It took a few more days than I expected, but at last, on April 16, 2022, I have released the Ditty of Carmeana and can throw off the shackles of guilt forever.
It’s about two weeks later than I originally promised, but honestly I’d have to say the wait is worth it. The hold-up was voiceover: I had got started way late, had pretty lofty aims (we recorded about an hour’s worth of dialogue), and it just turned out to be too much to get done before April 1.
I took advantage of the wait to add a few bonus features that I wanted but didn’t consider a priority.
- I added a certain way to create items that was only a minor side thing. I don’t know how much it helps but it adds a little dimension.
- Added a new app to Tabitha’s touchscreen that is an advanced version of an app that appeared in the Demo. I really, really wanted to do that app, it was one of the first ideas I had after deciding to create the full* game, but it was also so frivilous, and not exactly a simple to program. But I had time to get it in with the V/O delays.
- An obscure item that lets you easily get what’s otherwise a really hard achievement. It’s more of a meta item, as there’s no information about this item at all in the game.
- Some changes so that the game acted reasonably when you open Steam Overlay. (Especially, I made it reliably not hide the mouse pointer, which it would do sporadically.)
- Gamepad support. Yep you can play The Ditty of Carmeana with a gamepad. Even though I had gamepad ni the demo, and prefer gamepad to keyboard/mouse for this kind of game (third person action/adventure) I didn’t consider it a primary goal, as most PC users don’t bother. But with the extra time I got it back the game in and working. (If I’m being honest, Steam Deck is a big factor as well.) It’s called “Partial Gamepad Support” in Steam because there are a couple odd places where you have to type something in (and I did not want to add a popup keyboard), but for the most part, gamepad support is full and you can play it entirely with gamepad.
- Linux support. (Steam Deck was a factor there, too.) Distributing Linux games is a big time headache because of the brain-dead way Unix-like systems manage shared libraries. I didn’t really have a chance to test it on other Linuxes, and it’ll probably crash on any system that’s not a recent Debian/Ubuntu release, but it is in there.
- Fixed at least one thing that would have crashed the game that I probably wouldn’t have noticed, as well as a whole bunch of less serious issues.
Apart from fixing the crash, none of these are really super important from a big picture perspective, compared to things like making sure the game is robust, has a clean not-annoying interface, and runs smoothly in Windows. But they were things I wanted personally, andI feel they added to it.
So, in spite of the delay I think it was ultimately worth it.
Anyway, the game is finally released, so go buy it.
