on hold indefinitely

Hey, so. It's been 82 days since my last devlog and I've sort of been avoiding doing anything here because it's hard to come to the realization you tried to do a thing and it's just not going to happen. Admitting to failure and accepting it by writing it out is honestly incredibly hard. At the same time, however, I'd also hate leaving things unsaid for those kind people who check back occasionally.

So, to put it shortly: I'm not working on Star Stealing Prince: Definitive for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of factors.

The main one is that it stopped sparking joy a long time ago. When you open a project and all you feel is a complete feeling of dread because it will never live up to what's in your head because you out-scoped yourself, you stop working on it. This isn't wholly new for me, but this one particularly hurts because Star Stealing Prince is very special to me and I can't even get it together to give it the polish it deserves. Maybe that in itself is a failing too--the need to somehow give it what it deserves when it's done its job of touching its audience already. I'll never have the prowess other RPG Maker games have gotten to be able to do amazing remakes, but I'm also incredibly bad with attention so it wouldn't have helped anyway. Making the original and the fallout from having something vaguely popular get ripped part by the community back then should have been enough to know that trying to remake SSP was going to go badly in the long run. The original is something that'll continue to live in the hearts of the people it touched already and you know what, that should be enough for me.

Another reason is I can't make a game all by myself if it's anything beyond a simple visual novel (and why I haven't made another one is its own minefield about perfectionism and never living up to what you made before but I am not going into that here). And I will never have the funds to hire people to help me nor will I ever have the know-how to present something to a publisher and ask for said funds to be able to do so. And beyond that, the art is old (and I do not have the energy to redo it), the gameplay isn't hitting the way I want it to and I can't figure out why, and I just bit off more than I could chew. Hence the out-scoping myself. I thought I could do it and I was wrong.

And lastly, my life right now isn't the best. Game make requires a lot of hats and when I'm not having a good time, I can't juggle the hats. If you've been paying attention to my twitter, I'm sure you're thinking "but you're writing a lot!" and you aren't wrong! I have been, but it's a lot less hats than game making and I wholeheartedly love the writing process which is why I can do it. (Honestly, if I could sit here and write a game and someone else makes it, I'd be golden.) I've been focusing on writing a lot more lately because I can do it well enough (and even that's shaky right now; I am terrified of publishing a book next month and failing that too) and it helps me forget how terrible some things in life is going whereas game make I would hit wall after wall of frustration and cycle back to "wow, things really suck".

So, combine losing the spark of joy, being overwhelmed because I can't actually do what I set out to do and outside help isn't going to happen, and life becoming an existential dread cycle without knowing how to make sure it'll work out in the end, means game making to this degree is just not happening.

Am I going to give up game-making altogether? No. I do actually have something small I've been chipping away at because it's not as big or as daunting as Star Stealing Prince, but I don't know when/if that'll ever see the light of day. I may run into the same issues I'm having here, but this time I'm not going to post much about it until I can see the finish line.

Anyway, I'm going to leave the demo up because I still think it's a nice prototype of what I was trying to do and what I can do when I've got my life stable. Maybe one day when life doesn't feel like it's crashing and burning, I can come back to it. I hope so! But right now, it's on hold indefinitely. Thank you to everyone who donated to it or cheered me on. Those funds did indeed go right back to the game and it also means a lot that you believed in me. I'm sorry it didn't really pan out.

Thanks for reading.