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Attaching the bug report feature seems to have wrapped everything up. With just a single web address, I can log reports straight into Discord. Very convenient. One more round of testing and fixing whatever comes out of it should be the end of it. I’ll start testing first and handle the end content and voice recording after that.

Maybe because it was so grueling, playing straight through and reaching the end of the test run was genuinely moving.

User testing starts next week at the earliest, first week of November at the latest. A flood of bugs I never considered is surely coming. Too hard, unpleasant, awkward, boring, too easy — all of it worries me. The game also seems fairly long, so I’m not sure anyone will have the time to test it. Everything is on my mind.

I worked as hard and as fast as I could and it still ended up taking nearly three years. In a world moving the way it does now, it may have been a foolish thing to do. I’m not spending three years on a game again. The difficulty of it was beyond words. Not that what comes next looks any easier.

I thought I could wrap it up soon, so I pushed hard — no weekends, nothing but eating and sleeping in between. But while testing the last part, I realized it can’t ship as it is. It feels like pulling all-nighters to finally beat the final boss, only to watch it transform into its next phase. Like the finish line was in sight, and then a helicopter hooked it and flew away. I really thought this was the week. I’m dead tired, ugh. Anyway, I’m now making some fairly big gameplay changes to the late part of Reality and the threshold section. I don’t think the level design itself will change drastically, but I won’t know until I get into it. This is genuinely hard. For the first half, I tore down and rebuilt the world about ten times — starting from when I had no direction at all — to arrive at the current level design, and I used to think that was just inexperience. But after playing through this last part, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Some things just have to be fixed through testing, a lot of them. It really is hard.

The ambient audio and music pass is done, the text pass is done, and I’ve worked through most of the smaller fix list. All the existing music went into the threshold, but every track had to be re-arranged into a softer version. Apart from achievements and the end content that unlocks after clearing the game, everything is genuinely finished. The credit roll is filled in too, except for the voice actors. I’ll update it as players who help out during testing get added.

A little over two and a half years. It feels strange. None of the numbers or circumstances are good, but the game is finished, and after some twenty years I’ve made something I’m happy with. That feeling will probably get dismantled during testing, but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

Next I’ll test it myself on a dev build, pull together another round of fixes, and work through those along with the end content. Probably about a week to get there. Handling achievements means I’ll need to register a build on Steam somewhere in the middle. After that I should be able to start testing and put out a call for voice actors before the end of October.

I’ve been organizing the ambient audio and music while refining and fixing events along the way. The reality side stays dry, mostly environmental sound, with music coming in only occasionally. The threshold side runs music throughout. Taking things that only existed as isolated features, consolidating them and building atmosphere out of them — the results come back in proportion to the time I put in, so it’s rewarding and genuinely fun. My stamina is the problem. Right now all I can think about is hoping players like it.

Building bosses and polishing marketplace animations into events seem like similar work, but events are much less stressful, maybe because the outcome is fixed. In some ways I think they’re more fun too.

The surface-level story stays simple enough not to get in the way of exploration, but for players who read the text through Attune and pick up the chat logs, the much larger story underneath should come through. There are probably more players who just want to enjoy the exploration. Players generally seem to lose patience once dialogue runs past two lines, so I’m cutting down heavily on voiced lines that have to be skipped.

I keep saying it’s almost done and more work keeps appearing, bit by bit. Still, it’s converging on the goal rather than diverging, so I think it’ll be finished within the month. Then testing and voice recording.

Separate from finishing the game, I’m just grateful to my wife, who supports this whole adventure completely.

Finished the ending and the credit roll, and wrapped up the trailer for a game show submission. I’m not releasing the trailer separately — just put it up on Steam. It’s in this post too. I made it while being pulled between two thoughts: that nothing happens if you do nothing, and that making it won’t move anything anyway. So it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable process. No new footage went in; I just built the context out of what was already there.

Making games is about two billion times more fun than making trailers. Thinking about the next game is another five billion times more fun than that.

While pulling a shipping build to capture B-roll for the trailer, I kept spotting things that need fixing. I’ll deal with them while working on the dialogue. And the music all needs another pass too. Is the work actually shrinking, though…

Phew. The boss entrance scene is nearly wrapped. A couple more fixes and I move on to the ending. I went back and forth a lot on whether to destroy that palace, since I figured it would eat a lot of time, but somehow it came together in three days. Keeping the palace meant it had to break for the boss to appear, but giving it up meant losing that feeling entirely. I had to dig out tools I couldn’t even remember the last time I used, which was daunting, but they held up well and it went fine.

That palace (Injeongjeon) was bought during the last project, and its texture sizes were a mess — it was eating video memory at a terrifying rate. Because of that, things kept slowing down mid-scene and I went looking for the cause everywhere else first, which meant I ended up doing every other optimization before finally fixing the texture sizes. Now it runs okay. The video is from a standalone build; a shipping build should be smoother.

So now it’s really the ending. For the ending I’m planning to move the levels I’ll use as backdrops into new levels, set up static poses with a bit of camera movement, capture that, and handle it as video. The music will be carrying a lot of weight here. I bought a model for the ending but couldn’t find one at decent quality. It only appears in two ending shots in a fixed pose, so I can’t bring myself to install new tools and dig through it. The model quality is rough, but I’ll try to cover for it with camera work.

As I get closer to finishing, the things I want to improve and apply next time are stirring hard. Right now game progression is handled by an in-house script closer to assembly, with no arithmetic or logic in it at all — the one exception is a basic if-then. I decided that once a game script starts carrying logic, debugging becomes unmanageable later, so the script should do nothing beyond running things sequentially and making it easy to wait on something mid-sequence. That’s how it’s built.

