Progress Report: 12/16/2023

A digital painting of a Desi girl with a long, aquiline nose, flush lips, and golden hoop earrings looking over her shoulder at the roots of a banyan tree. thick curls spill over her shoulders and she has her eyes wide, brows furrowed, and mouth slightly pouting as if she's annoyed, but there's a slight quirk to her eyebrow that betrays her for other emotions. She is wearing a black kurta, although only the shoulders up are showing, and acne in the middle of her forehead.

Hi! It has been... a hot minute, haha. Not much has been done by way of real progress, but I have also been chipping at little things: small, important scenes in Act I, or small pieces or sprite drafts that move me forward. It's taking a lot longer than I had thought it would (although that is par for the course for me and any project, really)--always just lack of motivation or me being confused about why I made these choices about these characters, and this endless anxiety that permeates everything I do recently.

It's been a long few months.

Nevertheless, we continue! I love this story, and I love Enya and Thamarai with so much of me, and that is something honest, even if one day maybe I'll give up on the whole thing and just never make anything big that I want to finish again. I haven't given up yet, though. I've found, through writing, something hilarious, being that I have very little character arc for one of the ones I most connected to when I first started this project, and suddenly much more for the one whom I thought I wouldn't like--which now has me struggling as I take on the unbearable task of writing, and doing that in a way that just--gets everything out into the code, for the viewing pleasure of my close friends before the rounds of edits and even more graphics design and even more- ugh, you know, I don't think I can really even bear to think about that right now. Thinking about that kind of coding is something for wayyyy later down the line.

Writing-wise, there are three acts to this, which SHOULD make it long by default, but the first one has me struggling already--and it's so, so hard to, like, truly flesh out these characters in a story that is primarily led by dialogue between the player and the other written characters and then the player and themselves, and then to figure out, how do I make this feel more natural? How do I make this something people would want to play for hours until they're through and then want to play again? How do I NOT FORCE that. I heard the advice once that if you don't enjoy writing it, your reader won't enjoy reading it, so I'm sticking with that as I move forward--trying to enjoy the process, and making sure it's something that I deeply enjoy and truly love ahead of what these invisible end users will think about it.

We shall see what comes next, I suppose! I'm excited :)