#otome jam my fated love we will be united this year!!!

[crescencestudio]

“Would you choose me in every lifetime?”

Announcing “intertwine,” a short visual novel coming to otome jam 2023 🪡

Hi my friends 💖 I’m adding some Alaris updates under the cut to reassure you of development in case you’re worried about otome jam + Alaris!

I’ve been going back and forth on whether to post this or just keep it to myself, but I thought for the sake of transparency, communication with fans, and just normalizing the harder parts of game dev, it would be better to talk about this.

This is NOT bad news about Alaris, so please don’t freak out! But as you all may or may not have figured from my devlogs, I've been struggling with working on Alaris for the past... 2 months? I've made progress on it as much as I'm able to, but I've often found myself coming up against a creative wall and/or burnout. And I often feel like I'm disappointing you all because of it. There are a couple of internal deadlines I had set for myself that I just haven't been reaching lately, and while I know no one is actually rushing me, I feel like I'm dropping the ball.

This is common for a lot of indie developers, but I'm a solo developer. While I have a small team who helps me polish Alaris (i.e., editors, BG artist, GUI artist), at the end of the day, I'm the one who is in charge of everything. I don't have a separate person who can handle building out the art assets, or someone who oversees the writing, etc. And so, to feel like I'm making sufficient progress on Alaris, I'm constantly working on it, whether that's reviewing edits, creating CGs, writing the script, approving art assets/creating briefs for those assets, etc. And I do have a day job haha.

For most of Alaris's development, Alaris was my creative hobby, so I didn't really mind putting so much work into it. But lately, I think because I've been revamping the demo, I feel like I've been in this ~game dev thang~ for two years with no complete product to show for it. And having to go back and redo the demo two years into development is like an extra knife to the gut since it feels like... backward progress almost? Even though I know that's not true.

So while an otome jam project might feel inappropriate given I have Alaris to work on, it's something I've wanted to do since becoming a game dev. And after some encouragement from dev friends, I decided to take the leap because having a different creative outlet might resolve some of my struggles with Alaris. Getting to have one complete project would also be a super huge motivation booster for me!

I'm super happy to say that intertwine has been just what I needed. I've felt more motivated to work on both intertwine and Alaris and my dissertation lmao. As I've mentioned, Druk's route has been giving me a hard time, but I recently made a lot of progress on it. Overall, the creative process has just been coming to me more smoothly. So I'm excited to bring you all a complete game by the end of June as well as, what I hope to be, a lot of really nice progress on Alaris <3