Next time I want to stack a BASIC on top of that assembly (I’ve loosely named it a-asm, short for aom asm; the BASIC would be a-basic). Instead of wiring commands by hand across the code like I do now, I’d add an action, have the action describe itself, and let that propagate all the way up to the BASIC layer. I’m thinking of handling the a-basic to a-asm translation in VS Code. The a-basic layer would of course keep logic at the same if-then level. Two reasons for this: easier editing and readability, and because I want to make a game in the BASIC I used as a kid. The second one I consider an excellent reason.

Beyond that, I want to fix all the mistakes I made back when my understanding of the engine was weaker. I spent 2.5 years on this project, and if I improve the things I have in mind, I wonder whether the same scope could come down to a year and a half. I went down so many wrong paths on this one.

Circumstances aren’t easy, but things like this get my heart racing, and sometimes I wonder what that says about me. It’s also what makes me feel that building things the way I do now makes me happy.

One ending event left, then writing out the dialogue. And the end content.

Last week I was worn out and found myself wanting to see the ocean — and then something surprising happened. A close relative took my wife and me to Jeju, covering everything, flights and lodging included. A completely unexpected four-day trip. It almost feels like I dreamed it. We ate and slept in wonderful places. At one museum, an old magazine on display reminded me of something I’d sent in as a kid, so I got to check on that, and I was able to visit a few art museums and notable buildings. I also had the chance to see the work of a famous painter who has since passed. I remember seeing him on the news when I was a kid and wondering why his work was so popular — and even now, older, I still couldn’t quite see it. His very early work, though, I did like. Apparently he too moved from country to country chasing opportunity, struggled enormously for a long time, and then a chance introduction by a journalist made him famous. For a moment I thought, maybe it was all a bit similar even 50 years ago.

Working through the final assembly, I’ve had the feeling — for the first time in decades — of something I’d imagined and wanted actually clicking together like a puzzle. Along the way I stripped things out and cut things back; early on I’d stuffed in explanations, almost as if to convince myself about what was underbuilt or lacking, and then removed all of it. But lining it all up at the end, the thought that came was: it’s been a very long time since I felt this. Whether many people will play it or like it is a separate question, but getting something I’m satisfied with — that really has been a long time. I want to finish this and start on the next one. Just thinking about building it makes my heart race.

Filled in the Attune text and hooked it up to events. For the additional text I’ll need later, I just dropped in placeholders so I can batch-write them all at once. Attune is a feature for reading the signals left behind in the world — mostly background lore and a few gameplay hints. Most of it takes the form of logs left by AI, and the rest are proper sentences, but everything has to fit in a small on-screen space, so the length constraint was severe. It’s a bit under 100 lines total, and it took me about three days. Way longer than I expected, and it was exhausting. The overall flow of events was settled long ago, but each Attune entry has a different point in time and a different perspective within those events, all of which have to stay consistent — and even though the sentences are dry and rigid, they need to carry emotion, all within about 30 words. It took a lot of thinking and reworking.

While writing, I found that markers of time hit the hardest, at least for me. Things like “Aquarium drained. 73 years 4 months since.” or “Last backup: 100 years 3 months 7 days ago.” That’s purely my own feeling — it may land differently for others, or not at all. Attune actually requires a separate Suit Program you pick up mid-game, and that program isn’t even on the mandatory main route. Even so, I think it plays the most important role in delivering the game’s mood and background, so I poured an enormous amount of time and care into it. I don’t know who will ever read it, but I’m satisfied with it on my own.

After Attune comes the chat log. The chat window was originally built in the early days to avoid using voice acting, and after drifting around from place to place it has settled in as a secondary feature. It’s also completely optional text — you can progress without reading any of it — and it mostly carries background story that isn’t directly tied to gameplay. Why “not directly tied”? Because I can’t know whether a player will read a chat right after obtaining it or only after clearing the game. So most chat content is about things that happened in the past, or conversations about things that are always there.

Dialogue hookup is about a third done, I think. For now I’m just filling slots with placeholder text and leaving notes about what should go where. Two and a half years — I really have been making this for a long time. Next time I want to build much, much faster.

Finally connected from start to finish. Cutscenes and dialogue are still left, but it’s playable end to end. It’s been long and hard, and the final stretch especially has been rough since I’m running on empty. Still, writing dialogue should be the enjoyable part, so I’m looking forward to it. Two and a half years of development is coming to an end.

The rough playtime ratio and order goes something like reality 1 — threshold 0.01 — reality 0.5 — threshold 0.5 — reality 0.1. (The demo covers about 0.4 of that first reality 1.) Right now I’m hooking up the quests for that final threshold 0.5 — reality 0.1 stretch. Quest hookup means handling events and quest processing when previously built sections get cleared. The quest side is just table entry, but the events take some work. I’m planning to finish the connections first, then handle the event work while rewriting the dialogue. Events need some animation assembly too, so there’s a bit of labor involved.

Finishing around late September and moving into testing and voice recording still looks doable, but I’ll need to build more to know for sure. Being at the tail end is pretty draining, and I’ve been getting through it by thinking about the next project, or imagining refactoring and tearing this one apart to build a sequel, or remaking the prologue.

Anyway, it’s more than just “the end is in sight” — it’s closer to the summit. Close enough that I can see the ridgeline connecting my position to the peak.

Also, GTA 6 is something else. It’s been a long time since a game made my heart race like that. I’d pushed my release to February even though I’ll be done in October or November, because of the advice that GTA would vacuum up all media attention for two months around its launch — and now I’m certain that was the right call.