and we're back

First things first: pledges will resume charging on April 1st. I'm putting hell game on hiatus for the indefinite future, and I'll be focusing on finishing this twine game and working on other twine games after that, so if that's not what you want to see you've got a month to unsubscribe.

With more detail:

So, as you probably noticed, hell game development has been lagging a lot. There's more than a few reasons for that -- first-project-itis, biting off more than I could chew, building a lot of infrastructure without first figuring out a main mechanical loop, overengineering a lot of the backend, etc -- but ultimately I just didn't have a solid, compelling narrative that I wanted to write through, and that kind of poisoned everything else. It got to the point where just thinking about it was really weighing me down, and that kinda sucked.

As you might have noticed, I've been a lot more enthused about twine game writing, since twine stuff is... a lot more coherent and plotted than hell game was, and twine's limitations tend to temper my tendency to super overcomplicate everything I program. Twine games have space for about one big mechanic, so you gotta actually figure out what that's going to be and then figure out how to tie that into all the interactions you have, which is something I very much did not do with hell game.

I'd still like to work on a project that's bigger and more rambling than a mostly-linear twine game, and that project might be some iteration on hell game, maybe even using a bunch of the same code. But until I actually work out a good mechanical prototype and a story outline that I feel is extensible enough to support a bigger project, I'll be working on twine games -- first, finishing up the current one (which I really need to title, incidentally, so I can stop calling it 'the current twine game') and then holding a poll to pick from a few different concept pitches to write a smaller, ~50k word game that I hope to finish in two or three months, before trying anything larger again.

This also means settling down into a more regular release schedule, rather than "randomly whenever I feel like it, once every few months". I don't know how well that'll work for this existing project -- I haven't been writing it in playable chunks and linear sequences, so every addition is like "I wrote 20k words but in 1k chunks in 20 different places", which isn't the most fun to replay -- but for everything coming after this project is done I'll try for something a bit more standardized, like "patreon releases every two weeks; delayed public releases every month", and work on semi-linear content branches, or something like that.

Currently, this twine game is pretty close to completion, and I'll be working on it all through March so that it'll hopefully be ready for release in April or May. Once it's out, I'll post the release candidate version on patreon for pledgers, and put it up for download on somewhere like itch.io after that, with payment optional.

So that's the ~roadmap~ for this patreon!