A Turret's Life is a first person arcade shooter/tower defence game for PC and VR where you are the tower defending an area against the endless onslaught of attacking robots and crafting overpowered dream guns that can be traded as crypto-backed items.

Updates

Software Issues: The game engine has been running smoothly again so far. I ultimately ended up re-creating the entire project from scratch and importing the source code back in. It was a bit of a pain but no problems yet... (knock on hard wood)

Optimization: I implemented an object pooling system and have converted all item spawning to use it now.

Life Balance: Most of the dev blogs so far have been more focused towards the technical aspects of the game's development, but this week I will talk a bit about my personal struggle during the project.

Progress

Life Balance

So far, the hardest part of this entire project has been energy and time management. There have certainly been and will continue to be many technical challenges, but those can always be solved with energy and time. But the real question is: how does one get energy and time? This last week I was bogged down with other life events and stressors that I did not get to spend as much time on the project as I would have liked (which of course stresses me out me, causing me to lose more time... haha what a wonderful feedback loop).

I have really been struggling with balancing my life between this project and everything else, especially my full time job. On good days with my job I can come straight home and start work on A Turret's Life – but on bad days I get home and it's a struggle to muster the energy not to fall asleep.

It is also a really tough challenge just to balance social life. The weekends are the one time I have a large block of time to really work on the project, but it's also the time when I have to catch up on house chores and social commitments. I am not really good at saying NO to people yet, and end up wasting much time with them that I'd rather spend making the game. I personally wouldn't mind just being a hermit and staying locked up in my room programming away on the game until it's out and in your hands :).

It is my hope to get to a point where I can have some income from the project to work full time on it, without the other distractions and stressors. I am eventually planning on having a pre-sale, but that won't be for a while yet, so if you guys have ideas for other income sources in the meantime please let me know. I have considered patreon, but I am not quite sure what benefits could be given that the pre-sale would not cover.

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Website: https://www.aturretslife.com/

Telegram: https://t.me/aturretslife