What a wild, crazy ride these past few months have been.

If you’ve seen any of my devlogs, you’ll know that I’m always applying for government funding rounds whenever they open.

This particular one closes on the 27th of February, and amazingly … I’m way ahead of schedule. For every single funding round I’ve previously applied for, I’ve been bug fixing or putting the final touches on both the demo AND the documentation on the day of submission. Tomorrow (the 26th), all I have to do is re-read the documentation, make any edits necessary and submit.

Why is this demo, this whole funding round seeming more relaxed, easier and less stressful? Is it because I’ve done it before, is it because I’ve grown as a person. No, and no. The funding applications if anything are getting harder, with more requirements and more information needed for the application.

I think it boils down to the fact that I knew about this one well in advance, I planned my work accordingly and was able to focus on getting it done. Even on the days I wasn’t feeling the greatest, I got some work done. On the days I was really struggling mentally, I let myself take a break and knew that the next day (or if it was bad, after a few days) I’d get back to it and I’d be making progress.

The other important fact is that with Decaying Salvage, I’m having FUN. So much more fun that I did on We Are Not Alone (that game was a stress from day one, until a month after release) and I think this fun comes down to the major changes I’ve made during development.

While it originally started as a no combat, first person exploration game, I had this “what if …” pop into my head of changing the camera angles and making a type of game I LOVED growing up – fixed camera, third person horror.

This meant a lot of changes, not just to the camera. This meant I would have to dig further into animations (first person you can ignore a lot of character animations!), I’d have to dive into combat systems, health systems … but that’s what fired me up and has kept me going – the pursuit of more information, new techniques, and just new cool stuff in general. Decaying Salvage has (needing to be polished of course), more animations than the entirety of We Are Not Alone, is has combat, it has a health system (no more one shot deaths!) with invincibility frames, staggers … it’s honestly much more than I could have ever expected.

In terms of size of the demo, it’s hard to judge without all the external testers reporting back lengths, but when it comes to the amount of rooms you explore – it’s the size of the first act of We Are Not Alone … HUGE. It also has no loading screens after the initial scene load. I wrote some custom code that enables/disables areas depending where you are (which lead to a few headaches of variables not saving because the gameobject didn’t exist :P)

As I’m writing this, my brain is tired. You try staring at a budget spreadsheet and outcomes word document all day! This may be a rambling mess, I don’t know, I won’t re-read it. So just accept my thoughts as they fly from my fingertips, an inside look into my brain and how the many thoughts just kind of BLURP out onto the screen.

OH WAIT, I forgot to mention when the demo will be public. The estimate right now is the June Next Fest. Rather than doing what I did with We Are Not Alone (did you know it had 4 DEMOS?!) – I want to ensure this one is polished, and in a state representing exactly what you’ll get in the full game. There’s rumblings at the back of my head now saying there may be a very limited time demo on Steam prior to that … so keep an eye on (If you’ve Wishlisted on Steam, it’ll email you when it’s out)

With that, I’ll say thank you for reading, and please go Wishlist Decaying Salvage:

By the way, if you haven’t checked out my devlogs here is one to get you started! These will become more common in the following months. I love making them, it’s just the time to actually make is limited.