good time to implement ship exterior customization. I want to make the ship designs modular so that players can really dial in the look of their ship. This will be totally optional and purely cosmetic, but I think it'll be fun and anything that makes the player feel more invested in their ship is a good thing. Customization options will be very limited to begin with, but I imagine a future where every province has its own color scheme and ship style, with certain parts only available at certain stations, so players who want to can put a good deal of effort into pimping their rides.

So ship redesign & customization will be the main goals of v0.4, but there's a bunch of other stuff that I'd like to include if I have time. This might be a good opportunity to redesign the planets & moons, maybe start dialing in a visual style for the game, you know, make it not look like complete shit, and I'd like to add at least a little bit of new gameplay on the off chance that some weirdo out there is just waiting for a good excuse to start a new game by the time I get through all this.

All that said, I really haven't done shit in the past month. I think I just needed a break after finally hitting the v0.3 milestone. Here's to next month?

NOICE

Black Road Sky Tutorial Series Complete

The tutorial series is finally complete, check it out here!

When I had the idea to, in lieu of an in-game tutorial, just record myself slamming some 40s while playing the game, I really didn't think that it would set me back by over a month, but here we are. I'm not mad about it, I had fun doing it and it was a nice inter-version development break.

Yr gonna be a star, kid.

With that out of the way, I can finally move on to the ship redesign that I've been wanting to tackle for well over a year now. I expect this to be a slow process since I know fuck all about 3D modeling, but I guess if I'm gonna make a video game then I've gotta figure it out eventually.

Eventually has arrived. Wish me luck.

Black Road Sky Tutorial Series Progress

The tutorial series is coming right along, and you can check it out here:

BRS v0.3 Tutorial Series Playlist on YouTube

As of this writing, the first 5 videos are up. The remaining 3 have been recorded and will be uploaded as I finish editing them. They're not great, because as it turns out, making videos is hard. But I've been having fun with it nonetheless so I don't regret the decision to go this route instead of implementing something in-game.

Your drunk uncle explains orbital mechanics.

I've also spent the last month reacquainting myself with the basics of blender. So once I finish these tutorials we'll be ready to get back to work on the game proper. It's been a nice break, working on Black Road Sky without doing any programming or even opening Unity, but the party's gotta end at some point. I mean, I guess it doesn't gotta but it's gonna. Soon. Until then.

Gearing Up For BRS v0.4 But Actually Brewing An Assload Of Ancient Fruit Wine

I've mostly spent the past couple of weeks playing Stardew Valley (again! It's so fucking good!) instead of working on Black Road Sky, letting myself take a little break after finally getting v0.3 out into the world. Apparently the game has been downloaded 3 whole times, which is 2 more than I'd expect considering that I haven't actually told anyone that it exists yet. I haven't told anyone about it because I haven't started on the tutorial series, in large part because making the trailer was more of a pain in the ass than expected and now I'm scared. But I'll get to it.

One thing that I have done is to finally migrate the project to the current version of Unity. When I started working on Black Road Sky back in the whimsical carefree days of 2018, the most current version was Unity 2017 and I haven't upgraded since, for fear that I would break everything if I tried. But since a major goal of v0.4 is to make the game look less like shit, I figured that the least I could do was give myself access to technology that's not half a decade old. It was sort of a fiddly process, but not nearly the nightmare that I thought it would be, and I've now got everything working & error free in a modern game engine, so that's cool.

The next month will be spent dialing in the ship design on paper and hopefully getting my ass in gear on making these tutorial videos. And playing Stardew Valley. Seriously. So. Fucking. Good.

Release Announcement: Black Road Sky (version 0.3)

Download Black Road Sky v0.3 here!

Not sure if you're ready to part with your hard earned zero dollars? Hype yourself off the fence with this release trailer!

There's no in-game tutorial, but the itch.io page includes a basic guide to getting started and I'm about to start working on a comprehensive video tutorial series. Stay tuned to the all new Potato Clock Games YouTube channel for updates.

BRS v0.3 Imminent Release & Tutorial Series Plans

Well, v0.3 is finally done, only two years late, and will be available to download by the end of the month. Still doing playtesting at the moment, for whatever it's worth. A one person testing team isn't nearly enough, especially when that one person already knows how to play the game. So I'm sure that plenty of bugs will sneak through, but I'm fine with that for now.

Moving the goalpost is the same thing as staying on track.

The bigger problem is that no one will know what the fuck to do or how to play this fairly complicated orbital mechanicsy game due to the complete lack of any sort of tutorial. Thing is, the game is in such an early state and there are so many big changes coming that it feels foolish to spend a bunch of time on an in-game tutorial system that I'll just have to redo any time I release a new update. So instead I've decided to create a video tutorial series where I'll basically just play the game and explain how to do shit. I have a feeling that shooting and editing videos will actually end up being even more time consuming than creating a new in-game tutorial with every version release, but fuck it, I'm doing it anyway. I think it'll be a fun break from actually working on the game before I dive back in for the next version.

