Glancing at my last public journal, it feels like that was so far back it might as well be another world. I proceeded to tear into my work with a vengeance after that, and I was pretty proud of my progress when I posted another journal to my supporters. I’ve slowed down after that, but I’m still pretty happy with everything I’ve gotten done so far.

At this point, the majority of the Interp-Theory Mind is online. Characters in Project Wild One are starting to act in more interesting and reasoned ways, running purely and entirely off the ITM. There are still a lot of big gaps that need filling, but the Course system is online, I have new debug tools for reading deep into the system, and I’m gradually transitioning from building the system to tuning it. There’s still a lot to be done before it can ship, but at this point it’s more about picking what point is “Good Enough” for a release than having any function at all.

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It’s been a lot of ups and a lot of downs, but development on The Big One is moving steadily. I’m up to my elbows in Project Wild One, building out the Interp-Theory Mind to finally be a complete, handcrafted, end-to-end system for turning input into decisions in a logical and emotional way.

That’s the short version. I’m still working on it. I had a lot of problems early on, but it’s going pretty good right now. I can’t say I’m almost done or anything though, I’m still in the meat of it. Want the long version? Read on.

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Let’s talk about my large-scale plan for Project Wild One, and where we are in it now. I’ve had a lot of feedback during development either saying folks couldn’t understand where exactly I was going with the game’s design, or else making suggestions that are clearly based on a very different vision for this game from mine. This is fair, for two reasons.

The first is that I didn’t go into development of this game with a complete vision of what this game would actually be in the end. I’m still figuring out some of it now. The second reason is that, for all the work I’ve put in so far, the game still doesn’t actually have its most important element installed yet. There’s a lot going on with these two facts, so let’s dive in!

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v0.09 was supposed to be a light, quick update, but it turned into a bit of a beast when I really got into developing animations. So I felt like jumping straight into another long, slow update would be discouraging– for me, and for the players. So I put the question to my supporters. I offered a lot of ideas for smaller things I could work on, and asked if they wanted me to focus on one (or a few) of those instead for a little while, and ship a smaller update in between these big chonky ones. And the results came back pretty clearly in favor of taking a break to work on some small stuff!

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Since I started working on PWO, my mental list of things I’d like to add or change has only grown longer and longer with time– I always come up with ideas faster than I can implement them all properly, so there were tons of things I’d love to do with this time. But I know that, while in the long term the ITM system will make the game better for everyone, it doesn’t make for a very exciting or flashy update, and the game still doesn’t have a lot of appeal for new players as it stands. I wanted to find something that’s really going to draw in new players and raise the profile of the game, and when I was going down the list, I realized there was one thing that would do that better than anything else, and I’d just recently heard that it might be easier to do now than I’d ever thought it could be before.

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