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Suddenly, I couldn’t generate a VC project from the Uproject. After trying all sorts of things, I decided to reinstall the engine, which left me with some unexpected free time. It’s surprising how, even after using the engine for so long, I can still run into issues like this for the very first time.

The photo is something I stitched together of the view from my window while working. I haven’t seen this much fog since I was in school. Even back then, I loved it so much that I would just stare blankly at the fog for a long time.

Until recently, no matter how agonizing or difficult things got, I thought of it as a curse—that thrill and excitement I felt when looking at an empty space I’d made in the editor, wondering what to fill it with. But now, for the first time in my life, I’ve started to think of it as a blessing.

To proceed with the next stage, I’ve been creating and connecting empty halls here and there, and I’m enjoying the simultaneous feelings of being overwhelmed and thrilled. I’m trying to fill in the story events first, so I’m starting with locations where the visuals are more important than gameplay. But I got completely stuck while brainstorming for the final important event location—the last major story location I need to do—so now I’m working on other things.

In the past, if something like project generation, which was working perfectly fine, suddenly broke like this, I would have panicked and struggled. I’m surprised at myself for changing so much that I can just casually start a reinstall and write something like this.

Maybe it’s similar to Tom Hanks living happily ever after with a digital Wilson. With no desire to escape the island at all.

P.S.: Wow, I thought this would be over quickly, but I’ve ended up reinstalling and uninstalling Visual Studio multiple times, and doing the same with the engine over and over.
Just last night, I was thinking I could quickly wrap up what I was working on this morning, but I guess you just never know what’s going to happen. The entire day is almost gone.

P.S.: In the end, after reinstalling the engine, Visual Studio, and even the Epic Launcher multiple times… I just bypassed the issue by using a batch file to generate the VC project. For some reason, it just wouldn’t work from the context menu.
So, after almost 12 hours, I’m finally back to where I was when the problem started, with a temporary workaround…

I’ve finished moving. It’s an environment I’ve never lived in before, and it’s really nice. First of all, I can see the sky when I work. I can see the moon and the clouds too. And there are nice walking trails nearby, and best of all, there are hardly any people or cars.
It’s been a really long time since I sat down in the morning and said, “Ah, this is nice.” For the first time in my life, I even told myself that I feel blessed. Now that I am blessed, I hope my game will be blessed too.

Anyway, I’m continuing to work on ‘Lotus One in the Threshold’. I couldn’t make a lot of progress because of the move, but the event work for this part seems to be roughly finished. As long as it’s there, even if it’s rough, I can polish it later.

My goal is to sprint and finish all the story-related events within this month. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that to break free from what has been holding me back for over 20 years, I need “quickly” and “good enough.” So I’m trying to do just that.

I’m currently working on the story events for Stage 2. There was a foundation I’d laid down before, so it’s progressing faster than expected, but the move keeps interrupting me with various tasks, so I’m hitting the brakes a little too often.

I was grateful to receive a gameplay video after a long time. And again, I saw several issues I hadn’t anticipated. There was a scene where the player couldn’t proceed and gave up because I had failed to add a hint to a feature I’d recently added based on feedback. The moment I relax or lose even a little bit of meticulousness, it immediately creates a problem that is close to a game-blocker.

To exaggerate a bit, whenever I fix something, the side effect often manifests as a subtle, game-breaking bug. It’s so diabolical and hard for me to find, yet so easily encountered by users, that it almost feels like something malicious is interfering with me.

This isn’t a move for a happy reason, but as I move homes for the first time in 20 years, the only hope I’m clinging to—a kind of shamanistic hope I’ve never believed in until now—is whether this unknown, diabolical malice I’ve experienced for two decades will finally disappear or change. If I go any further down this path, it’s delusional disorder, so I’ll stop. Still, I think it will have a considerable psychological effect. In any case, my physical environment will be much better than it is now, which is good. So good that I might just want to settle in and stay put.

Going back to the original topic, I can’t say much because of spoilers, but I’m working on a scene where you meet an important character at a place called Lotus One in the Threshold. This ‘Lotus One’ was the most core and important place in the game, but I had no idea how to design it. I came up with the current design after considering various settings I had to adhere to, but I’m still not quite satisfied.

Especially the mandala on the ceiling. That part was originally supposed to connect directly to the sea. (In the Threshold, the sea is above and the sky is below.) The part ascending to the sea was meant to be like a data stream. However, when I made that golden data stream scatter as it met the sea, it looked exactly like urine shooting up into the sky and spraying everywhere. I decided that was absolutely not it, so I covered it with a mandala and removed the scattering effect, but it still feels like something significant is missing.

