My very first code commit for Startup Freak was 12th of January 2016. Four days short of a year have passed for a project that I first wanted to finish in 8 months. That was ambitious to be sure but I still have the end in sight. The journey so far has been both exciting and draining. As I have gotten older though, I have come to enjoy finishing things. Somehow the drag of working on the same bits of code day after day and just chipping away at a larger project strangely becomes its own reward.

Anyway enough sappy stuff. Holiday season has been quite busy with family commitments but here are a few updates:

UI Refresh

I have completed an overhaul pass of the UI and ended up sticking with a darker theme to complement the very colorful game graphics. I also added a number of icons on the buttons and tabs myself and I’m for the most part happy with those. Polishing is always possible but at this point given my aim to converge and finish the game, this will have to do. Here are a few screenshots:

Of course some of the art like the employee avatars are still placeholders as and I’ll be outsourcing those. Overall I’m quite happy with how this turned out!

Twitch

Streaming has been going well. It’s been a blast pulling out some hardware like my AT4040 microphone and Zoom H4n that had been collecting dust for a long time and putting them to good use. I have streamed and handful of times now and while the viewership is tiny, I have found that I’m actually more disciplined while streaming and productivity is good because I’m not inclined to have frequent breaks or do random browsing. I’m really not sure what the distraction would be like if and when there is a larger audience but I’ll take it as it comes. At this point I plan to twitch twice a week:

Tuesday 8:00pm Brisbane Time
Saturday 9:00am Brisbane Time

What’s Next

Last year I got the help Rob Hayes to create the art work for buildings and offices. I’m going to use those works to create the set of offices that you can rent in the game. The office capacities range from 3 to 20 (not sure any more than that would make sense) and while the tile-set is intentionally quite simplistic, I still hope to have a reasonable amount of variety in the looks of each. At this point I’m aiming for 5 or so offices, and once the game is a little more baked and play-tested, I’ll add another 4-5.