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Hey, everyone! I'm dropping a rare public status update on the development of Realm Invader, and a little bit about myself. Thank you all so much for eagerly following this game and being fans of my work. I generally see overwhelmingly positive feedback and that many people love this story and these characters that are escaping from my brain. I've been working just as hard as always to get this next update ready to go. However, I do want to remind you that I did absolutely zero work throughout March so we're a month behind, technically speaking. I still have a ways to go, and this development cycle has been the most bizarre one so far. Last year, the house I'm renting, for all intents and purposes, fell apart. The kitchen was heavily damaged, and the bathroom was completely destroyed. A new bathroom got installed relatively quickly, and only now is work beginning on the kitchen. My usual setup is in the vicinity of the kitchen, so I've evacuated my computer to my bedroom where it's going to be safe from all the excessive amounts of dust and other debris. I've been holed in my room without a desk in what has got to be one of the most ghetto office setups imaginable. I cannot stress enough how incomprehensibly uncomfortable it is. As a consequence of this, I've been writing and only writing for weeks now, as leaning back with a keyboard on my lap is pretty much the only thing I can do for extended periods without causing damage to my body. So the update is disproportionately written compared to rendered. The script is unfinished but is currently between Episode 1 and Episode 2 Pt. 1 in terms of length. The bad news is that I'm getting confirmation that work on the kitchen is going to be on and off through August. This means I might just commit to writing the episode in full before rendering anything else, it all depends on how long that takes and if repairs are finished faster than anticipated. If I finish writing before the repairs are done I'll just cry about it and start rendering in this fucking bomb-shelter office I'm currently working with. All in all though, if you ignore the month off I took, this update's pace is still generally the same as the last's. I'll spit some details about the next update in a later paragraph. For now, I need to talk a little about my personal situation.
You don't need to read this if you don't want to, there's going to be a lot of negative emotions and, vulnerability, and arguably, whining. If you only want to read about the game, skip ahead to the final paragraph. I want to get away from negativity-posting, so I'll bare it all now and try to move on to brighter things in the future. I've never heard of another dev sharing their struggles publicly like I'm about to. So sorry if I pioneer crybaby-posting. Anyway, I haven't been feeling myself, or well, I haven't been feeling anything really. I've been feeling this way since, I wanna say January. I have little drive to do anything, my mood and demeanor are worsening. It's complex but if I had to put it in one way. I'm just not happy. I'm really, really struggling to derive pleasure from things. I'm getting more tired than usual, even though I'm actually sleeping more than normal. It takes me longer to get out of bed because lying there, getting up, it all feels the same. Before I logged off of Discord 3 weeks ago, I had several unanswered DMs, some from long-term supporters who were there from the beginning. I read them, but I didn't reply. Why not? Because I'm not feeling it. Do you understand how sad that is? I'm struggling to talk to people, just because I'm not feeling it. My life is in two halves right now, and one half is Realm Invader, you guys are Realm Invader's audience, so I'll mostly talk about how that's affecting me as opposed to other factors. I'll keep it around an 80/20 Realm Invader/real life split.
Making Realm Invader was a fucking weird decision, and more of a Hail Mary. I've got nothing going on in real life, I've stagnated at a minimum wage job after failing a jobsearch. I have a STEM degree by the way, and I'm working a minimum wage job because looking for work left me so soulless that I gave up. Anyway, I always felt like I needed creative output, I was active as a musician while studying for my degree, that dried up and went nowhere. I had nothing going on, and my career was non-existent, so I decided to make Realm Invader. Realm Invader now gives me the strongest creative output I can get, and is my most successful endeavor trying to do something creative. Which is pretty fucking weird considering I've never done any creative writing, digital art, animating before, all of this was born from a whim. I've shown a lot of willpower a poured an unbelievable amount of effort into this project. I've decided that I want to make this into my career. There's high potential for income as long as I'm successful, and having a body of work that people appreciate is something I thought I'd find fulfilling. It's been about 2 years now and... It just feels... so unrewarding. At least in proportion to what I've given for the project. This is an issue a huge amount of AVN devs have suffered with, it's why tons of games get abandoned. Some devs are doing worse than I do, I even feel guilty moaning about this when I've overtaken devs I consider friends. My patreon income right now is $1,350. Which is kind of nice, except not really. Not after 2 years. Minimum wage in my country is $2,188. Any person in my country with a full time job, regardless of how easy, regardless of how well they do or don't execute their job, is making almost twice the amount of money I am off of Realm Invader. I knew patience was required, and that I'd have to wait for the payoff. But honestly, I think I'm at my breaking point when in comes to input/reward. The delayed gratification has become far too delayed and not gratifying enough.
Realm Invader isn't my full-time job, except it is, I work full-time hours on this. I work just as hard as a lot of devs that are working full-time on their projects. I really struggled with how I was going to write this without sounding like a crybaby, but surely it's understandable, right? I'm only human, I think it's natural to become frustrated after so long. I knew this would happen, it's why I still made Episode 2 Pt. 1, and it's why I'm still making Episode 2 Pt. 2, I was prepared to put in the time, but I think I'm reaching my limit of getting out less than I put in. Despite this, I definitely think I'll get there eventually, people keep saying I have potential, each update has brought in a nice amount of Patrons. I'm still going to keep working towards my goal. But I'm tired. I'm putting in the work of a full team while getting paid less than a single member should. I'm sick of reading complaints about how long my game takes to update, I'm trying my best here. You can even prove empirically that I'm producing content just as fast and sometimes faster than full-time devs. Thousands of renders, tens of thousands of words, two-hundred animations. All made by me. AVNs are in a quality arms race right now, look at the bigger AVNs, they're all taking longer and longer to update, and if you compare my changelogs to theirs, mine still hold up, which brings me back around to my point of feeling unrewarded. Conversely, I'm being overtaken by games with shorter playtimes, games that look like they were rendered on a fucking PS3. This is a completely cruel environment for new devs such as myself. My heart goes out to devs who are even less successful than I am. I still have so much I want to show off. I, myself, am frustrated with how long updates take. I want to show everyone where the story is going, I have all these cool moments that I've had planned since the beginning. It hurts me seeing that there's still years before we reach these moments. Not to mention how much quality I sacrifice to make pace, I wanted to retouch the UI for the last update but cut it for time, I wanted to add sex audio but cut it for time, I don't have the time to make animations as good as I'd like. Every animation you see was made in one session, I give them 4 hours at most. I can't go any faster without sacrificing quality.
