INTRO

CONTENT WARNING: This devlog talks at length about motivation, productivity, time management, and physical disability. Numerous screenshots are present of a game that centers around a protagonist with physical disability and mental illness, with explicit descriptions in the narrative of that. These are sensitive subjects for some people, please use your best discretion when reading.

This is also a HUGE post. Including this blurb, it comes out to a whopping 4,810 words with 17 images. Please feel free to take your time reading lol.
CW+INTRO: 1 image + 713 words.
Part 1 - ALARIC HOW DO YOU WORK ON THE SAME THING FOR YEARS? LONG PROJECTS ARE LOOOOOOONG: 3 images + 1,204 words
Part 2 - MAKING A GAME WHILE MANAGING MY DISABILITY: 6 images + 1,251 words
Part 3 - MILESTONES FOR CATALYST: BLIND FAITH: 7 images + 1,612 words

There's a hell of a lot of images in here. The filesize limit on itch.io is painfully small, so the pics in here are compressed to oblivion so I can still share them. If you'd like to see the high res versions, this entire devlog is also on my Patreon!

Alright that said
I am insanely motivated to get this rolling!

Here's some hype music before we kick this devlog off (piano cover, very good stuff, I am going somewhere with this TRUST):

That pianist, Animenz, spent almost three times the amount of time they usually do to fully arrange and perform that cover. To them, the difficulty and time was completely worth it. They released a beautiful cover that's been listened to over three million times, and even made a video about the hardest pieces they've ever composed. 

I feel incredibly similar about my own game's development. I often say that the core theme of Catalyst: Blind Faith is about perseverance in the face of impossible odds, but there's another theme interwoven into that! One that's in every inch of the script, and resonates deeply with everything I do:

Determination doesn't have to be about blindly charging towards a goal without any consideration for your own well-being. I think the kinds of stories that are worth telling are ones about people who fall down, but love themselves enough to get back up—and do so thoughtfully.

Pursuing your goals in a way that feels best for you is a very real kind of compassion. No one can tell you how to live your life, and if there's something that matters to you—no matter how hard it can be to get there—that is always worth working hard for.

That's right I'm talking about self-love this month. Working on the things you love cause you're worth it. That's the secret to how I work on a game I really love like a demon, you can close the devlog, we can all go home! Show's over everybody

Just kidding. If you're still here it's probably because you're okay with the sentimental stuff. Strap in cause I'm not holding back with this one

YOU THOUGHT YOU DODGED ALL THE PREFACING BUT HERE'S ONE MORE

BIG DISCLAIMER:

What works for me might not work for you. I'm not telling you how to live your life, just like how I don't expect other people to tell me how to live mine. Time management is a separate skill from managing people, which is a separate skill from recognizing if you have an underlying issue (social, mental, physical, anything) that could be impacting your ability to focus/have motivation/whatever.

Not only are large commercial games a daunting and involved endeavor, but this devlog also discusses physical disability. People who have disabilities have unique lives and unique stories. This is just a part of my story. These are strictly things that have helped me, mostly this year, and this is not advice for anyone.

So, whether you're a player who's been watching me fight the universe to continue making games, if you're a game dev who's looking for some inspiration (for a project big or small), or if you're just curious about what the hell I'm cooking, I hope this devlog may be insightful nevertheless! Thank you for your support. Thank you for reading. Especially in these TRYING times. It makes all the difference in the world, and I really mean that. You guys really keep me going, and I can't ever thank you enough!

Feel free to leave in the comments or on our Community Discord if you have any thoughts too. <3

Okay okay preamble is over I promise

Part 1: ALARIC HOW DO YOU WORK ON THE SAME THING FOR YEARS? LONG PROJECTS ARE LOOOOOOONG

Spoilers: I don't. At least, it doesn't feel like I do.

Part of the secret is wearing a lot of hats.

An artist's interpretation of me and my girlfriend making games on a slow Tuesday. Me on the right.

Writing is my absolute favorite thing to do in the world, but each and every other element of this visual novel goes towards elevating that. So when I'm in an art research hole, practicing anatomy for hours on end, I view that as a different skill and task. It's a break from writing!
When I'm designing UI, that's going towards bringing up the rest of the project. You guessed it: It's a break from writing, and anatomy, and character art!
Outlining, narrative design, editing, audio design, marketing, programming, and many more granular tasks (like even color formatting docs for my team) also changes things up.

But like with any huge project, it is literally impossible to work on it nonstop. Wearing 30 hats without washing them isn't going to feel fresh no matter how many times you rotate them. 7 straight days of deadlifting is just going to give you an injury—you get gains on rest days!

