Blog: Entering Inn Need Wrap-Up

22 April, 2024
Tagged as: #game-dev, #inn-need, #away-in-the-woods

Studio Overdoing It (As Usual) is officially in the final stretch of Inn Need Build B development! I finished the most recent (and nearly final) list of Inn Need bug fixes and updates, and now all we've got left is for each dev to run through it one more time and find any final stragglers. All of our schedules are their own types of busy and not really lined up with each other, so I can't say what means for a Build B release date yet, but it's getting close. I'm so excited to be able to share the final version of this game! The original build was already really solid, and something we were all proud of, but I think we really rocked it with this final version.

Wrapping up Inn Need also officially means I can return to development on away in the woods. I really didn't mean to neglect its development for this long, but my schedule is about to slow down as I take two semesters off grad school, so I'm planning to settle into enough of a consistent rhythm to hopefully help make up for lost time. For starters, I'm re-writing all my to-do lists to help break it down. My current focus will be on writing. Here's an abbreviated version of that to-do list:

away in the woods has a far more branching (pun unintended) plot than I'm used to, so even though I have almost all the story beats laid out, I need to make sure they all fit together mechanically before I start trying to put them in the game. In seaglass, when I realized I needed another quest, it was really easy and straightforward to add it, since only a few of them were interconnected. In away in the woods, adding in another quest or event might have broader mechanical implications either for its position in the timeline or along an ending path, so I want to have everything planned as solidly as I can before diving in. This has the bonus benefit of giving me the chance to revisit and rewrite my initial plans from a couple years ago. I've learned a lot about writing since then and I'm hoping to make away in the woods a much stronger game for my time off from it!