All of this is compounding into profound levels of work-related stress. With all the above symptoms of low mood and tiredness, just before the turn of July, I noticed my hair is falling out. So what now? You can tell me to take it slower, how is that a solution? Trust me, updates taking 12 months to make isn't going to help reduce stress. I don't know. Maybe I'm not cut out for this, starting this could've been a mistake. I'm corny as hell, immature, low in self-esteem, weak-willed, bad at taking criticism. I can make a nice game, but not built to undertake all the real-life baggage that comes with it. I can feel myself becoming more and more bitter, I don't know how the other small developers do it. Maybe they're just better-adjusted people than I am, maybe they have less ambition, maybe they have fulfilling lives outside of AVN development. In addition, I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable as a personality in the AVN community too. I already felt like an outsider because believe it or not, my interest in AVNs is chilling in the Mariana Trench, I don't play them, I very rarely want to play them. I'm especially uncomfortable because I'm not some fucking dork nobody, I have a product attached to my name, I know I'm making it sound like I'm a celebrity and that's not really what I'm trying to get at. But it's all the same, Whenever I interact online, I'm a public figure. It doesn't help that I'm dreadful at doing any of that public figure shit. I'm not cut out to promote myself, I'm not cut out to assert authority, I either go over the top or pussy out and do nothing. And I'm not at all capable of acting professionally or graciously. I'm strongly considering retiring myself as an online personality and just doing matter of fact stuff like answering technical questions and posting status updates. Which is a horrible feeling to have, because I sincerely enjoy talking to my community, I've met some great people, some of whom I've grown very fond of. I really love the idea of having a fanbase and a community that join together over my game, but that conflicts with my aforementioned anxieties and leaves me extremely troubled.
In real life, I'm still trudging through. I listen to a lot of music while I work, especially as I write. I can't listen to podcasts or anything with talking while I write as the words distract me from forming my own thoughts. Just yesterday I listened to the entire Karnivool discography which kicked a whole lot of ass. The G1 climax has also started, which carried me through all those animations at the swim meet last year. I made the tough decision to attend my father's funeral. It was probably a mistake. I didn't recognize anyone who was there, I felt physically sick when a photograph of me as a baby was displayed. I left as soon as possible. Life has been kicking my ass for a while now, and I'm just letting it happen. It beats giving up, I guess. Not that I know how to fight back anyway. Don't worry about me abandoning Realm Invader. I don't think that's going to happen. It's honestly the most important thing in my life right now which is probably not something to be proud of but whatever. I would consider losing Realm Invader to be a huge loss for me. If I ever need to stop making this game, I'll tell you, I won't just disappear. If I do, it's because I'm dead, in jail, kidnapped etc... I want to try to move back to positive, fun, bright updates and posts like I did when I first started out and before I became jaded. I'm just going through a lot right now so it's difficult for me to fake it. Even right now I keep double-taking and wondering if I should just delete this whole "woe is me" section of the post. I know I'm going to instantly regret publishing it. Oh and to my patrons and former patrons, don't interpret this as ungratefulness, just pessimistic realism. You guys are the reason this game is still being made, if it weren't for my Patrons, the game would've died after Episode 1. I appreciate you guys. I really do.
I expected this chapter to be much shorter than it's turning out to be, giving multiple characters attention and building up the climax of the night is really padding this chapter. I think it might be even longer than Part 1. The funny thing is, this party chapter wasn't planned. I came up with the idea partway through Part 1's development. That's why Ep 2 got split into 2 parts, honestly, it's really just Episodes 2 and 3. I added this party chapter because I was noticing the serious lack of a big event in the early parts of the story I had planned, so I've moved a major story event so it happens earlier, i.e. now. The irony is I haven't even gotten to that part of the event yet, I want to say I'm 10,000 words out. Anyway, once you reach the climax of this chapter, the story of Realm Invader finally starts! It's also going to introduce a game mechanic that's probably going to be a one-off. I'm ripping it completely off from another VN anyway. Episode 2 Part 2 is going to have a huge 6 lewd scenes, each with a different character. They're quite backloaded, as in, they come later in the episode. There isn't a single lewd scene in the first half. There are also huge interpersonal developments, especially in 2 particular relationships. I'm currently in the middle of writing an extremely involved emotional conversation between the MC and a potential love interest. I kind of wish I wasn't making an adult game, to be honest, I know I have 6 planned, but in the early stages I'm really struggling to get the situations going. I really hate how I handled the first 2 lewd scenes in Pt. 1. It's why I'm slightly re-writing the Grace scene in the shower. Regardless, I think I've got some really sweet moments with the love interests lined up, they're all going to go at different speeds, of course, but some of them are going to start moving more directly in this update. I'm excited to show off all the shit I've been planning for the next few episodes, however long they'll take. I can't wait to see everything come together, the lore, the mysteries, the teasers, the good times, the bad. Just stick with me and keep sending me love. We'll get there. We will.
- Gary
