Hi everyone, a bit late to the party, but then I decided to write my dev log here.

I launched the first demo version of my game some times ago, I saw some downloads, and I'm glad, but I don't see many interactions, I really would like to have feedbacks from other users when possible.

The game it's still under development, I'm about to post a major update, but I'm facing a dx11 crash all of a sudden, dx12 isn't affected, so I'm trying to understand what's gone wrong and how to fix it.

So, about the game.

If you still haven't tried, you're a cat firefighter in a fantasy world, but instead of fire trucks and hose you're using magic.

I built a fairly simple propagating fire system, and at the moment you can start an emergency from the board near your house, in the future I want to make them start randomly or at a set time, or probably I'll keep the trigger thing and fake it, so you're responding instead of triggering it.

The idea came out after playing another fire fighting game, and being a bit disappointed by the lack of fire and such.

Don't know why, but ff games have such a charm, and there are so little good ones around.

Anyway, at first I wanted to make a realistic game, and so I immediately started to work on the fire system obviously, if I couldn't build a believable one I wouldn't continue the development.

A first iteration turns out pretty good, and then I started to work on the interaction and extinguish mechanic.

But the best part had to come, modelling and my worst enemy, rigging and animation.

I simply hate rigging, but I had to since I wanted to use an original character.

I made some sketches and used a bunch of character creators online to have an outline of the protagonist look, then I made several different models until I got the one in the demo, and for being a first time I'm pretty proud of myself (self pat on the shoulders).

The biggest part was laid down, but then I had a work to build, and started the endless search for environment packs that fits the idea I had in my head.

Luckily I had a couple of free assets in the library that I could modify, and you can still see in the modular buildings, with a pack of free textures from an abandoned project that was released online for free (I'll never thank you enough for those 25Games).

Everything right, right? Nope.

I realized the hard way that all the best assets won't help when you're pretty much starting from scratch learning on the go the engine, I had moment of pure joy when things took shapes on the screen and moment of pure rage when things broke all of a sudden by himself.

As a solo dev with a job I can't work on the game continuously, plus I have to take breaks from time to time or else I'll over burn, before setting the demo posted here I had a couple of months break doing anything else, mostly playing games, to cleans my mind and regather ideas. I was somehow stuck and a bit unmotivated, frustration can be a real pain in these cases.

So pro-tip, when things aren't going as expected, do something else and come back later, most of the time it works!

About the future? The game it's still goin' and I already said I have a major update cooking, but I'll leave the details in the next post when I've figured out what's gone wrong.

I hate Unreal in those moments, but I can't see myself using anything else, and I already tried, but I found it more "friendly" despite not being that friendly at all at times.

Hope you're all good and hope to see you on the next post!