A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.

Life Stuff

Time is going really quickly and I don’t know why but its a little scary considering, yet why does it feel so long when I’m at work?

I was off for 2 weeks during this month but it went really quickly and I didn’t actually do much, I just enjoyed the time off mostly. I beat Fire Emblem 2 more times (completing all 4 routes, now on my 5th playthrough, send help), completed the Spyro trilogy (damn those skill points!) and beat Links Awakening.

Sadly I’m back at work now and doing extra work to help pay for some of my wife’s visa fees so I expect to be busy in the coming months but we will try to complete the thing 2 v2.6 update this year. It’s what comes after that which scares me, I’m not too sure what I want to do and I don’t have a budget to start anything big so I’m still thinking about it.

The Thing 2 RPG (v2.6 Update)

By some miracle I did work on the game a bit this month, I’ve been moving things around in game, making slight tweaks here and there, mostly visual stuff. As I have extra time while waiting for Arteaga I’ve started going through the game modes and correcting spelling mistakes/grammar and changing dialogue up to be better. Prequel Mode is the only game mode where I used scripts and thus the writing, grammar and spelling is fairly accurate. All the other modes were done ‘on the fly’ so a lot of it is really choppy. There is a lot of text in game though but I’ve got it down to just Story and Original Mode left to check now.

I still need to playtest Story mode but I haven’t had time. I need to do 2 runs of it (one on hard, one on normal) and complete various sub-missions to find a nice balance for difficulty vs frustration. It can just take a while to do, I find it’s about a 15 to 20 hour run (which is better than most Triple A games these days).

Arteaga has been hard at work this month despite working at his job a lot. He’s completed the level select images, lots of environmental pieces (there are new outpost objects, the oil outpost has been reworked and we are also working on the crash-site to make it a lot better looking and true to the film) and he completed new original/story mode intro photos for me to use.

He still has some extra work left to do, making some new objects such as the UFO crater (we are also changing the tents and other misc stuff) and we are going to change one of the ending scenes. Alongside this he has also been providing some new music tracks for the game which are very reminiscent of the film score.

While my expected release dates are always famously wrong, I do anticipate we will finish the work this year. It’d be nice to open 2020 with something fresh and new as I’ve been with The Thing 2 for like 7/8 years at this point.

Did you know I made the first Thing RPG back in 2010 with a total development time of 8 weeks? I’ve worked on other odd projects and made a bunch of demos for stuff I never finished over the years but never really gone through with releasing any of it. I have ideas for games it’s just seeing them through that is the challenge.

The Public release of the game is still delayed until further notice but a private test build of the game is available for members of my discord server, if you are interested in helping with this you can join my discord server (here) for more information.

Thing Team: Richard2410, Arteaga

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That’s about all I have to say for now. I hope that I can fill these blog posts with enough decent information each month to keep them readable. Thanks for reading this and playing my game(s) over the years :)

-Richard