Anywho, I have no idea how long it's going to take me to put the tutorial series together so I'm going to go ahead and release v0.3 in order to meet my arbitrary July release target that no one knows about and then release tutorial videos as I create them. Stay tuned!

Finish Line on the Horizon: BRS v0.3 Release Prep

 

I'm back in the flow and working steadily to knock off the dozens of remaining items on the release prep to-do list. In addition to a final round of bug squashing and play testing, I've added a handful of gameplay features that I felt were worth taking the time to implement.

Added NavBall Functionality

The player can now manually rotate the navball into any orientation, then easily reset it to its home position. This is a feature that is not needed very often, but it's super useful in certain circumstances, particularly in making correction burns on interplanetary transfers. I have some other Big Ideas for easing the pain of interplanetary travel, which is still at least as tedious as it is engaging, but this was one easy-to-implement feature toward that goal.

Ship Ownership

You now begin the game without a ship, and kick things off by buying one and taking on the debt which is the backbone of Black Road Sky's engaging storyline of paying off debt. I thought about starting the game, just for now, with a little block of text like "You just a bought a ship, you're in debt, have fun", but I think that letting the player spend the money might give them a more meaningful connection to the ship. Probably overthinking it. But also, it's just a hilariously boring way to start a video game. How you gonna start your space game, an engaging cinematic cutscene of flashy lasers cutting down alien spaceships? Nope, let's make everyone apply for a loan via a cumbersome text-based banking terminal.

Cumbersome text-based banking terminal. Admit it, you're hooked!

These kinds of features typically only take a few hours to implement, but considering that I only have an hour or two each day to work on the game, I'm trying to be very careful about what I'm choosing to invest time in. To this end, I've also decided to push a bunch of less critical things up to be dealt with in a future update, such as refining the keybinding system and diving down an optimization rabbithole. The game works great with keyboard & mouse and it runs fine on my mediocre 5 year old PC, so I'll save those tasks for later.

Bigger picture, I'm still in a sloggy part of development, but it feels better now that I can see a finish line. Still gunning for a release sometime in July!

April 2022 Lack of Progress Report

Progress hasn't quite ground to a halt, but it's been particularly slow this past month. I mean, slower than making a game one hour at a time in the morning before going to work usually is. This is largely due to Wobbledogs, partly due to the two new beehives that I now find in my charge and, not insignificantly, also the result of a generally waning enthusiasm for working on Black Road Sky. This is normal and, I think, expected; my energy for the project ebbs and flows, and if I try to muscle through and ignore the ebbs then I'll just end up getting burned out on it. So I respect the ebb. This particular ebb coincides with the discovery of a pretty major bug in the base orbital mechanics simulation, which is especially disheartening. I've just about got it fixed, but getting it almost fixed required a frustrating 2 week detour and I'm still not sure if everything is quite working properly. Space is hard, I guess.

That said, I'm still shooting for a July release, 2 weird years later than my original plan for a July release, but a July release nonetheless. Unless, of course, I get distracted or things take longer than expected, but what are the chances, amirite?

BRS v1.0 Cockpit Mockup

Well, time to start implementing the genetic simulation for crossbreeding ships in Black Road Sky. Back to work!

The Return of the WUMPUS BASTARDS Leaderboard!

Play WUMPUS BASTARDS here!

I've never been able to convince anyone else that this is a good game, but I genuinely love it.

The high score table has been broken for years because the database was stored on a university server which I eventually lost access to after graduation. By that time I had completely forgotten how PHP and SQL and all that worked, so I kept putting it off, but it only took like an hour to fix once I finally sat down to figure it out.

The old leaderboard is lost to time, so there's plenty of room to make your mark. If you're into logic puzzles, long winded game manuals, and drawing crazy maps then this is your game. See you in the putrid caverns of the Wumpus abomination, wretched hunter!

Post-v0.3 Plans for Black Road Sky

A couple of months ago I outlined the possible paths I saw in moving forward with Black Road Sky: give up, start over, or just keep going. I have chosen a path.

I'm actually having fun again, so giving up has lost its appeal. And now that I've reacquainted myself with the code base, which was more of a trial than it seems like it should have been, starting over feels unnecessary. SO ONWARD WE GO! I have reduced the scope of the game somewhat, but I've never said much about what the full scope was going to be, so who will ever know the difference? No one, but I'm gonna tell you about it anyway.

