I looked at my phone yesterday evening and saw a calendar reminder for today. Today is the day that I made my first commit on my project last year. Holy shit. Granted, I've only been working on some nights, mornings and weekends, but so much has been done over the past year.

First off, it hasn't felt like it's been a year. Life really starts to cruise by when you're working full time. I've been trying to combat that by being generally more present in the moment, but even so, you look back and it's all gone by so quick. Luckily, still full of lots of good!

I wanted to do something momentous for today, to celebrate the occasion. Something like truthfully announcing the project publicly. I thought it would be a fun thing to do, but I also still don't think the project is ready to be announced, at least not just yet. I also don't want to rush the announcement, I'd rather have something fun to show alongside the announcement.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the playtest. I got some seriously valuable feedback from you, and I'm taking it to heart as I move forward. It was heartwarming to see that everyone who played it enjoyed it (at least in some capacity), and that most everyone realized something early on in the playtest: this game will fuck you right up.

I don't want to make the game inaccessible, in fact, I want to make sure the player feels that they have complete control, but the original spark of inspiration for this game was one thing: if you step outside of town, you better damn well be prepared to fight for your life.

I think I've captured that to some degree, albeit some tuning is needed. I'm excited to have surmounted the foundation of the game. It's on to content creation now. I've set up useful tooling, both in and out of game, to allow me to get going in full force on making towns, quests, enemies and people. Now it's a matter of hunkering down, and coding / writing / spriting / composing as hard as I can. I have a long way to go, both in terms of where I want the game to be content-wise, and where I want it to be graphics-wise. I've never been strong with the art side of things, and this project will, hopefully, be the one to push me past my limits.

Thanks again to everyone for your support. I hope to have a page on itch.io or something soon. I'm so tired of referring to this project as "my game," but I'm not quite ready to put it out there yet either. Good first impressions, and all.

More to come, as always. Until I have an actual devlog somewhere, 64D will remain where I put the first looks at what I'm doing. Even then, I'll still drop the good stuff here :D

~tg

Next blog I do will probably be about an awesome setup I've made recently for writing dialogue trees. If that interests you at all, stay tuned.