itch.io

Never is a strong word. When I first started this game, I was writing it after work and working overtime to afford an artist. Now, we have a team of 6 people, with a 7th person starting soon. The more money I make, the larger the team grows, so we can get the game built faster.

It has been almost 4 years, wow. But we are not "just now" starting over. We announced over a year ago we'd be making the Unity switch and started building the visual novel framework then, while also finishing up our time in Ren'Py.

To me, the game was not fine before. We were running into so many issues using the Ren'Py engine that it led to our longest wait between builds. (7 months) It was getting increasingly difficult trying to make Ren'Py play nice with all the ideas and systems we had. We were bending over backward, making them work suboptimally in Ren'Py when we could just... switch engines where that stuff is easier and better suited.

As for the story, we did not scratch everything. A lot of the story still remains; we are only a little bit into the restart. I did not "throw all that stuff away" at all. This new opening is set before Isaac meets Hazel, building up his character and establishing his arc better this time around. Not sure why people think I am throwing everything away when, over the past year, since I announced the Unity switch, I have been very open that a lot of the story will stay roughly the same. 

And yeah, I did figure out where the story was supposed to go. When I first started writing HL, it was to make a short porn game to see if I wanted to do this. People liked it, and I kept the story going. As the story grew, I realized the story I wanted to tell. Later episodes are more coherent and well done. But the early episodes, where I was writing a random short porn game, still existed. 

The early stuff just didn't fit what the story had become. So, since we were already switching engines and rebuilding, I figured now was the best (and likely only time) to restart the narrative with stronger direction and focus.

I know that right now, people are doomcrying that I have completely restarted the game and everything is terrible.

But games restart all the time. It's a common industry practice. And not one that always ends in disaster either.

In like a year or so, once more of the game is out and people see what we're going for with more content, people will generally think this was the right move.

Until then, I just gotta lock in and keep working.