Dev Log: March 30, 2025
I have not been updating the dev log. What I’ve been doing is drafting a post every 2 weeks or so containing some variation of “I’m struggling”.
I’m not struggling right now. With practice I’ve learned that, in the interest of both conveying and alleviating my pain, it’s best that I manage and document these things offline and try not to put them straight into words. For whose benefit? The online ecosystem that thrives on daily anxiety and false expectations? We all hate it, don’t we? I’m not putting in any more there than the price of entry, which is already too steep.
I don’t need to pretend that I’m happy and fulfilled every day as an artist. Some days I am very miserable with what it seems I cannot do. Some days I am positively manic with the potential of my work. And most days I’m pleasantly chipping away at something bigger than a day, bigger than a year, something definitive and hopeful and lasting.
Look, I’ve just been busy. The biggest playtest yet has been underway since February. We are only halfway through, and the majority of feedback is the helpful “this is broken” kind and not the flowery adoration I’ve been sweatily listening for. The only work I can do right now is technical fixes and adding whatever written assets the game is missing.
“Written assets”. What a bummer. I’ve reduced the entirety of my work day to a spreadsheet - and a difficult one at that. These are incredibly taxing little boxes to fill. They are often entire conversations, heartfelt impressions of books and online experiences, plucked from either ancient memory or fresh research and relevant to plot/mechanics. They need to be good, and they need to be done fast. There is no time.
That said, I’m getting plenty of help from the testers and editor Matt, the work gets done even as despair cycles in and out, and after my latest rough patch I’m back in the swing of things. I’ve gotten myself horned up for less exciting things, and I think my output is good. I see the value in this work. Each spreadsheet box amounts to a small jewel for the player to examine. When I play through it myself, they feel pretty tasty to me. I’m less than a week out from the 3rd (out of 4) phase of testing and feeling good that it’ll all be hot and ready.
In my reluctant downtime from writing, I made some new key art for PT2’s Steam store page. I will soon be showing the game in-person (more on that when I can say) and wanted a new close-up of Mara for this:
I was also recently on the Save Your Game podcast talking a little bit about PT and a lot about Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, a 1993 adventure game that influenced my own work (in a few choice non-cursed ways). It was a lot of fun and you can listen here.
Dev Log: January 17, 2025
Haven’t chronicled Perfect Tides: Station to Station’s development in a while. Besides getting caught up in the holidays and travel, there have been periods of frantic optimism and despair, alternating weekly until pretty recently, when a realistic idea of what I’ve got began to emerge. These days I am calm and focused and enormously productive. The game is not expanding. The gaps have been closing.
I am preparing the playtest. It will be rolled out in 4 parts, but I must get everything pretty much feature complete before I begin the 1st round. This is mainly due to the AGS engine’s limitations when it comes to performing updates that won’t break existing saves. But it seems like a good idea to have as real a game as possible in the very first build. And I gotta say, I think I have a pretty real one.
Playtesting begins in February. If you are interested in being a crucial part of the game’s development, I would love to have you. Simply join the Perfect Tides Discord, where the testing will take place, and you will be notified as soon as recruitment begins (this is the only thing I @everyone for - promise!). Or sign up for the newsletter, to be notified by e-mail.
I will be at MAGFest in National Harbor, MD next weekend, from January 25-28th. Not exhibiting this year, just walking around. Say hello if you see me - I’d love to meet friends both new and old.
Dev Log: December 11, 2024
I’m having one of those weeks where I panic because the game isn’t done, won’t be done by x date, will never be done, etc. By now, I recognize this as a need to shift gears, but it takes a few days to fully get there.
One of my giveaway panic-brain behaviors is working on parts of the game that have very little to do with the task at hand, and quickly becoming overwhelmed by how neglected these parts are. Of course they’re neglected… they’re not important right now! You can playtest an entire game without them. From this vantage point, I eventually pivot again to something that IS important - maybe more important than I’ve been acknowledging - but isn’t the thing I’m desperately avoiding. In this way, I can feel like the things I’m worried about ARE getting done, with the best possible attention to quality.
These past 2 days, that brings me back to animation. While this work isn’t technically needed to run a playtest, it weighs heavy on me. My biggest fear is putting off pivotal cutscene animation until the very end of development and making something boring, rushed, not what I meant. I also want the playtesters to experience at least some of the animation, which after all is part of how the game rewards you.
I occasionally work on minor animated scenes in a sort of modular way (draw a frame here and there, whenever I have time) which produces mediocre but passable results, and until a few days ago I was sweating approaching more major scenes that way, due to lack of time. Animation needs more than half of my attention. Animation needs my obession. Anything less would be a waste. And ultimately, it doesn’t take long when I’m in it, because I stick to it until it’s right.
I guess it’s just daunting to go looking for that obsession, to imagine throwing myself fully into so many things, as opposed to patiently, pleasantly chipping away at Game Tasks #1-10000. These creative bursts do not always happen during standard work hours. It’s magical - unpredictable. And it will all disappear into something bigger one day.