The Official "Where is Val's Venture/TideWalkers update, it's 2023 already" Blog Post
 June 18th 2023

Alright ahem So, we're about halfway into 2023 and there's been more or less complete radio silence on the actual state of these so called video games that "Team" Coral (still just me, Andrew) is working on. What gives?

Well my friends, I am going to tell you that there IS progress! but the progress isn't exactly in the area you would expect for an indie game. Basically, between 2018 and the video I posted back in January 2021 a lot, if not most of the game development was as you'd expect. The programming of the engine, the creation of game mechanics, some enemies/environments, learning how to animate and draw properly (still bad lol) ect. But as I was starting to fill in the blanks, such as story, game loop, ect; I then realised I was missing some very crutial parts to actually making the game. I was missing a story, I was missing a lot of experience in game development (and just games in general for that matter) so I started to work on learning how to write stories, and I started to begin working on learning how to make a good fun and exciting game. I had, up to that point spent over 3 years on getting this far, and I wanted to make sure I was doing it right (sunk cost fallacy much?). I knew that trying to just "wing it" wasn't a great idea, and I should have my work more grounded on principles. I then, in 2021 up until 2023, started to spend time watching movies, reading books, and filling my brain with masterclass works. (I also had to take a full year off in 2022 to take care of some personal matters, but regardless). During this time, I started to really understand what I wanted as a creator; what I valued, what my personal tastes were, how I planned to execute on those tastes, ect and how to meld the idea of story into my game.

We now come into 2023, and this year, I've been working on making my wiki (private) for the games. I ended up writing so much lore between 2018 and now, that I've had to compile it from large text files, into an actual database. No it's not something I can share (maybe after some games come out I would be willing??) but it's certianly serving it's purpose, and was worth the hassle of learning how to set up apache and a local server to host it. I've been literally filling in the database with most of my game dev time. Yes there is literally that much I've written, I've learned that I really like writing lore over the years. (I promise there will be no info dump in any of the games).

There's also the forum that I spent time making happen. It took some 20 hours to setup, debug, and stylize, so that's some amount of hours out of this year as well (read next blog post below for more info on that).

So, now that I've gone a whole two paragraphs explaing the timeline, and what's happened. I hope that has explained at least in part why it's taken so long to get this far (On top of my daytime job of running a local business construction company). As for an actual date on when there will be Val's Venture/TideWalkers. I'm not going to sugar coat the actual responce. But I will not be surprised one bit if it's more than a decade out. I have so so much ahead. The actual content in the game(s) is incredibly sparse right now (it's not terribly uncommon for some games, Super mario 64 spend 80% of the development time working on just the physics for mario). Also the long development cycle isn't too uncommon for hobbyists; Owl boy, Iconoclasts, Sonic Robo Blast 2, and Dwarf fortress are all games that have hit double digits for development time, so I wouldn't be the first for sure. I am quite literally still in pre-development, and I'm at the point to where I'm at the end of pre-development. I could take my game pitch I have, and send it to a studio to make. (I want to make clear I will not be doing that, I'm just stating where the progress point it.)

As for the questions I've gotten about "Why two games at once?" Well, I'm actually not working on two games at once. I started TideWalkers, but very early on, I realised that both the engine, back in 2021, and my lack of experience in game development made me not ready to make a full on metroidvania. I wanted to do something that was more simple, a 2D action, style combat game. Something that's still difficult, but something that's a bit easier, and I could go through the growing pains of the engine along with it, and it allowed me to write space lore along the way :). So to answer, Val's Venture will be releasing first.

I wish I could give a more concrete timeline, but games take time; I plan on keeping my job, and continuing my persuit of being a married christian man one day. All of this takes time, and I can't just stop my real life to make mermaid go burrr da ocean. I will say, however, that if things take more than two decades I will be greatly surprised.

That's all for now, thanks for coming to my TED talk, see you on the forums, or in the next blogpost, or video, and God bless.