I take my health and rest just as seriously as the project itself. When I need a break, I take one. Self care comes first.

Reducing the tower of hats wherever I can is also very helpful. Seriously, the importance of knowing when to delegate tasks is fucking massive. I've worked with a small army of volunteers for audio design and consult, beta reading, sensitivity testing, the best lead editor in the whole fucking world (shout out to KnowledgeDomain for her quality work and incredible professionalism), a team of Quality Assurance legends who are too good for this earth, commissioned artists, volunteer artists, programmers who are infinitely more skilled than me, and work with industry professionals for everything from font design to tips on animation and marketing.

I can't do this alone. I couldn't do this without them. I couldn't do this without community support and people who check out my project, like you. A big project is not as good as the person leading it, but is about every single person who helps to build it.

These relationships do not happen over night. I'm deeply fortunate to have met and cultivated a rock solid support network, incredible working relationships, and a killer community. I've also had plenty of ugly encounters with people who do not align with the best interests for my project, but that's okay—that's also part of the journey.

Game dev is hard work and that is a reward in and of itself! If you set out with a long-term commitment, that is not a commitment just to the good days. Life is a very long road, with many speed bumps along the way. Sometimes your tires give out. Sometimes the back seat is on fire. The scenic route really doesn't matter when the check engine light is on and you need to fix things. How far you go very often boils down to if you can get back on the road.

I've encountered a lot more craziness in the last two years than I ever expected, but that's okay. I haven't been running scheduling, management, training, and other white-collar stuff for nearly two decades without learning none of that shit means anything if you forget that you're working with people.

People aren't always pretty. People have bad days where motivation is low. I have a lot of those! The world is hard. Natural disasters and sickness happens. But the way that big projects work is accounting for those hiccups. You bring an extra tire. You do the maintenance the car needs before you leave, and if anything else happens along the way.

It doesn't mean you have to always barrel down the highway at top speed. It might suck horribly to have delays. There's nothing wrong with recognizing if you need to take a long break, or take the trip another time. But if you are equipped for it, and you are respecting your limits, it's reasonable to prepare for the worst with a big endeavor. You'll have a smoother time getting back on the road. It's okay, even if it's hard and takes awhile.

Me navigating 2024. We didn't expect the road trip to take well over a year longer than originally estimated, but you know what, you can get snow tires along the way. this is not a magic formula, it is the absolute essence of "this sucks but fuck it we ball"

Another hot take here, but I think even sitting in traffic can be enjoyable, if you have the right music and some good people to keep you company along the way. :^)

So like, on top of taking good care of myself, taking plenty of breaks, the scheduling, the checklists, the spreadsheets, regular check-ins with my team for the numerous things they help me with, community management, and a billion other things from nearly two decades of business experience and a very hard life and challenging myself to look to the long-term health for me and my project in equal measure has built me up to—

What, you thought I was going to say it's easy? ;)

It is inevitable that things sometimes get slow or tough. As much as I wish I was a nonstop energizer bunny of optimism and energy, that is not reality lmfao.

However I have some very strong tools at my disposal. There is sometimes no amount of preparation in the world that can prepare you for life's bullshit. I break out the BIG GUNS for motivation when that happens.

You see, I hoard every piece of fanart, fanfic, and literally every heartwarming comment everyone has ever said to me about my work.

Rainy days, meet a nuclear bomb of light and optimism.

This is a really low res version of one collage! The high res version is attached the this Patreon post. You can also check out our Discord for WAY more fanart and memes, or CBF's itch.io page for like 40+ glowing comments. It makes me very happy. c:

I am not just memeing when I say how much my community and the kindness of others seriously matters. It means the world. Thank you for your support. <3

This level of support and community didn't come about in a day or a week or a year, but every single one of these memes, loving drawn pieces of fanart, heartfelt comments, and sincere pieces of encouragement and praise comes from people who's life is a little better thanks to the stories I'm telling and the game that I'm making. That's worth it. Making a big project is hard, but when I can keep things in perspective, it gets a lot easier.

Keeping focus on why I want to make games to begin with is not the only way I make my game stay on track, but it sure as shit helps me more than anything else. There's still plenty of days when I rest as an investment in making good stuff when I'm feeling well, and that's okay too.

Part 2: MAKING A GAME WHILE MANAGING MY DISABILITY

There's a silver lining to the hardships I have faced, particularly as I have put my health at the forefront of my priorities. Especially since December of last year. And no, it's not the fridge-horror of realizing I wrote with great authenticity about physical disability in my game years before experiencing it first-hand.

