Perfect Tides: Station to Station Dev Log (3-30-25)
I have not been updating the dev log. What I've been doing is drafting a post every 2 weeks or so containing some variation of "I'm struggling".
I'm not struggling right now. With practice I've learned that, in the interest of both conveying and alleviating my pain, it's best that I manage and document these things offline and try not to put them straight into words. For whose benefit? The online ecosystem that thrives on daily anxiety and false expectations? We all hate it, don't we? I'm not putting in any more there than the price of entry, which is already too steep.
I don't need to pretend that I'm happy and fulfilled every day as an artist. Some days I am very miserable with what it seems I cannot do. Some days I am positively manic with the potential of my work. And most days I'm pleasantly chipping away at something bigger than a day, bigger than a year, something definitive and hopeful and lasting.
Look, I've just been busy. The biggest playtest yet has been underway since February. We are only halfway through, and the majority of feedback is the helpful "this is broken" kind and not the flowery adoration I've been sweatily listening for. The only work I can do right now is technical fixes and adding whatever written assets the game is missing.
"Written assets". What a bummer. I've reduced the entirety of my work day to a spreadsheet - and a difficult one at that. These are incredibly taxing little boxes to fill. They are often entire conversations, heartfelt impressions of books and online experiences, plucked from either ancient memory or fresh research and relevant to plot/mechanics. They need to be good, and they need to be done fast. There is no time.
That said, I'm getting plenty of help from the testers and editor Matt, the work gets done even as despair cycles in and out, and after my latest rough patch I'm back in the swing of things. I've gotten myself horned up for less exciting things, and I think my output is good. I see the value in this work. Each spreadsheet box amounts to a small jewel for the player to examine. When I play through it myself, they feel pretty tasty to me. I'm less than a week out from the 3rd (out of 4) phase of testing and feeling good that it'll all be hot and ready.
In my reluctant downtime from writing, I made some new key art for PT2's Steam store page. I will soon be showing the game in-person (more on that when I can say) and wanted a new close-up of Mara for this:
I was also recently on the Save Your Game podcast talking a little bit about PT and a lot about Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, a 1993 adventure game that influenced my own work (in a few choice non-cursed ways). It was a lot of fun and you can listen here.