MARCH 2026

MARCH 2026 UPDATE

I wrote this back in the first week of April, then I didn’t realize I hadn’t posted it.

The panel at tora-con was a success. Got a lot of people who came, a lot of engagement, lots of people wanted to talk afterwards and chat, which was a relief. However I feel like I could’ve done the presentation better. Despite all my rehearsing this was still my first time doing an unscripted presentation. I feel like I didn’t make my points as clearly and succinctly as I should have.

Despite it being a success on paper, I’m still haunted by my shortcomings, which is why I've been procrastinating on the video. I’m scared to look over the footage.

To add to the disappointment, while people signed up to be playtesters for gunriders, no one has responded to my follow up emails. Plus my website hasn’t seen any change in visitors or attention. Getting to my website, garner interest in my game, and getting my name out there was the main reason why I wanted to do this panel, and to see none of those secondary goals accomplished anything was kinda soul crushing.

Am I asking for too much? I feel like I’m doing all the things needed to garner an audience and none of it is working. There’s no one who can tell me if I'm doing something wrong, and back when I had "professionals" help me, they couldn’t figure it out either.

I think all of this is why my heart still isn’t in the Zelda RPG. I thought getting all the giant robot stuff out of my system would create a need to get back into the RPG mindset, but I still can’t get myself fired up like I used to. I have since adopted a new workflow with the project: Touch it everyday.

Instead of trying to force myself to work on the project for long stints, I’ve instead told myself that it’s ok to get only 1 thing done on it each day. Whether that’s a single drawing, to something little as reviewing the text I already wrote to determine what can be cut and moved around.

Cuz I’ve reached the point of the project where I decided to make cuts in order to move stuff around to fill the gaping holes that I’m hung up on. I’ve been working on this thing for so long that I’m becoming less attached to certain ideas. The more you work on something, the more resentful you become with the thing, so ideas that were previously precious to you can now be seen with a more objective lens and with more scrutiny. I think this pruning of the garden is necessary for any large creative project and helps get things done faster, or at least with more clarity and efficiency.

I have since become attached with another idea, one that I first started in November and haven’t spoken much about because it was still in its gestation period. But what re-ignited interest in the project was the discovery of Star Wars Zero Company: It sounds like the mass effect game I’ve always wanted, (a sci-fi SRPG with unique squad mates) and it takes place in the star wars clone wars era to boot??

It got me excited about what kind of SRPG I wanted to make, but to make sure I wasn’t re-treading old design ground, I started cross referencing the work I had already done on this other project, which I’ll call Project Marth for now.

Re-reading all the material I had drafted for Project Marth got me excited for the material all over again, and this past week I’ve been doing nothing but re-iterating on it and creating a playable build that I’ve been rigorously testing.

This first round of testing caused so many moments of revelation, that on the final playtests I experienced this creative euphoria- that moment where the thing you’;ve been building finally worked exactly as you envisioned!

I’m so proud of this little game I made, that it’s gonna be my plan B. This year I’m gonna prioritize finishing the zelda RPG, playtesting GunRiders so it’s ready to publish in 2027, doing SOMETHING with Project marth, and maybe get that Mighty machine book finished as well. That’s gonna be my 4 avenues of success.

I’ll reveal the details about Project Marth once I finish this next round of personal playtesting. In the meantime I'm gonna keep chipping away at the Zelda RPG until it’s done.

~ An Eli that didn’t get enough sleep last night.