Third year of “Wright Files: Egerton’s Pickle” development

Last Monday marked exactly the third anniversary of starting work on my tiny, super-short mystery adventure game, which was supposed to take a maximum of 6 months to develop. In a few days, it will be exactly one year since I publicly revealed the game (optimistically assuming that I would manage to finish the game by January 2024). And yet here I am on a day when, despite three years of development, not only is the game still not released, but it can be openly admitted that it has not been actively developed for almost a year.

However, it wouldn't be entirely true to say that work on the game has stopped completely. I simply did what I do best – I started a new, smaller side-project (which was supposed to take a maximum of 2 weeks). But let's start from the beginning.

I keep a fairly detailed work journal, so I can easily trace what happened over the last 12 months that led to the disruption of game’s development. And quite a few things have piled up! The first distraction came in July 2023, when Twitter began transforming into X (by the way, for me it will always remain Twitter). However, this was nothing compared to what Unity served us in September 2023. The commotion caused by the announcement of plans to introduce a runtime fee flustered me so much that for a long period I wasn't able to muster even a bit of motivation to work on the game (especially that I was already struggling with 3D asset creation for all the props I wanted to have in the mansion).

Of course this does not mean that I was doing nothing development-wise. I’ve just started procrastinating heavily, looking for every possible excuse not to actually work on the game. And the excuses were plenty: toying with Godot as an alternative for Unity, resurrecting my old prototypes, creating new prototypes (i.e. delving more into low-poly 3D + pixel-art visual style, testing new code architecture ideas, prototyping an Android application to play YouTube music in the background, etc.). Wherever you look, always something more interesting to do than to grind on parts I’m not comfortable with.

And then, at the end of November 2023, Thinky Game Jam has been announced. If you’re not familiar with TGJ, it’s a game jam focusing strictly on “thinky” games: puzzles, mysteries, investigations, detective games, etc. Have you noticed “detective games”? Yup, that sounded like a good justification to get me back on track – to participate in a “detective games” jam by creating some really small detective micro-game using code base of “Egerton’s Pickle”. This also aligned nicely with my overarching idea of making a series of episodic adventure / mystery / detective games with the same main protagonist within the same universe (thus the “Wright Files” prefix). This micro-game would serve as a complement to the story presented in “Egerton’s Pickle” depicting the history of the friendship forming between the main protagonist and Charles Cavendish.

In retrospect, this was exactly the moment when the “Egerton’s Pickle” has landed on the shelf for an indefinite period (that is, essentially defined – at least until the end of work on the micro-game for TGJ). Two weeks to complete seemed like a quite reasonable deadline, and initially, work was progressing really smoothly. The initial scope was small, and most elements were already implemented in the main project. I further simplified some parts (e.g. dialogues) to reduce the amount of work required. But then I hit the same issue as with “Egerton’s Pickle” – 3D assets. The TGJ has ended and I’ve had about 80% of mechanics and 20% of props and level design. Again, I’ve bitten off more than I could chew.

Yup, this is the bane of me. I’m a programmer first and everything else second so all other areas of game development are a challenge for me. That’s why I struggle so much with visual side of my games and why I try to simplify it as much as possible while striving for something more than simple 2D top-down graphics.

Right after TGJ concluded I’ve decided to push on with what I’ve done until then telling myself that there was so little left to do. That the story and mechanics were ready, that I just needed to get through finishing the visual side of the project. How long would that take? A month or two, right? And then came the usual case of scope creep because not being able to get the style I have envisioned, I’ve started to look for the ways to make the game more interesting mechanics- and story-wise. I’ve also decided to refactor substantial part of game’s architecture to streamline elements I was not comfortable with (or I found limiting) during development of “Egerton’s Pickle”.

And yet here I am on a day when, despite 8 months of development, the TGJ side-project is not done. It’s also bigger in scope and more advanced architecturally than what I’ve had when TGJ has started. The only consolation is that I'll be able to use all the improvements implemented in this not-so-micro-anymore game to finish “Egerton’s Pickle”. Oh, wait! I think I told myself something similar a couple of months ago.

P.S.: I've attached a small GIF to lighten the mood a little (let this door situation be a metaphor of me trying to actually finish this project).