Inside you there are two wolves; The first one has an inexplicable desire to share every little scribble, musical note, or line of text you’ve ever written with the world. The second one tries to beat the first wolf to death with a giant club before they do so.

The first devlog I wrote was originally going to be a formal announcement of sorts. I’ve been working on this idea for over a year now, and I reached the point where many of the core ideas are locked in and settled. I wanted to share the title, describe the world and gameplay, show off some ugly placeholder stuff, etc. If you’ve read that one, you’ll notice that’s not really happened. Spoilers, but this second one is not that either.

While there is some connective tissue between what I had planned and what I actually wrote, I ultimately decided to pull back on sharing anything too specific about the game itself, and instead chose to talk mostly about how I tricked myself into starting this whole mess in the first place. There’s a few reasons for that:

Reason #1: I still haven’t actually settled on a title. I do have a name I’ve been calling it so far - Relic, the same as short story - but I don’t like this enough for that to be the final name.

Reason #2: Even acknowledging its current state as a developer art graybox prototype, I’m just not personally happy with it enough to share too much about it. Ideas are cheap, realizing those ideas to their full extent is not.

Reason #3: I just kinda loathe doing any form of marketing and self-promotion, which is what that original post ended up feeling like more than anything else. In theory we will have to cross that bridge someday, but you can’t make me do that today.

It’s not that I’m trying to create an air of mystery here, because I don’t feel like what I’m doing is particularly special or unique. (In fact, I saw another game with similar ideas being shared around on my social meda feed recently, which I must shamefully admit had put a slight dampener on my motivation for a few days afterwards. I mean no shade though! It looks very cool! And while I want to check it out, I will purposefully be avoiding it in the meantime!) But the work I’ve done (or have still yet to do) is still my work, and I can’t help but view what comes out of that ritual as a reflection of myself, finished or not. I’ve thrown away far more art than I have ever finished.

My development process can only be described as chaotic. I think part of that is because there’s such an overwhelming amount of areas to cover still, from music and animations and code and 2D art and 3D models and written text. This is a good problem for me to have, because if I get bored with one thing I can just switch over to doing something else, and it all adds up in the end. At the same time though, before you know it suddenly you’re spending the next three weeks in Blender remaking the same character for the 5th/10th/20th time when you actually intended to get networked multiplayer working (yes, it happened again).

I feel like I’m responsible for managing my own personal expectations and making sure I’m not accidentally overselling anything, especially when the road ahead is still far too long to even see the end of. My fear is that one day my brain will decide that working on this is no longer an option and I never reach some sort of satisfactory finish line.

I don’t really know how much people care to read a devlog series that so far spends more time discussing my thoughts and feelings about the creative process than the actual products of that machine. And maybe it seems counter-productive to even spend my time yapping away on these without there being much I’m willing to show in motion, but I feel like it’s a good way for me to collect my thoughts and calibrate my focus, like my extended detour with the debug viewer on the last one. Just be warned that’s the way it’s going to be for a while.

Additional counterpoint - This is my website, so I can do whatever I want here. Check this out:

See? Don’t make me do it again.