Hello! Kevin here!

Devlogs have long been something that I think is worth investing time into, but have rarely taken the chance to dive into. I wouldn't exactly call it "impostor syndrome" but I have a difficult time taking my work at Pizza Curse seriously because it feels like nobody cares about the work we do. It's definitely a self-fulfilling prophecy. Majdi, Jordan and myself are all professionals who work hard and do well at our day jobs (in video games) and have been working on this labor of love for around three years now. We (well, especially myself) should take these efforts seriously. That's not to say I have any idea what I'm doing - I don't. Making games is a lot of fun and I think everyone should dabble it in at some point. Making games to make money is an entirely different ballgame (most things are entirely different ballgames when you want to make it into a living) and while we've got design, art and programming down pat there's still a bunch of unknowns. We have no producers or sound people or marketers, we have to figure that out ourselves. And... well, now we're getting started with The Rest Of It All™ Will it work, will anyone care about our games, are we just wasting our time? I have no idea, but we have a lot of fun along the way and I think that's key to making a good game, and if my deepest darkest fears all end up becoming reality I will have no regrets, because we made something and we had fun . Really, what more can anyone ask of their free time?  (Oh, and we learned a TON about game development either way that we can take back to our dayjobs, too, so there's that)

Anyway, we’re just back from PAX East, which takes place in tropically-warm Boston! (I’m being sarcastic we froze our toes off) We had a really great time at the convention, I spent most of the first two days under the booth fixing bugs with the game, including a long-play bug where items would stop spawning after 30min-1hr of play. That one was due to a singleton transition I did a few months back. If you've ever used Unity you know that scene transitions are kinda a pain in the ass if you have any persistent objects that you way to keep holding a reference too. (You ALSO know that using FindObjectByType is generally a bad idea) Bear in mind, we're on 5.5.5p2 at this point, so it's a tad outdated. The point is, I missed a file when I transitioned my managers classes over to a better and more consistent system and a class that I used to wrap spawning items was using an outdated reference to my game time management class that, after enough scene transitions, would essentially become garbage, and all delta time applied to this wrapper would be 0.

Thus... no items would actually appear on the field. It was annoying - and definitely something I should have caught earlier - but ultimately I'm very glad I got it out of the way at PAX instead of figuring out about it later closer to launch.

Attendance at PAX was pretty solid, Majdi and Jordan walked most everyone through the game while I kept applying show-floor fixes (not a strategy I would recommend too highly, I was a little overconfident in our initial build stability assessment)

We had people who remembered the game from two years ago and were excited to play again, and a group of people who came back three days in a row with new friends to play! Lots of laughs and smiles, and even some very good advice given to us RE: UI by an artist from the booth across the isle (If you haven't heard of Dunk Lords then you are seriously missing out) that we'll try to integrate quickly in the next month or so! We hope it will make it a lot easier to see that you've got an item (and help you stay focused on the ball and not trying to scan the screen for far-flung UI elements!)

Build 0.1.19 is the result of much PAX floor iteration and our previous hard groud-laying work of the past three years of nights and weekends! I hope you guys enjoy it, and I hope you feel comfortable giving us feedback! (Good, bad, and anything in-between!)