As always, rules for this thread:
-DO NOT post suggestions.
-DO NOT critique unreleased features. Wait until you've had a chance to try them before passing judgement.
With that out of the way, let's open with an in-game screenshot:
Spoiler
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Why am I posting a picture of a chicken (besides loving him)? Well, it's because I feel BTW has reached a critical turning point in its development. I'm currently holed up in a little cave with myself and that chicken as the last survivors of the gradual apocalypse that has occurred around my spawn point, waiting out the night to try and get him back to my base, with spiders hissing outside and wolves howling in the distance. I am genuinely nervous about trying to get him home safe in the morning as my food supplies are running low, and he's one of my last hopes for long-term survival in this region.
You see, I've been putting off starting my new world for awhile now. I've started many temporary ones to playtest the early game, but there was always a major change on the horizon that made me hesitant to start *the* world that would become my new primary.
That changed a few days ago. I finally felt that BTW had reached the point where I could start a new world and stick with it. Ever since, I've been playing the shit out of the mod, and loving every minute of it. I've made a few tweaks to the code here and there to get the gameplay experience right where I want it, and still have a couple of lingering items I want to take care of before next release, but oddly, I've begun to cross off more items from my todo list as unnecessary than adding to it. More and more, it's beginning to feel like the additional plans I had in the works just aren't needed anymore, and that the game is standing on its own merits. It's just plain fun as is.
Some specific observations that I've made over my few days of play-testing here (keep in mind that I am playing a slightly different version from what you are, that's also slightly more challenging):
-The thrill of finally reaching diamonds is fucking awesome. In fact, the whole bottom layer of strata portion of the tech progression where you're hunting in caves that you can't effectively modify is the shiznit. There's a real sense of claustrophobia that occurs, and you actually wind up having to *think* while trying to do things like navigate lava pools and worm your way through caves to get from one to the other. I was shooting for precisely that, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how well it works out in practice. There's a real building sense of dread as you work your way downwards.
-My own mod is killing me. I probably died 5+ times over the past few days, which is totally unheard of for me. I usually go weeks in game without dying, and when it did happen, it was usually just a stupid mistake like momentarily letting go of shift while navigating a dirt scaffold or something. Each time I've died over the past few days on the other hand, it was always because I felt like I fucked up as a player, it was my own damn fault, and I learned something from it. I'm extremely happy with that.
-The overall sense of desperation is just about where I want it. There's a sense of being stranded in an alien world and really having to fight for your own survival. What I find really neat about that, is it is *not* realistic, but the emotions involved feel about right. Again, very happy about that.
-I *really* want to play BTW right now. I've got a stack of games on Steam that are either going unplayed, or which I'm rapidly getting bored of in favor of playing BTW. This is rather unheard of for me. Over the course of my career, generally after a year or two of working on a project, I was so sick of it that I never wanted to play it again. Not so here, and that's a definite first for me.
Anyways, this is a big moment for me overall. It's beginning to feel like BTW can stand on its own two feet as a game, and if my crossing stuff off of my checklist as unnecessary is any indication, it feels like I can now begin the process of pushing it out of the nest and letting go to move on to bigger and better things.
Overall, I think I'm really happy I took the extra few months to finalize BTW like this, and finally decided to tackle the overall "game" rather than restrict myself to the mod specific functionality like I was doing in the past. I've admittedly been beating myself up a lot over not having started up RTH by now, but I've mentioned before that BTW is probably the thing I am most proud of creating over the course of my life, and I think that's doubly true right now. I am beginning to believe more and more that it was time well spent.
My apologies for all the tooting of my own horn in this dev diary. It's really coming from a place of genuine satisfaction over what I've done here rather than a desire to self-promote. I'm just a very happy camper right now :)
<dances>
