Writing these devlogs for years always makes me wonder—did early humans feel like this when they painted on cave walls?
I feel like I’ve roughly dealt with most of the functional issues in the early gameplay. I know more problems will pop up once I test again, but I’ve mainly been tweaking the flow and feel. I’ve added, removed, rewritten, and reinserted lines of dialogue. I’ve done the same with scenes—adding, cutting, fixing, repeating. I think this is the first time I’ve spent so much time just on the early section. I really hope it pays off. Some parts are inevitable as they are, but I just want what I’m trying to convey to actually reach the players. If I were to fix the beginning any further, I’d practically have to rebuild it from scratch—something I’d rather not do, though if I have to, so be it.
For the first time, one of my Shorts hit 27k views. It’s not an impressive number in itself, but for me, given what my Shorts have done before, it feels big. Aside from adding a voice-over and subtitles to fit what the platform wants, I didn’t change anything in the content. Of course, Shorts don’t bring in direct traffic on their own, but having some views is still better than zero.
Making a game alone feels less like just making a game and more like studying myself—seeing myself raw, bit by bit. Like I mentioned before, it’s a bit like alchemy: at first, the goal is to make gold or make a game, but in the end, it becomes about finding the gold within your own mind. I feel like I’m understanding parts of my personality and my issues more deeply than I did when I just vaguely sensed them. It’s like a journey where reality and the mind are tangled up together. Where it goes, I don’t know yet, but it doesn’t feel like a path I can simply avoid.
Maybe someday these devlogs will be unearthed like cave paintings, or maybe they’ll just get wiped out by some digital undertaker—who knows.