So I’m gonna try to do this at the end/start of every month where I talk about the things I’m working on. I used to do this on a weekly basis as youtube blogs, but I lost motivation to keep those up when it was clear that there was no one paying attention to those. (Then again, he case will likely be the same here.)

Most of my focus has been on the next gamebook project. August wrapped up my personal alpha playtests and it already lead to some changes. September was all about trying to finish up all the actual writing; the scenery descriptions and the NPC dialogue branches, which turned out to be far more expansive than I anticipated.

The Metroid RPG was 80 pages long total (including promos for my comics).This next book is already over 120 pages long, and that’s only 1 dungeon out of the planned 3. I worry that the scale of this project has ballooned beyond my capabilities (again) but 2/3rds of that page count is all just dialogue branches. They are far more simpler than the 1 from the Metroid RPG, but there’s 10 NPCs you can talk to, so the sheer volume of dialogue options is whats taking up the page count.

In videogames like Mass Effect, you can hide a lot of redundant choices by having the same response to 2 different reactions. In a game book where you have to show where the pages go, you can’t easily do that.

Still, I ended up doing a majority of the NPCs that will be in the final game, so hopefully with less NPC’s I gotta work on for the remaining 2 dungeons, it wont be as much of an exhausting undertaking. Although I might have to commission someone to make custom software to make assembling pages far easier and quicker, cuz doing it all by hand is the WORST part of making these gamebooks so far.

The Beta build is just about complete, but I’m going to hold off on releasing it for public playtests until January. Holiday releases are starting to come out, and I don’t expect many people to divert their attention away from the latest console releases to play an incomplete version of my incredibly niche-genre of games. (Including myself, I’m gonna be playing MechWarrior Clans as soon as it drops, or as soon as I get a PS5. Whichever happens first.)

If there are people who are interested in playing the demo, leave a comment & I’ll DM you some possibilities we can work out.

This month I’ve also been flopping back and forth with 2 other games I’ve been developing, both table-top games. I can’t go into specifics about them just yet, but I’ll include the proto-character sheet I developed for the game book. After 3 drafts, I’m really proud with how it turned out.

~Eli.