It's been nearly a year since the previous update about Spark and it's development. I thought today I would change that in order to keep the game "alive" even if these are seen by nobody but myself. Without further delay, what happened? Where is the game? Why on earth has nothing happened? All of these are true, Spark has not been in development for the last 11 months, with only minor progress or additions being made. The reason for this was particularly lack of motivation and time. Now that it is the month of February in 2021, I thought it would be a joy to return to a passion project that I personally believe deserves more than a crude enemy, gun, and map.

With Spark returning to development, there is a variety of things that will be changing over the next months as the game begins development:

1. Everything is being remade from scratch and will take significantly longer than in the past. The reason for this is that the previously used assets were rushed, low quality, and generally just terrible. In order to prevent issues such as these, I've been taking the time to accustom myself with programs such as Blender and familiarize myself with model importation into Unity.

2. Coding will go by much smoother. This is in part to myself taking a C++ course in the fall, albeit Unity uses C# mostly but it's still incredibly useful for understanding the language and being able to identify problems much faster than in the past.

3. A much smoother workflow is being developed. The previous plan for Spark was to just "make random things and see if they work together." While this may have worked at times, it's a terrible way to develop a game and ruins any coherence for a project.

So, when will the first devlog be released? Fairly soon. The current goal(s) is to build the player first while building systems such as health, movement, inventory, weapons, etc. This will be a fairly boring development period considering most of this is just code after all. However, it will be critical for the game's completion and entire existence. The game itself will likely not have many visual elements such as a world or in-game screenshots for about half-a-year, pray it to be that quick.

I hope that you join us in the return to Spark, as I hope to actually see this project to completion, or at least to a foundation for the game.

-Mold