AbsurDock playtest progress 3
Here comes another weekly blog update. Honestly, it’s impressive how much you can get done running on pure piss-off energy. I believe the build will be up and ready in a couple dozen commits, the only things left are the tutorial and some blocker bugs i’d been procrastinating on for the past three months. Content-wise, this week i got playtest-ready anomalies done, plus Foulhook behavior and visuals (still jank) and two more time-of-day presets. Everything else was pure gameplay improvements, like being able to catch anomalies.
Anomaly showcase (one distorts air, so it might not be well visible)
In which state will the playtest launch?
Rough, meaning no unaccounted-for game-breaking bugs or crashes but a whole bunch of nitpicks. What’s left is trivial: objects clipping through geometry, UI jank, the kind of thing that’s still frustrating even though it won’t break anything. Multiplayer is playable, but i wouldn’t call it production ready — there are just too many failure points i can’t personally account for. Not sure whether that’s a negative or a positive, janky multiplayer is half of what gets clipped these days.
I have concepts in mind but i must ship.
Right now i kind of feel jailed by AbsurDock. Over the past year i’ve stockpiled so many concepts i want to explore and prototype, but i can’t just let this game turn into vaporware, not after investing this much effort. I’ve cut corners hard, and that’s what gets a playtest out in October instead of Q2 2028. I’m genuinely sad the project will get shelved once it releases, but it’s not abandoned. Realistically, i just need a pause to go chase commercially viable, proven concepts that won’t eat as much time, and then come back to this one — hopefully with actual feedback to build on instead of working blind into nowhere.
Next week, i’m hoping to add the remaining content and finally announce a precise playtest date. And the blog after that will hopefully be the ceremonial ribbon-cutting i seem to be the only one craving.