It feels like progress has really slowed down recently. I think that has a lot to do with what sorts of work on the project feel like progress and which don’t. A lot of the last week or so has been working on creating illustrations for the title screen and intro: These all are going to look kind of shitty until I finalize their composition and start detailing them, but still require a significant amount of work to block out, plan, and come up with supplemental designs for. Among these designs are several characters and locations which don’t show up in this first section but who I need to know the general appearance of, where otherwise I’ve been tackling designs as I get to them. Of course, these designs don’t need to be perfect or final, but they do need to be at least refined enough that if I change them those changes are minor enough that I don’t need to redo everything surrounding them later. Until I get to a certain degree of polish, though, all of these illustrations just feel like I’m investing a lot of anxiety and effort into something that looks, well… not great. It’s a bit hard on morale, which relies on the sensation of making steady progress to maintain itself.
Similarly, while character dialogue at least quickly takes its final form or something close to it, it’s also something I’m going to need to revise many times over the course of the project, read and reread, revisit and rescript and test-read and play-test, before it ever settles into something final. The process of writing/adapting this text feels very slight in effort for the most part, but also feels very time-consuming – time flies rapidly by while I sit, trying to figure out what tone is correct for each character and what it makes sense for them to be talking about, but just behind that lies the the anxiety of it being potentially much more time-consuming in the future, as I need to refine and repurpose snippets as the contours of character and plot shift. This will probably only feel like progress once I’ve got all the dialogue I need for this demo written – and even then I’ll probably still have a lot of anxiety tied up in it.
One of the most triumphant moments of this month was reworking the way weapon animations work, so each weapon can have custom attack animations that make each one feel unique. I’m very pleased with the results of this – a development side-path sparked by the decision that it would be good to have an early weapon such as a pipe to find – but, like with writing dialogue, it’s also attended by anxieties around what additional work this might create for me in the future, how many weird specific custom weapon overlays I may need to make. Realistically it probably won’t be that bad, but any work that doesn’t firmly move something from the “to-do” pile and add it to the “done” pile, without changing the aggregate size of both piles, worries me.
Even work that does check something off the list worries me sometimes! I’ve been doing a fair bit of music composition work as well, something which I generally find both enjoyable and satisfying: First I created the death theme, for encounters with death and dying, which I’m largely pleased with. This track builds off the little sting for dying in combat and elaborates on it in a few ways, and is probably going to be the earliest (relatively subtle) break with the NES-style of the early-game soundtrack.
I also completely reworked the lobby music before the second boss. As before, it’s a piano tune with SNES-style sound-fonts, but the composition is now a rearrangement of the area and battle themes that precede and succeed it. While I think this is an improvement on the previous theme, I’m still not certain of it – it feels rather stiff and mechanical for a piano piece, not as smooth and expressive as I’d hoped. It’s likely to be revised a bit as I go for that reason, but the basic structure and melody of it are likely to be pretty close to what’s here.
I’ve also been working on an intro theme to go with the intro illustrations, but though it’s further along and has a good tone to it it’s still rather incomplete, so I’ll reserve posting it until next month’s DevBlog. For all of these, what still worries me is that I’ll get to the end, polish them as much as they can be polished, refine them as much as they can be refined, and something about them will simply still not fit, and I’ll have to start all over again. Still, there’s nothing I can do about that except to move forward and figure out what needs to be done when it needs doing.
Art is, I suppose, in large part the discovery of how to simultaneously care about something a lot and not at all. I need to kill the part of me that worries endlessly about everything fitting, everything being perfect, everything being correct; perhaps one day there will be time again to allow that approach, but for now I have to concentrate on moving decisively forward. Of course, I’ll need to finish those illustrations and get them in place, write the rest of the dialogue… stuff that shouldn’t take too long, but we’ll see. I also need to make one more mini-boss type encounter and place some texts in the world, which I may also post some of as Problem Machine blog posts since I’ve been having so much trouble with writing my regular posts.
I am, genuinely, running out of things that need to be done to complete this demo/vertical slice. The task now is just to maintain the requisite focus to actually do them – and to make sure that this list of things to do doesn’t continue to grow and move goalposts further away as I do.
If you’d like to help support this project or my writing, please consider supporting me on Patreon.