Progress Update 1: Nightcap
It's been almost a month of silence, but here I am again. For those that for one reason or another mostly know me from this blog (unlikely but I suppose theoretically possible), or in general don't know a lot about who I am or how I operate, my personality is very much feast or famine in most things. I either want to see friends every day or I want to play games and not move from one spot on the couch for days at a time. I want to go on adventures and eat good food and find cute cafes or I want to save every penny and cook every meal.
This unending juxtaposition of my own conflicting opinions fighting for dominance in my brain can get overwhelming, and I'm sure frustrating for those around me sometimes, but it's what I've learned to work with rather than against when it comes to living my life. This yo-yoing leads me to periods of constant work, and periods of none. That's not only why I haven't worked on Observation (and might not still for the foreseeable future), but it's why I took a brief break from working on Nightcap after the initial hyper focus wore off from starting the project.
Luckily, I've come full circle and managed to make some more headway on the game! It may not be much, but I wanted to give a quick update of what's happened in the past month or so:
- I lost about 20 passages of fully finished intro dialogue when Twine didn't actually save my archive, but I remembered what those were supposed to be and fixed them
- The same thing happened again not even a week later, forcing me to again rewrite the same about 20 passages from scratch
- I have since started archiving more unique versions of the project as a safety precaution, but I also now never close the app out of fear it'll happen again
- I made real progress! I more than doubled the number of completed passages, finishing the first part of the intro and moving on to another (see image below)
While I've already changed around the section that was "completed," a lot of the core of the first day has stayed the same. Just a few details have been flushed out to make everything feel more fluid. I also took 30 minutes to change the name of every passage to something that will make the process of following the branching paths much easier as time goes on. While I'm sure this all will also change in the future, I'm pretty pleased for a first draft so far!
Art progress has been less noteworthy. I haven't picked back up the pixel art course I've been taking for a little over a week now while we've had a friend in town staying with us. I'm more easily distracted wanting to spend this time visiting, and I'm not beating myself up about it. I will continue to make progress soon, I've been itching to do more art, but I have all the time in the world to continue forward with this passion project and a limited amount of it to catch up.
While there's much more progress than this that's actually been made on the project (a Trello board with tasks assigned, many decisions about where the story will go and what the vibes are for art and music, etc.), I'm hoping to finish up the intro by the end of the year! A stretch goal, I'm sure, but I don't feel I'm ever more than one good day away from knocking it out.
Now if I could manufacture that good day on command.