This is a bit of an anxiety-induced pre-mortem for Sunder, which I JUST squeaked into IntroComp with mere hours to go. (At 11:57 CEST on the 31st, to be precise).
I’m feeling about anxious about having put out a very personal thing and chatting about it helps. I’m avoiding going into any detail about the game, but if anyone reckons this goes against the no-promotions clause, I can delete.
My big issue recently has been finding time to do any development work - I got through drafting the structure and written core of a Twine poetry project in hexameter in February during a 30daydev Twitter mutual support event. The project stalled for a while after that, because getting edits and voice recording done seemed an insurmountable challenge with a toddler (born as my IFComp 2016 entry went live!) on the rampage.
That’s what IntroComp got me out of: a demo’s a much more manageable prospect.
Sunder deals pretty overtly with my previously very fragile and now quite-decent-actually mental health and sundry other uncomfortable places my brain has been to, which also made it sometimes difficult to approach.
In the end, I pared down my passages to a functional demo loop in June, got some usable voice recording done in July and got that edited in the hours immediately before the submission deadline. There are some features I didn’t manage to implement in time, mostly to do with audio interactivity
TL;DR: I’m demoing a very personal thing that was surprisingly challenging to put out. But I did it, and that’s something, even if the feedback ends up telling me that it definitely doesn’t need a full-length release. I nonetheless have the heebie-jeebies about it.
