Sorry about the big gaps as of late. The combination of grind and general frustration about some designs not really working out in the expected ways has me quite worn down. By this time of the day all I wanna do is sit back and play Bloodborne.

It’s particularly frustrating because the combat we have is quite good and it will only get better; That part I’m so proud of. But I can’t, for the life of me, come up with a great loop. All the ideas we’ve prototyped are just boring, or I’m not experienced enough to pull them off and make it meaningful… It’s breaking my brain apart in ways I didn’t expect.

Like, not even copying the loop from other games is an effective strategy if I want to finish the project within my lifetime. The number of things I can do, and do well, is staggering. But none of those solutions will work in the short term. They’re investments that need to be done and require more manpower, experience, and a myriad of other things. It’s all stuff that I can’t realistically do by myself and one programmer in months time.

It sounds gloomy and spells doom at Sacrifice because it frankly is a grim scenario I’m facing. We’ve been in the process of downsizing in every possible aspect and I think what we have is attainable. It’s the actual gameplay loop that needs to be compelling and encourage players to see the full story.

I’m also worried about length, since the game needs to be at a certain price point for this to work and be profitable. I hate thinking in those terms like you wouldn’t believe, but such is life living in this fucked system. Art can’t proliferate if the artist doesn’t eat.

Work has been steady, though. Fucked up shit aside.

We’ve been working on the things we know are fun and can get better while writing and drawing level layouts. Discussing lore a fuckton over 5-hour calls, modeling props, texturing stuff… The usual grind. I think we have most of the game already written; at least the story, not the scenarios ’cause of the above issues.

This week I want to focus on giving the player more shit to do during battles and increase prototyping speed by adjusting some of our tools to require less steps to do simple things. Some of it is inevitable but a lot other can be better.

It’s one of those days where I think “man, if only I could do short games for the rest of my life and be happy”. You know, just doing whatever I want from a cabin in fuck-knows-where. Unbothered by life and people just enjoying my brand of shitty inconsistent art.

We’ll come up with something, and this will be one hell of a learning experience when it’s all said and done. Commercial and critical bomb or not. It’s just a matter of finding the sweet spot between ambition and reality. VA-11 Hall-A and every other small project was shipped successfully because they were all small from the get-go. This is legit the first time we set out to do something big, and boy, is it biting me in the ass now.

It will be fine. There’s always a solution for everything. All I need to do is escape the tunnel vision to see the light ahead.