Anyway, this is how I’m building it. Once the move is over and things settle down, I think I’ll be able to pick up more speed. I’ve been working on this title for quite a long time, so I need to finish it soon.

I still haven’t been able to start Stage 2.

I’m moving soon, and while I don’t have that many tasks to do myself, I keep getting interrupted. I had to go to the registry office to prepare some documents for the move. I thought I was perfectly prepared, with some help from an AI, but the clerk—who looked disheveled and hollow-eyed—just started circling things all over my documents. They mumbled something about needing to print ‘such-and-such document’ from a computer in the back, and “you have to press this button around here,” and so on…

My brain just checked out. I sat down at the computer they pointed to, but I couldn’t even find the website to print the required form. As I was staring blankly at the monitor, wondering what site I was supposed to use, an elderly couple behind me started arguing about whether they’d brought their official seal or not. To my right, someone else was losing their patience, complaining that the homepage wouldn’t even load.

Suddenly, the lyrics of an children’s song popped into my head: “In my dream last night, I had wings and flew up, up, higher than the clouds…” which made me think for the first time, “Wow, that dream sounds deeply problematic.” I was just spacing out, staring at the monitor with my hand on the mouse, when thankfully another employee stepped in and helped me somehow get the paperwork sorted out. It was truly a mystical experience, witnessing the exact point where the pre-modern and modern worlds collide, and something like a Lagrange point between consciousness and the unconscious.

I found a solo dev community by chance and made my first post, hoping to talk about our challenges and offer mutual support. It was completely different from what I expected. How should I put it? It felt like a “crab bucket,” a place very close to the world as seen from an Adlerian perspective. I was surprised at how many people there seem to think of solo development as an identity, something special, or even a privilege.

It seems like the kind of work you couldn’t possibly endure unless you accepted it as your destiny. I’ve always thought that working in such isolation, with almost no feedback or reward—and furthermore, being in a position where you have to choose this path and the fact that you genuinely enjoy it—is something close to a curse.

Phew, finished organizing the backgrounds. I checked all 50 sublevels one by one and cleaned up all the tangled or broken props. I don’t know if it’s related, but after the cleanup, the bug where the build would freeze on first launch has disappeared for now. I feel like a wizard who met Cerberus and claimed he’d discovered something profound – insisting that smearing mud on his body would make the dog unable to see him – but anyway, it worked. I also made a 2.0 trailer with the demo I’ve been updating for about 5 months since releasing it on April 1st. I just finished it and plan to get feedback on Discord first before releasing it publicly. I wanted to take my time making this trailer leisurely, but in the end I rushed through it again.

There were close to 3000 games in this Next Fest. I tried about 50 that caught my eye, and personally Industria 2, Painkiller, and Reanimal stood out. Though are these three even indie games… There seemed to be a ton of Vampire Survivors revised editions, VS + Hades, VS + Diablo clones, and horror games. Steam has clearly expanded the indie game market significantly… but the number of indie games being released seems even bigger…

Stage 2’s world design and event design are finished, and I can start building the levels. I also made music for the Demo 2.0 trailer. During the prologue, when I was still getting used to Cakewalk again and things felt awkward, I bought vocal stems for the first time and made a track – this time I reused those same stems to create something new. Writing a new song from scratch is fun, but it’s also enjoyable to buy vocal stems, reinterpret them, and create within those constraints.
There was a weird issue where the demo wouldn’t run properly the first time but would work fine from the second launch onwards. To try to fix this, I cleaned up the engine and did a fresh build today. Then I opened the editor and, oh my god, the props I’d placed were broken. Many had moved to the origin point, and all the auto-placed props were reset and needed to be refreshed. I was mentally checked out for about an hour before I came back. The silver lining is that gameplay-related stuff was saved in a separate sublevel and seems unaffected. Thinking back, I split a sublevel in two while making the Lotus One hallucination event in the plaza. During the split, when trying to move linked objects, there were cases where it asked “move even though the link will break?” When I clicked no, there was an editor bug that duplicated all the actors I was trying to move right in place. I discovered this later and manually found and deleted the duplicates one by one, but something must have gone wrong in that process… Even if I wanted to rollback, I don’t know which build to rollback to. In the end, I decided to just check all 50 sublevels one by one. Well, might as well use this as meditation time while cleaning up levels… but still, ugh… Back in the day I would’ve been devastated, but after making games solo for a few years, I guess I’ve gotten stronger – I was just flustered for about an hour, then played with my dog and felt better. Ah, I was planning to leisurely work on stages and events while gradually making a trailer, but… well.

