This has been, to my chagrin, the least productive month of the project so far. I’ve already talked about most of the things pushing back against my progress, and all of those continue to do so. The arc of progress seems, to me, to be an asymptotic approach towards completion: The further away the goal is, the more rapidly I can approach it. One reason for this seems to be that, when there are many tasks standing between me and completion, I can pick them up as I think of solutions or feel particularly motivated to tackle them and use that momentum to advance rapidly. Conversely, when there’s only a few tasks left, I have to sit and think about solutions and pick at them bit by bit to make painstaking progress. It’s like eating a big bowl of popcorn: When you start it’s easy and fun and light, but when you get to the bottom it’s full of little hard kernels that never properly popped, and if you want to finish the job you have to slowly chew them up, one by one, each buttery desiccated kernel. Nevertheless, they must be eaten – in this metaphor, anyway, I don’t usually eat the actual kernels.
So okay. I went around working on this and that, as I could see ways to advance towards a goal. I made a number of tweaks and fixes to the dialogue system, I polished up a bunch of the character portraits, I added new single-frame animations to the main character for turning and for pushing against walls. Nothing big, but little fixes to things that had been bothering me.
I decided, though, that what’s really blocking my progress here is simply that I don’t have confidence in the story and writing of the game. I’m so fucking excited about so many of the ideas that I’m playing with in this project that I’m terrified of messing them up, forgetting bits and pieces, expressing a powerful idea ineffectively, concealing or revealing too much too late. I’m in idea debt to myself, hypnotized by possibility and humbled by impossibility. This state of affairs is probably going to continue until I have a Plan, a structure, something that makes it feel like I can tackle each problem individually without completely losing my place.
Easier said than done. I have a long list of “don‘ts“, which turns out to be much harder to work off of than a short list of do’s. I don’t want to have what so many games have, characters who give quests which you do to get stuff– I really dislike how many games boil down to the idea that you should help people because they might give you their old enchanted hat. I don’t want to have characters that just sit around and say the same few things over and over, I don’t want to have characters with broken lives left around for the player to fix, I don’t want the character stories to just be static events that always happen exactly the same way… so many things to avoid, it seems sometimes to chart a very narrow path indeed. To simplify and reduce some of this pressure, I’ve started trying to note down little bits of character arc – essentially just try to figure out, on a case by case basis, what I think each character’s story is about and where I see it potentially ending up
What sucks is that while I’ve just written several paragraphs about why this is necessary work, I still feel like I haven’t done anything all month. The writing is a little better now, there’s a little more of it, it has a little more direction, but I still have no real confidence in it and don’t exactly know how to address that. It starts to feel like this entire aspect of the project is an albatross around the neck, is just slowing everything down – but perhaps that which adds weight also adds momentum, and as an artist I do want to maximize impact.
After a certain point, anxiously pacing the same ground over and over loses its appeal. One of the things I was planning on doing after finishing the demo/vertical slice was completely overhauling the sound system, and in order to avoid needing to figure this shit out I just went ahead and started working on that. I went into some detail on where I’m at on that task in this Cohost post – suffice it to say that at this point I anticipate it being another week or so of work to finish it up.
Okay. What now? This month, I finish and implement the overhauled sound system, go through the writing again and send it out to some test-readers so I can exorcise my anxiety around it, put together the intro illustrations, and playtest/finalize all the in-game scripting. That sentence covers effectively everything that needs to be done to wrap up the demo version of the project. It sounds so easy! The hard part is just… accepting that whatever I do is going to have flaws, and that there will never be a perfect realization of these ideas, and just resolving to do what I can here and now.
This struggle will be ongoing, but I think I’m winning. Slowly.
If you’d like to help support this project or my writing, please consider supporting me on Patreon.