Every once in a while I get a message or an email or a comment asking for updates on the game, and every time I tell people that I'll try to update the Steam page more often. That has gone terribly so far, but luckily, that's about the only thing that *has* gone terribly.
In short: development of the game over 2024 has been really solid, and I've been making progress faster than ever especially over the last six months or so. The game's in a good state and I can finally see the end of the line somewhere in the distance! (It's still going to take some time, just so you know)
So what's been happening over 2024?
Well, here's some of it:
- The second in-game day of the game is done, first of all, which already is almost four times the size of day one. There's a stupid amount of secret interactions, dialogues, and permutations and it's been a ton of work getting it all in and functional, but it's all there now.
- A bunch of QoL updates to base mechanics and UI (for example, Luck now plays a much greater role in every single dice roll you make) and I've spent some time updating the project to a newer version of Unity. That should mean that, in the future, the possibility of porting Clam2 to another platform might not be such a far-fetched prospect.
- Day three is coming along really nicely! In order to finish the game at some point I've been managing scope as much as I can, but I'm also very happy to say that there's a ton of missable and optional stuff along with secrets and secret interactions, which I've always felt is the lifeblood of any RPG.
- The amount of writing in the game has almost doubled since the start of 2024. It's way, way, too much.
- There's also a bunch of other little things and details I don't want to spoil just yet, but I might be posting more about it in the future (if I remember posting more devlogs, that is)
If you follow Clam2 on twitter (@clam_team) you might have seen some of these updates, as well as sneak peeks at new areas, characters, and mechanics. You'll also have noticed that I'm posting a lot less frequently on any social media! I'm personally taking a break and it's doing me a lot of good, which does affect news on Clam 2 as well unfortunately. To be frank, though, twitter has become just about unusable for me and I really don't intend on engaging with the hellsite any more than I absolutely have to. You can follow updates on bluesky as well, though, where I might be making updates a little more frequently.
Anyway - development on the game is going really well and if you're worried that it's stuck in development hell or just not coming out, fret not. It's coming out eventually, once it's done, and I promise you you will be playing it if you want to. No news is good news, essentially.
Have a great start of the year, everyone - stay safe out there.
//Martin/marafrass
P.S. I said I'd have a discord up and running at some point, and I still plan to - once I've got a clear idea of the final stretch of the game, I'll have enough bandwidth to start managing that too!