I’ve been working on a tram for Stage 2 that travels from the Threshold to Lotus One. While designing the world, I realized that Lotus One is quite far from the Threshold, which called for some form of transportation. Filling the gap with more level content felt like it would compromise the skyline, a simple warp lacked charm, and I also wanted to create a moment for the player to rest. In the end, I chose to build a tram. It has no special gameplay function, but it ended up being quite a bit of work. I think I’ve spent nearly four days on it, and it still needs a bit more polishing.

A notice keeps popping up that Cakewalk by BandLab will no longer be supported as of September 30, urging users to switch to Sonar or Next. I’ve been using it since Cakewalk 4.0 back in the DOS days, and of course, I liked that Cakewalk by BandLab was free. To be honest, I’m so used to it that I feel like there’s no real alternative for me. I can still use it for now, but I’m not sure when the activation might be blocked.

I’ve never actually ridden a tram before, but after making this one, I find myself wanting to go on a trip.

Updated the demo by applying features and improvements I added while making Stage 2 to the first stage. Now when you first interact with the Veil, it also shows Lotus One once (this isn’t from Kim), and I’ve updated all the player attack animations. The player attack animations might be hard to notice as an improvement compared to the amount of work I put into them. Since animation isn’t my specialty, even the base assets seem somewhat lacking.
The foundation work is now pretty solid, so I thought I’d be able to make the game faster, but unexpectedly small additional tasks keep popping up and holding me back. The list of games I want to make should be getting shorter, but it keeps growing. More stories I want to tell keep emerging too. I wish I could make games faster.

I worked on this for 2 days, then thought about scrapping it since it wasn’t turning out how I imagined, but somehow managed to polish it enough to use. This is the screen that appears when you obtain a complex in Lotus One (Stage 2). It’s nothing technically impressive, but I made it with the goal of conveying the story with a kind of retro-futuristic digital art feel. I see a lot of digital art and installation pieces on Pinterest and at exhibitions – there are some truly amazing works. I’m not an expert in this field so I don’t know much, but especially the light-based installations I experienced firsthand at exhibition spaces were incredible. They were absolutely mesmerizing. I’m really curious what goes on in the minds of people who come up with these things. It’s so fascinating how they think of such ideas. Media art had that nice feeling of being directly projected onto backgrounds with movement, but it seemed like many had graphics that were not as polished.

This is an effect I added to try making Stage 2 look more like a virtual space. Stage 2’s story is roughly organized, and once I finish the Complex2 (temporary name) mechanic, it should be mostly done. Gotta keep pushing forward and making it happen.

Just finished roughly organizing the Stage 2 story and about to start working on events. The attached footage shows Lotus One (兀蓮), a network security system. I created it as a motif of a metal lotus floating on the sea, but since the sea is positioned above, the lotus appears upside down, transforming its silhouette into something monster-like – the complete opposite image, which I liked.

Lotus One was originally 兀然 (Ol-Yeon), meaning “standing alone with dignity.” But when I decided to use the lotus motif, I noticed the Chinese character for lotus (蓮) had the same pronunciation as “yeon” in Ol-Yeon, so it became 兀蓮. Same pronunciation as Ol-Yeon (originally Ol-Lyeon, but let’s just say it’s the same as Ol-Yeon), but now meaning “a lotus standing alone and upright.” The English name also changed from simply “Ol-Yeon” to “Lotus One” (not Lotus 123). It ended up fitting well with the story content too.

I didn’t even know the character 兀 before – I happened to see this Chinese character that looked similar to pi, and since its meaning was good, I ended up using it. Even creating the threshold feels like something that drifted away from my original intention. Beyond is the virtual world where most people live, so it should be bustling with people and more similar to reality, which would be difficult and boring for me to create alone. So I conceived the Threshold as a cache-like virtual space, but due to spoilers I can’t say much – though story-wise, the necessary space and reasons naturally attached themselves to it.

Looking at how all these elements came together, even though I created them, there are so many meaningful coincidences that it doesn’t feel like I made them. I increasingly feel like I’m just fishing things out from the back of my mind and bringing them into reality. I once read somewhere about someone dismissing this kind of experience as nonsense, which I found fascinating. Maybe they’ve had many experiences of their own experiences being denied or not understood.