5/28 Status Update

My vacation isn't quite over yet, but I think things have pretty much settled in my mind as to what I want to do moving forward. And so I wanted to get that info out before the end of the month in case it changes if you want to support me or not. Hopefully it won't, but I want to keep my fans informed. If you don't want to read any of this nonsense and just look at sexy pictures, don't worry, I got you.

Now the wordy stuff. I've thought a lot about what I've been going through lately in terms of development and I think the best way to describe it is having the "game design yips". Yips is a sports term usually used in reference to baseball or golf that describes athletes suddenly being bad at athleteing. Like a pitcher suddenly being unable to throw a fast ball despite doing so consistently for years. It's usually a psychological thing and in my case, I'm just any lacking confidence in my decision making right now.

Generally in the past I've just thought of ideas and decided that sounded good and executed them. Afterwards I'd have to test and iterate on them of course, but making designs was never a problem. Right now I'm second guessing everything I do. I think I have some cool stuff and ideas lined up but what if they're not? It's hard to describe psychological issues like this because they're really just something you have to work through. Generally with the sports version of the yips, the more you think about it the worse it gets. So the best way to move forward is probably just that, moving forward.

I think I got too ambitious with my development schedule last year. I did manage to pretty much pull it off, but was it really worth it? Monetarily, no. I didn't break even. Creatively, eh, maybe I'm not sure. I think I need to scale the business back. At the Mountains of Friendship was just too much. The amount of moving pieces in terms of my own work plus the work of artists and voice actors was all above what my tiny one person part time studio could handle. I'm going to try going back to the times of just two games at a once. And one of those probably something small like a Twine game. Moving backwards like that does feel bad, but I think it's necessary.

So for now I'm not going to put anything more into production than I already have. That leaves the slate as Netoria 1 expansion content, Netoria 2, Naked Ambition, and AtMoF 1.4 eventually (maybe a year? IDK). After the Carwyn triumphant update, expansion content should be pretty painless to make since they won't involve new levels or anything like this one does. Just new scenes and new in-between scene conversations. Netoria 2 is well into pre-production with the first batch of scene art coming into production soon. This is the one that suffers most from the "yips" right now as there's a lot of creative decision making I need to do for it right now that I'm kind of delaying.

As for Naked Ambition... I don't know people. It's still going really badly. There's pretty much three options at this point. 1: Keep going with the original design. That's what I'm currently doing and it's both a slog and producing bad results. 2: Simplify the end game and reconfigure how this all works exactly to create something I'll actually finish. This is good in theory in that it might actually produce an update but it probably will be disappointing, especially after how long it's been already. I'd have to start over too. 3: Just forget about Naked Ambition and abandon it.

None of those options are very good, but they're kind of what's on the table right now unfortunately. I'd say right now the only content I'm actually producing consistently is Netoria Tactics stuff. Updates for those game should be pretty smooth. Everything else... well we'll see.

So that's where my thoughts are after my month of not working on stuff and taking it easy. I feel like this helped and I do have more creative energy now, but there's some underlying issues still there. But more time off won't help so I'll be back at it shortly.