2025-02-13
It's been a long time since I posted any updates on Bizio development, and I'm excited to say the project continues! Here's what I want to cover in this post:
I left Bizio in a relatively good state; my previous "Let's Play" post summarized where things were as far as gameplay pretty well. There were a few major objectives coming up, most notably art and simulation visualization. I knew this would be a hurdle since this is a solo project and I'm not an artist, so I took a break that ultimately turned into a long development pause. This version of Bizio was "always online" because the server was what saved progress and processed turns. At this point, I had a cheap Azure server hosting the development server, so the game was technically playable and distributable. Account signup worked and content delivery seemed fine. So overall the game was in a good state technically. The other major thing that needed to be addressed was playability and balance. All of the skills and projects and AI were nonsensical because I had only been playtesting a handful of turns at a time.
Life happens! Since this extended break started, I've had two wonderful kids, changed jobs, and COVID-19 caused the whole world to pause. All things considered though, two major factors were limiting me technically from being motivated to finish the project:
I know the lack of art shouldn't have stopped me, but it often does with my side projects. That's why I often consider my side projects as little tinkerings rather than big projects that I expect to complete. Bizio is the most mature side project I've ever worked on, and the lofty technical implementation wouldn't be complete without also having a complex art component to it. The way I wanted to dynamically create and represent different people and their interactions in the simulation meant a lot of art assets needed to be created. And while I could get along for a while with developer art, I knew I wouldn't be satisfied.
The always online aspect originated for two reasons: I wanted to build my own client-server app from the ground up to learn the complexities involved first hand, and I wanted to eventually support multiplayer. I got what I wanted with respect to learning: Bizio helped me learn so much about authorization, authentication, and API design. But I never landed anything with regards to multiplayer; I oftened deferred any such implementation to "the future" because I needed to get something working first. In honesty, this is probably the result of being too lofty with my original goals and realizing too late that this was a huge task to undertake myself.
Well I created a new empty project and decided to simplify the architecture first. Not all is lost: I was able to port and patch about 90% of what I had previously done into a standalone desktop app with no server-side dependencies. That means right now we've got almost everything from the previous video working locally in a self-contained app. There's also a been a large reduction in complexity and volume of code thanks to these changes, and also some UI bug fixes for "free" thanks to the nature of processing the turns locally. Now the priorities are as follows:
Parity is the most straightforward aspect here: it's just a matter of finishing the port. Playtesting has been prioritized because the fun of this game doesn't depend on the visuals (to me at this moment) and I can concurrently discuss art while balancing the numbers. The hope is that this comes together in such a way that #this year# we may have a playable, distributable, and visually compelling alpha for Bizio!
I'll try to post more often about the game and development ideas in general, but for now: WE'RE BACK IN BUSINESS!