Hi everyone and welcome back! In an effort to keep the blog updated regularly, I thought it was a good time to post something. Unfortunately this isn’t really a great update in general: various things have been happening and the last few weeks have been super slow for productivity.
What’s up?
Right now I’m just recovering from Covid. Our whole family got infected, but luckily symptoms weren’t that bad and we managed to get well in just a week. Getting Covid happened with unlucky timing though, because I’m currently looking for a rent. Our family situation is not exactly safe right now so I need to move, especially so I can work undisturbed on DTC. But problems never come alone and in fact finding a rent is taking quite long: it’s full of scam ads, ghost ads, and generally bad quality of apartments around. So, development is slowing to a crawl until I sort this out.
V-Speedway
Despite all this I still managed to get some work done. As you might have seen on Twitter or Discord, V-Speedway is finally out both on Pico and iQiyi, and looks like it’s really appreciated by the eastern players despite some leaderboard issues for China. I am testing a bunch of changes and I will probably push an update to all versions of V-Speedway sometime in the next weeks, mostly regarding leaderboards in China and global integration with Discord.
Oh, and let’s not forget: September is the anniversary of the V-Speedway project since the original inception, since the very first files were created on my pc. What an adventure!
Happy third birthday, you little amazing racing game!
Downtown Club
Nothing too fancy is happening on the DTC side of things instead. I’m continuing to work on the new Downtown environment and I think it’s coming up pretty good. If you recall from the previous blog post, I’m working with a whole new workflow for racetracks and I’m finally feeling confident enough with it, all the critical issues have been solved and it’s mostly a breeze to use right now. But well, that’s it for now about DTC, as I wrote above, development went very slow in the last weeks.
Wrapping up
I wish I had much more to write but that’s really it for now, hope you can understand! That generic 2022 release date is really looming upon me lately, but I’ve learned not to fear it, regardless if I manage to do it or not. My full commitment is to develop this game the way it deserves while also having a healthy life, without crunch and unreasonable deadlines. I left my job in search for a more sane development process and I want to commit to it (even if life is throwing some punches at me lately). Recently in the V-Speeday server this famous quote came up again:
“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
Shigeru Miyamoto
We can talk a lot about how this old quote might have lost meaning today, in an era were games are easily fixed, updated and growing over the years. Personally I think this quote still holds very true, with a different and deeper meaning than before. But this is a topic for another place and another time.
Danjel Ricci “SkyArcher”