LIFELIKE: Day 141

Hello all!

Daily goals have been helping me through the past two weeks, though appointments kept me from longer work sessions. Here’s what’s been happening:

• Leo’s birthday was this past Saturday! I released a short, silly video to celebrate. I have a lot of fun with live-action and have more plans in the future. 
• The soundtrack is moving. I have accounts set up on every platform it will be available through and am waiting on a few tracks before it can go up. Unless something goes wrong, expect it by the end of the month! 
• Various character sprites that I can’t share are finished. All idles are done and I’m working on diagonal motion right now.
• Debugging. Things are looking good, most changes are cosmetic or otherwise do not crash/interrupt gameplay. After running into a strange bug, I updated the framework for characters in the party to be more flexible across future episodes.

Before I get into my goals, I’m changing the devlog schedule to biweekly (every two weeks). Because I have obligations at school, I’m not able to get nearly as much work done as I could when I was free every day. I feel that logs will get tedious and eat more of my time when I have less to talk about. By pushing logs back, I’ll free up a bit of my Mondays for work, and notify you all a bit less frequently but with more substantial information. 

My goals for the next two weeks are:

• FINISH TESTING. I am going to devote all of my time to testing the combined game. Once I’m satisfied, it’ll go out to my playtesters. 
• I will move to artwork if I feel burnt out or need a rest, but my primary daily goals will be structured around playing through an episode, checking edge cases, and ensuring everything is where it needs to be. From the past few weeks of testing I can say that most everything is in its place, it’s a matter of making sure every detail is working as it should. LIFELIKE is a big world to check over. 
• Release the soundtrack! You’ll hear about this in an announcement! 
• Marketing! I need new players and fresh eyes on LIFELIKE! I’m working on strategies for both Twitter and Instagram to reach new players. This is somewhere where you can help me:
  • Word of mouth marketing helps me the most. By far. Please let your friends and followers know about LIFELIKE if you think they’d be interested! Someone mentioned LIFELIKE on Twitter this weekend and my page views jumped to about two times above average. If you’ve done this already, thank you! It means so much to me! 

I’ll see you in two weeks! If you would rather have weekly devlogs, or think another change would be better, please let me know in the comments. I use these logs to be transparent to my players about development. I want you to get the most out of them! 

Mantis