This month went by really fast.

It puts things into perspective, like, last year I traveled and did so many things. 2024 felt extremely fulfilling and slow in a good way. 2025 has been instead all about locking in— about getting stuff done and fully focusing on finishing this game. It’s working out so far, and I think I’m more confident than ever we’ll pull this off within our internal deadline. There’s no crunch, and yet… work life is just so boring. I think if I let a camera record my daily life I’d become suicidal. I’d see that footage and feel terrible upon the realization that all I’ve been doing since January is waking up and sitting in front of a monitor.

This doesn’t mean it’s ALL I do, I’m obviously exaggerating. I go out on weekends, hang out with friends, I go to raves and concerts. This month I’m actually taking a little one-week vacation somewhere in Europe. I do my best to actually have a comfy existence, don’t get me wrong.

What I’m saying here is that making games at this scale is a lonely, boring affair.

It’s fun to put things together and see them in action. It’s fun to spend two hours figuring out cool compositions and colors. Editing dialogues where changing a word transforms the overall feel of a sentence. That’s fun. When I say it’s boring and lonely it’s because there’s this lack of a more dynamic sense of excitement and camaraderie. It’s not like filming a movie, where you go to a location with your crew to get shit done. Or going on tour with a band where you get to shoot the shit in between gigs.

This is not me glazing one profession over the other, don’t get me wrong, and similar things can happen in games. The problem is we’re indie as fuck. We got no office, everyone lives super far away from each other, and the game is designed in a way where stuff like motion capture or voice acting aren’t really that necessary. All that’s needed to build this game is to sit down and look at Unity for hours on end until it’s 5pm and my apartment starts looking like a prison.

There are some glimpses of what I want for the future, though.

When we organized Sukeban Visions in Akihabara (video coming soon, I promise) or back when we revealed 45PB at Bitsummit in Kyoto, there was this spark about it all. Like, this is how much I’m missing out on. Working with my crew in person is like, the coolest shit I can imagine, and I want more of that.

A friend once said I waste too much time worrying about what things could be instead of accepting reality. Yes, it was said in a very rude and almost insensitive way. I’m definitely sugarcoating his words. Point is, what he meant is that instead of working towards improving my current reality, all I would do is get sad and avoid moving a finger about it, and I think that’s why this doesn’t feel like I’m bitching. If anything, I’ve just identified something I don’t like about making games, and once 45PB ships, I’ll make sure to steer the ship towards a more human way of doing things. Games don’t have to be just slaving away on a computer on your own until it’s done. I think making games can be as exciting as going on tour and filming on location. Hell, even on this project I’ve had trips to insane places and done urbex just to gather textures and references, so I know it can be done.

I don’t know. Making games is awesome but boring, and I don’t want months to fly by like this ever again. I want years to be long as fuck and create cool things with my friends until I die. Fuck this computer shit, lol, idk.

Oh yeah, the game.

We’re moving onto chapter four. That’s good. We made a series of choices that I think I outlined in my last log, which is to make compromises on some aspects of level design that are frankly not worth fussing over. This is why I was able to polish chapter 3 so fast compared to chapter 2, which is still largely a gray boxed map with really cool encounters but still unfinished. Meanwhile chapter 3 is like, almost as polished as the first chapter we showed last year during Bitsummit. There’s a lot on readability that needs to be addressed, but other than that that shit’s already fire. I even underestimated the runtime because it was smaller than chapter 2 in total size, but all our playthroughs take almost an hour to complete. It’s all a good sign.

We still have to finish the boss fight, but thankfully it’s not something I have focus on all by myself and can let the programmer handle it with my direction. While he does that I can safely move onto chapter 4, see what needs to be done and lock in. The advantage this time is that I don’t have to redesign chapter 4 like I redesigned chapter 3, which had its whole layout done again from scratch. Ch4 is like an actually complete level sans finalized encounters and textures, so let’s see how long that’s gonna take us.

Had a chance as well of focusing a little bit more on writing and cutscene direction. We’re pretty proud of what we’re achieving, and we arrived to this sweet spot where we know where things are going, but now that we can afford to visualize how everything will play out on the screen, we can safely write and edit stuff to further enhance the vision instead of blindly trusting the word vomit that’s the current final draft. I do have to go back and retroactively edit some earlier dialogue, but in a genius move from our past selves, the game is not that word heavy anyway! So this sort of task is not at all stressful to me.

Enjoy these screenshots from actual in-game cutscenes and environments.

That’s it for now, see you next time.