DL6: End of the Beginning

I haven’t been consistently productive at my creative goals across an entire year since I was in school, so it feels great to step back at this milestone and realize I’ve accomplished something. No one else in the whole world worried about whether a Twine game working through a multi-generational family mythology got started in 2024, or whether the first section of it would be polished enough to draw the line and move on by the end of January, 2025. Just me, and it feels momentarily monumental to stick my flag in the sand and yawp at the wind.

Last dev log (over two months ago by the time this is published), I talked a lot about what I accomplished over 2024, so I’ll focus on the work I’ve tried to do over the last couple months to bring Part 1 to temporary completion. I wanted consistency across what I’ve developed so far to set a bar for what follows, even if there might be significant changes that get flowed back into Part 1 as I move into Part 2 and eventually Part 3. That meant reading all of it out loud over and over to fix issues as small as dozens of unnecessary commas I love to pepper my writing with and as large as implementing gated side-nodes across what I’ve written to add weight to the attributes the player is incrementing.

• At the level of language, I found it helpful to curl up away from my desk with my phone and play through the current build and read the words. I took screenshots of each node I wanted to edit / develop further with some brief notes overlaid. Starting in late November until now, I’ve generated and resolved over 200 revision notes. Separating the identification of issues from the implementation of the fixes made the process more palatable and led to a lot of good ideas that I may have brushed aside if I plowed through changes as I found them to keep things moving.

• A relatively minor issue I cleaned up is changing the way attribute points display when they’re gained. Previously, if the player visited the same node twice, they wouldn’t gain additional points, but the point gain would still fade in, signaling something happened even though the stat number remained the same. Now the fade-in effect only happens on the first visit.

• Another readability change I implemented was having the perspective & time tag fade in slowly when the story transitions from trunk to branch. Now (hopefully) that transition is more visible to the player and less potentially confusing.

• I added a passive save system that returns the player to the title screen, but gives them the option to continue from where they left off.

• Point gains were normalized across Part 1 with greater impact from branch nodes than trunk nodes. Previously I had haphazardly assigned the point gains, but they escalated too quickly and felt haphazard, so I standardized the gains and applied the standard.

• The ending of Part 1 got updated to flesh out the conflict between the brothers and maintain tension better, as well as the reveal of a new character to be added in Part 2.

I can’t say I’m terribly happy with it, but if I waited for myself to be happy with something I’d never move forward. The frustration that accompanies burnout or whatever the mood is that sets in when I can’t bring myself to work on something anymore used to stop me entirely, but now I’m trying to give myself space to move on to something else (Part 2) and return to what I’ve worked on over the last year plus some other time, refreshed and able to view the work with new (older) eyes. 

So onto new things—the old things will always be waiting.