Though, yes, high-five past me, we killed it! Knocked it out of the park! Yippee!!

Me in 2022: "Boy I sure hope I wrote this severe migraine and resulting sound and light sensitivity well!" [monkey's paw curls]

I had no idea that I had an auto-immune condition, or anything else that came with it, until August of this year. My symptoms are numerous (no need to get into it all here) and have presented many challenges I wouldn't wish on anyone, but I've developed life-long habits for keeping the momentum on my projects. Skills to manage my time and energy, so that even on days I'm not feeling my best, I have strong people to fall back on. That same dedication has gone wholly into finding exactly what is going on with my health, getting those diagnoses, and aggressively pursuing treatment with the same zeal I put towards everything in my life that matters.

Thanks to that diligence, I'm seeing massive relief for everything from photo-sensitivity and sound sensitivity, to chronic pain that's hindered my quality of life for years. It's nowhere near back to what I'm used to, but as I heal, find ways to manage my symptoms, and find a new normal for me, I'm keeping things in perspective. I'm getting answers, solutions, reducing my pain all the time, and am looking forward to coming out of this on the other side with a much greater life expectancy than if I never knew about these problems to begin with!

Chansey is a Pokemon associated both with luck, healing, and being an absolute tank in a fight. Coincidence? I think not.

I wanted to make part of this devlog about the challenges I have faced with adapting software to my game dev workflow, as a tremendous volume of applications claim to have features for accessibility, yet have obviously made no considerations for how someone might actually want to use those features.

An extraordinarily harmful and common issue comes from assumptions or just zero thought about how individuals with disability can live a meaningful life—and whether that's zero thought at all put into the software (LOOKING AT YOU MICROSOFT)

No actually, Alaric unable to look at any Microsoft applications, 2024 colorized

Worth noting most videos and games simply cannot accommodate things like severe photosensitivity at all without making their entire art design around it. That's totally understandable, and not really the discussion here. I hope it's obvious, but if you do want to take considerations for things like that with media, please for the love of God just warn about it if you do advertise features to turn off those elements. For example, if Discord has a feature that advertises it turns off all animations and flashing lights, but then forces a full-screen, flashing animation every time you hover over its Nitro button, that is false advertising and actively harmful. Don't do that lol.

Though Microsoft is godawful with their computer software (it's not helpful to reskin just the toolbar on an application and call it "dark mode" if the whole rest of the fucking screen is bright white and cannot be changed oml), their video games guidelines are shockingly thorough.

This is a link to an insanely in-depth, free resource about accessibility in games in particular, which is long and deep reading, but goes hard on ways to actually accommodate players. This is link to that documentation, which is worth a read even if you just check out sections you might want to try making features for in your own projects, or are just curious about what might actually be helpful for some people! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility

Anyways

I'm staying on my high horse, don't think I'm getting off of it this whole devlog

Despite the needless and numerous hurdles poorly designed or thoughtless software presents, I've found ways to adapt at each and every turn, and am very happy that things get easier to work with all the time as my symptoms improve.

I am deeply fortunate that this is the case, and not everyone is so lucky, so again, I'm VERY grateful for the ability to share as much as I am with you all. Some shout outs here to phenomenal programs and means of accommodating the challenges I'm personally facing! I thought some examples might be insightful and interesting for how the fuck I'm keeping this show rolling with so many hurdles.

Visual Studio Code not only permits detailed control over every display element, but it also works with a multitude of plugins for accessibility (which is very well documented)! Their website grossly advertises a bunch of AI integration, but it is absolutely not necessary to use.

Even at the worst of my photosensitivity I was able to still program thanks to VSC being so easy to reskin and use. My favorite plugin for it is indent-rainbow, which provides tons of palettes to color code different levels of indentation. Massively helps even more with visibility and navigation! (it's also just very pretty lol)

A better part of this week was testing that camera work and making sure it's smooth as silk lmao.

You're going to notice a theme REALLY fast here: Notepad++, GIMP, DaVinci Resolve, and LibreOffice also all get big shout-outs for having actual customizable UI.

Like, seriously, that's really all it takes for most programs. Let me recolor things pleeeeaaaase

While I'm trying to move all of my art workflow to Clip Studio Paint, their move to make their desktop launcher pure white is literally unchangeable and unusable for me (requiring me to have to ask for help to get brushes I was able to download online AAAA).

