This will be a short update because I’m exhausted. This was a long and productive week, but it was also pretty intense. The last two weeks were probably the hardest since the project began.

Last week, I was hopefully clear about how hard it was to write Chapter 1. What I omitted was that I then suspected that some key gameplay principles the game relied on were irreparably broken. Writing Chapter 1 was so difficult because the gameplay I had in mind for months was boring and repetitive, and I couldn’t simply fit a good story around it.

Last weekend and the subsequent days were about saving the project from what could have been a fatal blow. It came suddenly after weeks of smooth development, like violent turbulence in the middle of an otherwise uneventful flight. And last weekend, the thought of completely rebooting the project crossed my mind.

I didn’t seriously entertain cancellation for long because I began this project with a huge set of notes and ideas I had pondered throughout the years. When thinking about it all, I suddenly remembered an older gameplay variation I couldn’t previously make work in my head. Fortunately, that was the starting point for a subtle but critical change in how the user interacts with the story; I went back to my Chapter 1 writeup, and it fits perfectly. As I had coded the engine to be pretty flexible, implementing this change took only a day of coding and another day of tweaking the story.

After the changes, I could finally see a good story unfold. What had felt forced and hard to understand flowed beautifully. Even if I have to make further tweaks, I feel that this is absolutely the right gameplay direction, and I’m fairly confident I can write the entire story around it.

As I’ve been using Super Mario Bros analogies, imagine when the team thought about Super Mario growing when eating a mushroom, while before, it was just boring jumping around. A small change with a huge gameplay impact!

Next week I’ll talk about the plans for the Outsider demo, which will certainly not arrive in November. This said, I had asked for volunteers to help playtest the gameplay in a barebones development version of Outsider, which you now know was due to last week’s concerns (I called it “one aspect of the game”). Well, this could not have come at a better time because I can use that playtest to validate this week’s changes! I feel very confident I will have this version ready in 1 or 2 weeks.

When you’re working on a tough project, sometimes you stare at the abyss, and the abyss stares back at you. When that happens, just give it the middle finger.