Dev Journal: Alternative Possibilities

I really need to find a better way to work these into my routine. When I'm having a hard time pushing past a challenge I let myself push off doing a dev journal, partly since I feel like publicly admitting "this is hard D:" would be a hit to my personal motivation. And then when I'm past the challenge and on a bit of a roll, I stop thinking about doing anything else, partly since I don't want to distract myself and lose that momentum!

Which uh, has pushed a lot of my life aside in weird ways that I should be working on anyway. But yeah. Then when I've finished a big push and I'm relaxing it's easy to put off a journal for "tomorrow" so I can take a break, and... it just doesn't really fit in anywhere. I guess part of it is just that I'm still a little shy about putting myself out there so often and reporting all my successes and failures. Which is probably pretty silly, considering how long I've been putting together games on a crowd-funded budget at this point.

So that's something I still need to work on. The good news is, things are going fairly well at the moment. I was pretty frustrated at the start of this month, lots of things weren't going well, but once I switched gears and started really getting into writing again, stuff gradually came together. It's been nice throwing some passion into it and learning to remember that yeah... I do this for a living because it's fun to write. Sometimes I let it turn into a chore or an obligation, but that's not what this should be. It should be about embracing the joys of creation. I think that's a lesson I've had to re-learn a few times along the way.

That said, I'll admit that the stuff I'm working on has made it... harder. I'm finally digging deep into the sex scene we teased in the original build for Project Matchmaker, and I've got a couple different variants finished, but... well, there are a lot of variants, as it turns out, trying to make it open to a lot of different sexual anatomy. Which was kinda one of the things I liked least about writing for MVOL... so at this point I'm wondering if I don't have better options for moving forward in a way where I don't need to write the same one sex scene three to six times over. Maybe at the least, other possible routes can have their own sex scenes that are less complicated and it won't feel like a cop-out once players have already seen the original. I don't know. I'll have to feel out the possibilities for a good compromise. It feels a little like a waste throwing so much effort into writing one scene so many different ways when any one player will probably only play through one or two of the possibilities.

And of course, this is supposed to be where I'm testing the possibilities with mixing in different projects, but I also realized that I feel kinda "obligated" to get another update out on Matchmaker specifically since it's supposed to be my "main" project and I've worked on it so little, comparatively. Plus, I've been getting a lot of positive feedback around Project Wild One, and I have to admit, it's been prominent in the back of my head. I'm starting to think once I've got the two projects about "level" I could try putting out a poll and seeing how people feel about each. If PWO is more exciting, then maybe I should switch it to my main focus? Honestly, I'd rather have at least three projects to choose between before I offer a vote like that, but right now the main new side project I've been thinking of starting up would definitely be one that should stay a side project. It'd be more of a novelty/experiment with an aspect of game design I haven't used much, but which I'm pretty passionate about and I'd like to try my hand at. I'm not sure if I'm ready to tackle all the foundation work that would be needed for another of my more substantial projects just yet.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to have a survey soonish, then another down the road, anyway. Hm. No matter how much I work, I always wish I had more done, sooner. So far I haven't taken a fair shake at "work on whatever you want from day to day," I haven't really given myself a proper chance there, but it's true that I'm worried that that much freedom may lead to choice paralysis, kinda like when I never know what to play out of my whole steam collection.

Maybe it'll be more effective if it's more like... I pick one particular task to focus on for several days or a couple weeks, so I can build up momentum on it, then when I'm getting tired of it I switch to another. And if on a particular day I'm feeling especially inspired, it's okay to splice something else in. This is another whole way of doing things I'm really not used to. I'll have to try and work it in, if I can stop worrying so much about "strategizing my work schedule."

Anyway, that's where I am at the moment. Lots of worrying and wondering, but working steadily on that new content. It's been a long time since I punched up some proper interactive prose... about two normal-ish humanoids already... though it still really feels weird lumping it all out into these tiny pages, and it's giving it a different feel and pacing I think. Will have to see how folks like it. It's turning my style a little more compact, I think.

Thanks for reading!