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"Lumo Journal: Week 88"

Posted: 25 February, 2025

Lumo Journal

25.02.2025

Right, I’m calling it. I’ve added the last room to the game. Close to 600 days after work began on the first one.

Feels a little weird.

I’m not finished, far from it – everything needs fettling, timings need to be checked, bugs fixed, and I’m sure I can squeak in a few more jokes – but I’m not going to be waking up each morning thinking “what shall I make today”. It’ll take a little while to get used to that.

26.02.2025

Hmm, so this is the part of the project where there’s not a lot of specifics to talk about. Well, apart from a long diatribe about how much of today was spent debugging stupid bloody achievements, but I’ll spare you that. I think they’re working…

I’m in a constant loop of playing the game, looking for things to tweak, hunting bugs, smoothing out pops, adding audio cues, and doing stupid things to see what happens.

It’s the fun bit, in many respects, because the whole thing is laid out for me to fiddle with. But it’s also a little stressful. I don’t have a lot of time to make wholesale changes, and if I start to think I’ve painted myself into a corner, well, it’s too late now.

I was a little bit worried, halfway through the project, that the game would be too short. I’ve gone out of my way to avoid the “empty” rooms – corridors and dog-legs – that made up the bulk of the first game, making sure every room has a “thing”, even if that thing was a one-off (and maybe a little janky). I’ve not done a count, but I know that there are less than 150 rooms in 2umo - it’s ended up being a similar size to Head Over Heels, oddly enough - so it’s a third of the size or the first game. But I’ve still not done a 100% run in a single sitting.

I played for three hours, last night, enough time to complete the intro bits of Willy’s & Moonbas, the three mini-games, and 100% of Sandy’s. I’d guess that I could have completed the rest in another 30-40 minutes, so that’s not bad. I know where everything is. It’s even better when you consider that I was doing 100% speed-runs of the first game in ~50 minutes.

Obviously, there’s absolutely loads of stuff in 2umo that’s optional. You don’t need to chase the Ducks, or the Boom Boxes, and I know that it’ll be a small percentage of ~~masochists~~ players that try to. And, if you’re handy, you’ll probably have enough paint to roll the credits in a couple of hours. So I’m relieved that there’s more meat on the bones, regardless of the percentage of players that see it. I know it’s there, it’s made me laugh, and I’ve really enjoyed the process of making it, despite some really horrible things that have been happening outside of work while I’ve been making this.

2umo’ll be Marmite, my stuff always is, but I happen to like Marmite. Especially with cheese.

Mmm. Cheese.

Anyway, I’ll still be working until the game goes into cert, but for now, I’m only going to write updates if something exciting happens. You honestly don’t want to read about the list of “bugs I cleared today…”

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