Trying to stumble my way back onto the blogging train.

Summary

• multiple overlapping periods of indecisive angst
• ill-advisedly started a bunch of projects that I won’t talk about today
• drew some art tests for Black Mountain
• traveled a bit
• got covid, recovered from it
• re-focus on Alice is Dead

The Nature of a Devlog

There are a few things I struggle with, in regards to this blog.

First, I’m not always sure whether I’ll continue with a project when I start it, so I’m hesitant to bother talking about it. The blog is better, I think, when it’s a consistent long-running devlog about a particular project. The nature of a prototype is that it won’t necessarily look great, it might be shelved for a while, or it might just be outright abandoned. I guess there’s a certain level of not wanting to get people too interested in an idea that doesn’t pan out.

Second, sometimes I am working on stuff that has a certain amount of discovery and mystery to it, and/or I am not leading the project so I’m not sure I’m in the best place to decide what I can/should/want to say about it. I don’t want to ruin any surprises or give too much away. It becomes easier to just not talk about it at all – you can’t un-say something after you say it, especially on the internet.

Third, the longer I put off posting, the bigger I feel I need my posts to be when I do finally get around to it. This leads to things piling up and the psychological weight of posting getting heavier and heavier the longer I wait – which makes it harder to just get the post written.

Getting Back on Track?

A lot of the last four months have been working on things that fit one of those first two categories – either small things I may or may not continue on, or working on Alice is Dead. In addition, I had to do some travelling, and during one of those trips I ended up getting COVID, which knocked me out for a week. Of course, since I hadn’t posted in so long, number three came in and has just been preventing me from even getting started.

So I decided to try to just start writing some stuff; to hopefully get over those hurdles and get some of what I’ve been working on out there, and to give myself a bit of a reset on my stacked up topics. This draft has been sitting here for more than a week, though, so I’m not sure it was a slam-dunk of an idea.

Regardless, I’m going to try to salvage this.

My Main Focus Now

Once I got Escape from Evil Island out, I sort of floundered around with a few different things, but ultimately decided that I’d really like to try to focus on Alice is Dead. Due to various life things, it’s not been seeing as much progress as any of us would like.

And hey! Things are actually happening. The game is very heavily art-focused, which isn’t the aspect I’m working on, so I have been tackling building the remaining bits of framework-level programming we need for it. We put a demo out on Steam quite a while ago now (currently the demo is down! but it will be back soon) so much of the framework was there, but there were some things we wanted to re-work. Most of that is actually done now, so I’ve been able to start actually add more to the game, opening up beyond the bit covered in the demo.

Since it’s my main focus at the moment, I’m going to try to start posting more about Alice is Dead specifically. I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, since the game does include a certain amount of mystery, so it’ll be an interesting line to walk. I’m sure it will be good practice for me.

Get It Out

I’m going to cut the post there. On top of Alice is Dead, I think I would like to talk about some of the other things I’ve been working on, but they can wait. I also want to just get myself to start a habit of posting regularly again, so I just want to rip this band-aid off now.

Of course, my last post also ended with me saying that I wanted to get back to weekly posting, so my track record isn’t amazing. We’ll see!