I've pared all of the ship systems down and even eliminated a few. This will help give me a chance of finishing the game in my lifetime, and now that I've made that decision I think I was probably over complicating the systems stuff anyway. I'm getting rid of a planned Tank Management System which was going to handle pressurizing & depressurizing consumable tanks as well as routing them to the appropriate systems. The system also involved a complicated network of valves for refueling, purging lines, and so on. All of that stuff is just going to happen automatically now. I've also decided to completely hand wave away the Life Support System, which was going to handle cabin pressure & temperature and would have had its own tank of life support gasses. And nearly every remaining system has been simplified to some degree, most notably the electrical & communications systems. Don't worry, the cockpit will still be an overwhelming mess of buttons and meters, but I'm trying to make sure that every button and every readout is really significant in terms of gameplay. I'm also shelving some non-trucking and endgame ideas, but those are things that I could add back in someday if it seems like the game needs it.

It's looking like another 2 months before v0.3 is ready, so that probably means like 4 months, but work is progressing steadily. If I can get it done by July, it'll only be 2 years later than my initial goal. Pretty good.

BRS - Pandemic Flashback #5: Gameplay Part Two

The last thing that I did before setting Black Road Sky aside for way too long was to finally implement some actual space trucking gameplay. But before I started on that, I decided that now was the time to completely redesign the ship's interior and exterior. That turned out to be a dumb idea, and I spent a lot of time not getting very far before eventually giving up, but here are some screenshots anyway. None of this will actually be implemented in the playable build of v0.3, but it gives some idea of where things are headed.

Starting on the cockpit redesign.

 

Detail of main control panel.

 

Figuring out the engine room.

 

The ship design is 100% placeholder, so yeah, a redesign needs to happen at some point. But I was really just replacing the placeholders with more elaborate placeholders and was spending way too much time on it with very little to show. I finally realized that it was completely unnecessary for the release of v0.3, so I abandoned the idea and got to work on gameplay stuff instead.

This gameplay stuff is also mostly placeholder, but at least there's something to do now in the game. The previously inactive terminals found in space stations are now functional (with the exception of the 'Body Shop' terminal found on city stations).

The bank terminal is used for taking out loans and will have additional functions added later. The first thing you'll need to do in the game is buy a ship, which will require that you take out a loan, and the only real objective of the game (for now, at least) will be to get out of debt by completing trucking contracts and eventually paying off your loan. You don't get to be a successful spacefaring civilization without a healthy dose of fiscal responsibility.

The contracts terminal offers up these trucking jobs. You can only take one at a time. Eventually, the plan is that you'll need to actually tow shipping containers much like real life semi trucks, but for now the cargo is just magically loaded into some mysterious cargo hold on your ship. The contracts are randomly generated and wildly unbalanced, but the core system works and finally provides some real motivation for flying from point A to point B.

Finally, the garage terminal provides refueling and repair services for your ship. I'm not sure if repairs will make it into v0.3, but I have refueling working.

That's all the makings of a GAMEPLAY LOOP, BABY! Cool. However, at this point I was forced to confront all of the bugs and loose ends that stood between me and a version release, and it was fucking overwhelming so I just gave up for a while.

Anyway, I'm back in a groove now and things are actually going pretty smoothly. Gonna take longer than the "month or two" that I estimated last month, but things are looking good. Bugs are being fixed, loose ends are being tied, and I'm confident that BRS v0.3 will be the breakout hit of Spring 2022. Maybe Summer 2022. Probably 2022.

BRS Version 0.3 Progress and Existential Dread

 I finally got back to work in earnest on Black Road Sky. It sucks.

The code base has been a nightmare to get reacquainted with, even after just a few months away. But I've been forcing myself to work on it for a couple of hours each day and I'm making progress. Some major bugs have been squashed, and I'm confident that I can get the game back into a stable state. Might take a month or two. I don't know what the future holds for Black Road Sky, but I feel pretty committed to getting v0.3 off the ground, at least.

Then what? I'm not committing to anything here, but these are the options currently floating around my head:

1. Fuck it. Give up. I don't think there's any way this game will end up meeting my expectations for it, but who cares, I'll end up with a cool tech demo and maybe I can move on with my life and make a different game that doesn't require a mastery of math that I barely understand.

2. Fuck it. Start over. I've been trying to make this game for like 10 years now, and I've started over 4 or 5 times, and maybe I'll just do that again. This is actually pretty appealing. I've already figured out a lot of the architecture and math and stuff, so I know that I could build a stronger code base if I started over.

3. Fuck it. Just keep going. Keep building on this monster until we have something resembling our vision. Maybe reduce the scope. Make like $150 on Steam. Get it right in Black Road Sky 2.

Maybe there are other options, but I can't see them right now. I'm not really leaning toward or away from any of the above 3 options. I suspect that I'll have some clarity in a month or two after I get v0.3 ready to ship.

DON'T WORRY, Pandemic Flashback The Last is coming up next. Cool yr jets.

Well, shit. Again.

 

BRS v0.3 COMING ... 6 months ago ... ? Aw fuck.