Hello, and happy July! I hope those of you who live in the Northern hemisphere are surviving the onslaught of heatwaves.

In the meantime, here’s a fresh (and longer than usual) newsletter to help cool you down.

Project Lion

Status

I hit my goal! Eventually.

The important thing is, I finished my design document. I would have finished it by the end of June, but before declaring it done I decided to look over the whole thing to make sure I still liked what I’d written. Turns out, there were a few puzzles that I wasn’t in love with, so I had to make edits, and that took a few extra days. So although it actually took me until July 5th to declare my design doc finished, I still managed to do it within my self-imposed time frame, which feels very good.

What’s Next?

The simple answer is: building the game. This is always an interesting task, because the goal is to get it as close to fully playable as possible. I have no idea how long this is going to take, but my goal is to get it done well before the end of the year.

Adventure games are an interesting beast, because many times, dialogue trees are an integral part of the gameplay (they certainly are in the games I design) However, I design and build the game before writing any dialogue, which means I either need to construct very crude placeholder dialogue trees, or not feature them at all.

Example: say there’s a puzzle that involves being given an item by a character, but in order to receive that item, you need to ask about a specific topic. Once the dialogue is written, the conversation with that character will obviously include the dialogue that triggers being given the item, along with whatever else might be relevant for that character to talk about. But before any actual dialogue exists, I have two options: either mock up a very crude dialogue tree that mimics the final in-game action, or just have the character say “Hello, here is the item you need!”

In the past, I’ve done way more of the latter, which has also snowballed into a very bad habit: placeholder puzzles. In Shardlight, as I was building the game, if I got to a puzzle that required complex coding, or something I hadn’t fully designed, I’d put in a temporary message saying “puzzle goes here.” In Rosewater, for many of the scenes in Act 2, I didn’t actually code them until I had written the dialogue. This meant you’d arrive at a place, the game would say “this is the scene that happens here,” and then you’d find yourself back on the wagon.

This creates a problem: the illusion of having completed much more work than you actually have. In fact, the whole reason Rosewater ended up taking me 2 years longer than I anticipated was because I had an enormous amount of scenes to actually code, most of which had complex branching that required a lot of testing (the scene at the oil well, for example)

All this is to say that I’m very conscious of coding everything as I’m building the game, no matter how janky. It may not remove every unpleasant surprise, but I’ll at least have some more control over when they pop up.

Testing…testing

In better news, I recruited a few alpha testers to check out the very placeholder and very janky prologue and full first chapter of the game, and the results were good! I’m especially pleased with this particular comment:

"I think the puzzles hit just the right amount of challenging where I always had a hunch of what I need to strive towards and how I might be able to achieve my goals but it still took some looking around to solve them so at no point did I feel like I was really hopelessly stuck in the game but it wasn't just a cakewalk from point A to B either."

Considering one of my self-imposed challenges with this game is to design more layered and complex puzzles, this is a very encouraging bit of feedback.

In Other News

In last month’s issue, I said I was waiting on some information. I can now confirm that I will be speaking at AdventureX in London on the weekend of November 7-8, 2026!

I can also confirm that I will be revealing Project Lion’s real title and launching the Steam page very soon after that. So mark your calendars, because it’s happening!

See you in August for the next newsletter.

Francisco