Hatchetflair 2024 Year in Review

Hello! Starting today, Hatchetflair will have a “year in review” posted on the last day of each year which discusses things like the game's development progress, future plans and community happenings.

Regarding the game’s development within the last year, title menus stuff was finished up to the state that it is now, the current 3D scene + related of the game was created and implemented (notably I created and implemented animated models for the first time,) various scripting was done, and the first public version of the game was released (also giving the game an anniversary date of October 5th.) 

I’ve also made lots of progress on the ideas/concepts front of the game, particularly with document writing. I spent likely over a hundred hours working on (chemistry) element ideas for the game, and I'm super happy with them now! Documenting around sapient species ideas (and very recently also biomes ideas) is also substantially progressing.

As for unfinished things, unused in the project is unfinished code from my third major attempt at marching rhombic dodecahedron ("rhombdo") terrain. (Although not nearly guaranteed, I’m still substantially interested in trying that, the math and code has just been very difficult to figure out.) Secondly, I have yet to finish the testing player model that I mentioned working on earlier. I was trying to make it very accurate to the human form (so as to have visible effort/quality put into it,) but I now recognize that I should instead probably make a fairly simple/easy model for functional reason and put my time and effort in as polish later (especially after I know what I'm doing more artstyle-wise)

The biggest hindrances to Hatchetflair's development this year have been my struggle with executive dysfunction (unmedicated ADHD,) and since march of this year, a (probably tendonitis?) bowling-related injury to both of my wrists/arms/hands (mainly with my right/dominant hand.) (I hope to be able to go to a doctor/walk-in for it soon.) I’ve been barely able to use my computer for the majority of this year because of it, as doing things like typing on a keyboard or using my mouse make my wrists sore/hurt very quickly.

Currently, there are 7 people on the development team (myself as the game's designer and lead developer, Fox as development support and secondary/assistant developer, Steve as a secondary/assistant developer, and 8.0.0 (aka Redstone,) Blitceed, Octo and JJ (who joined this year!) as testers.) The testers haven't actually had much of anything to test yet (oops,) but I appreciate their support. There are also 2 other people in the development discord server as observers/spectators/guests. There are currently 8 people in the community discord server (6 of which are on the dev team,) with 1 posted piece of fanart (drawn by JJ.)

Next in the game's development, I want to draw lots of concept art and further refine and solidify my ideas for the game (especially terrain appearance and functionality, species designs, gameplay,) and then begin more serious work on developing said terrain and gameplay.