MAY 2025
Yes I know It’s almost the end of June. I wrote this in the first week of June, then SO MUCH LIFE HAPPENED. I’ll go into more detail in the June update, which at this rate is probably gonna be next week. Now, let's go back in time-
For once I feel like I’ve had a moderately successful month in terms of productivity. I’ve made A TON of progress on the Zelda RPG, including getting all the text for one of the dungeons complete and the 2nd dungeon 60% complete. I was hoping to get the text for both dungeons complete before the end of the month so I could focus on the minuscule NPC dialogue and tutorial section, but I had a belated start this month due to hiding my notes from myself.
I have a Nintendo-esque approach when it comes to game design, in that I design the mechanics first, then I write the story around what I’ve built to ensure mechanics and story enhance each other. In this case, I had already plotted out the maps of all the dungeons back in January or even November, and then locked them up when I shifted focus towards other things.
I couldn’t start writing until I found the maps and see how I arranged all the rooms so I could go- “Ok these rooms are where the Moving Mangrove forest will go, and this is where the ship will go” so that the placement of all the locations and set pieces connected to each other in a logically within the world.
After that, I decided to take Yahtzee Crowshaws advise when it comes to maintaining drive on a project- write at least 1 page a day. Or in my case, write down at least 5 rooms a day. Each room descriptor is 1 paragraph at most, so 5 paragraphs should roughly equal one page.
I can attest that it does work, but it doesn’t account for the fact that sometimes life happens. The last few days of May I broke the streak because stuff just kept happening and I didn’t have the availability to write at all.
After this weekend I’m gonna try and get back into it. I feel the pull of mecha again so my goal for June is to finalize Blade Busters and get it out as a feature complete product so that I have something to show for a Q2 release. Then I’m spending all of summer prioritizing The Zelda RPG. This is the perfect window of opportunity for something like it to come out; there’s no new major Zelda title coming out this year so this is the only chance I have in the foreseeable future for this project catching on, both within the fandom and out of it.
If I can get the Zelda RPG done and Blade Busters complete, I will feel like I had accomplished enough this year. Then I can focus on creating anything else at my own pace, like all those video projects I’ve wanted to do, or the other games I’ve already started.
In terms of mental health, May has also been really good for me, mostly because I found something else to do on my phone instead of doom-scrolling on reddit. Funnily enough, that alternative is- of all things- a mobile gatcha game….
Yes, I’m firmly aware of the irony of trading one addiction for another, except this isn’t just another waifu slot machine, this is an actual videogame first that is perfectly playable without paying into it at all. The game is Wizardry Variants Daphne, the newest entry in the ancient yet incredibly influential DRPG series, Wizardry.
Now this was going to be part of the update where I gushed about Wizardry, how good it is and how it got my game-designer brain going- But then life happened. How much life? Tune in next month to find out.