The Steam pages for NIGHTSWEEPER and bithunters have been approved, and I'm getting to work on the demos.
This new project development process is working well, but I'm realizing that innovation in game development is exceedingly difficult because there isn't any real way to experiment rapidly or take action intuitively. Each gameplay system, even with AI coding assistance (which is fast, but still not fast enough), must be comprehensively considered, coded, tested, tuned, and then combined with other systems. Even simple systems usually take several hours. It's making more sense why so many developers rely on derivative gameplay mechanics and content. Truly new material is very difficult to create. But I'm beginning to figure it out.
These projects are very different in terms of both visual content and gameplay systems, but my new MAZE framework is working very well for handling and reusing core systems. This vastly reduces the amount of time I spend fiddling with input, audio, profiling, builds, and other groundwork. The work is paying off, and once I finish these games, initializing future projects should, theoretically, be even faster.
Now I'm working on the demos. From what I can see, this is the most critical part of any game's development process. Once a demo is complete, content can be added to the existing product, but until that point, the game exists in a much more fluid state and can potentially become many things.
Developing a game on your own is an entirely separate beast from collaborative work. Without outside judgment or restrictions, the possibilities become endless, allowing me to reach for more unusual ideas, but wrangling the sheer amount of gameplay potential is proving extremely difficult. I've created a few techniques for handling this, and they are proving effective, but it took very long to figure each of them out and learn how to use them.
I intend to have at least one of these demos submitted for the next Steam Next Fest in October. We'll see how much I can get done.