This week was a lot of reorganizing and adjusting, along with finally wrapping up this game I've been working on for a little over a year. Going forward I intend to focus on smaller, higher quality games with shorter development times.
As my first released 3D game, and with a ton of content, Sidereal was originally meant to be primarily a learning experience, and it fulfilled that purpose pretty well.
After cutting a ton of potential content, Sidereal is completed and will be released on Steam for free once it is approved, which should be next week.
It's a walking-simulator exploration sandbox with a bunch of narrative ideas and environmental elements. I'm not even sure how long it would take to beat, but there is an ending.
The game has a lot of unique assets, including hundreds of unique item images and models, some of which I decided to use AI to speed up development time. Like I said last week, even if it saves time, using AI really sucks the fun and interest of whatever it is you're making.
Any interesting stuff still has to be done by hand, so in the future using it to fill small gaps and quick optimizations will be helpful, but pretty much anything contributing value or interest to the game I still have to make myself.
Learned a lot making this game, can't wait to apply everything I've learned for tighter, more interesting stories in the future.
But some things I envisioned a long time ago came together pretty well, and I hope people find them interesting.
That's the main project for this week, took up almost all my time. Completing and finalizing a game like this takes more than most people think. Lots more to come, though.