Worth noting that since writing this devlog, I've had some assistance with changing my settings on CSP to make it usable for me again! It's not ideal to not put preferences like that in the launcher or make gigantic UI updates without warning that can flashbang users, but it's better than it could be and that's what matters 💀

Google Docs is workable with a 3rd party browser extension that enables me to do CSS injection so I can still customize color-coding for the rest of my team, but as you might imagine that was a nightmare to set up. It is WORKABLE! But an additional time investment, and not ideal.

Audio design is still very challenging for me at this time (seemingly innocuous noises like birds chirping or people whistling is excruciating, so balancing audio is not feasible for me at this exact moment), and art is still something I'm doing with very dark values in grayscale, so I'm sitting tight on the next update to the demo until I have the art and sound ready.

This is not all of the resources I'm using, but despite these barriers, I have worked hard to continue game dev this year. It has not only been very achievable, but leaps and bounds of progress has been made since the last update. This is thanks to the extraordinarily hard work of not only me but everyone else who has been supporting this game. I am deeply proud to share what progress has been made since January to the demo and full game's development!

Part 3: MILESTONES FOR CATALYST: BLIND FAITH

Strap in. We're just going to touch on my bullet points of stuff done between January, 2024 through today. Cause holy shit it's a lot. I want the sheer volume of badass new content done to speak for itself.

The public, early development demo version is NOT reflective of the current state of the project. This is a preview for you all of what is to come! All of the following information pertains to upcoming content that is not currently visible in the public demo.

EARLY DEVELOPMENT

• Splashscreen stating the demo is in early development has been removed!
• A persistent notice displays on all screens about grayscale assets (final art will be in the next build, colored assets will be in the build after that!)

OPTIONS MENU AND ACCESSIBILITY SETTINGS

• Photosensitivity splashscreen has been replaced with the Options screen immediately displaying upon first starting the game, which contains all options for accessibility.
• This immediate prompt only shows when first starting the game, but the Options screen can be accessed by players from any screen at any time.
• Visual overhaul of the Options screen to improve colors, icons, and layout for maximum clarity.
• Discord Rich Presence has been completely removed.
• Voice effects channel has a slider with a test button for volume.
• SFX channel has a test button for volume with a randomized preview of 3 SFX!
• Toggle added for the "Find Reflection" display preference.
• Pop-up added beside the "Find Reflection" preference elaborating on its functionality.
• Frames added to the various preference sections to help visually distinguish each category of features.

MAIN MENU

• Main menu layout and positioning is complete! Total overhaul done of its buttons and animations.

GALLERY

• Complete revamp of the Gallery, using the Touch Screen Gallery code by Feniks.
• Custom navigation created for the Gallery, containing separate sections for Places, Characters, Gods, Demons, and Demo Endings.
• Complete overhaul of how images are unlocked within the game. Unlocking images still persists across all playthroughs.
• New features in the Gallery includes improved navigation, zoom (with mouse, keyboard, gamepad, or touchscreen), rotate, and a timed slideshow with autoplay.
• "Momentos" category has been cut, key item acquisition is now handled with the in-game screen signifying their narrative importance and in the Inventory tab of the Journal menu for reference.

CONTENT WARNINGS

• Content warning and extreme content information screen has been totally overhauled!
•  Text detailing content warnings and the extreme content (which can be disabled) has been massively consolidated and edited for clarity.
•  Content warnings are no longer displayed on hover, so all warnings are immediately visible.
•  All text is rendered in-engine, compatible with screen readers.

CHAPTER TITLES

• Text for Chapter Titles are now completely rendered in-engine!
• This removes the need for the flat placeholders that previously filled this function, freeing up 10MB of images from the demo.

QUICK MENU

• Fixed bug for Quick Menu preference toggle. (Setting the Quick Menu to "Always" show now works perfectly!)
• Quick Menu redesigned, moving the "Journal" button to a separate section.
• Quick Menu addition, the "Find Reflection" feature.

FIND REFLECTION

• This "Find Reflection" feature is now available at specific, story-appropriate moments so you can view the MC's reflection in appropriate nearby surfaces.
• It first unlocks shortly after completing the Prologue!

FITTING ROOM

• Because the MC's appearance can change over the course of the game based on your choices, the appearances unlocked will be viewable in a special screen! A demo version of this feature is accessible through the main menu!

HISTORY MENU

• Text tags (bold, italics, underline, etc.) now render on the History screen!
• The timelapse text now populates in the History menu.

SAVE AND LOAD

• Buttons for navigation to "Save" and "Load" screens are available in the Save Screen menus when saves are unlocked (previously that navigation was only handled through the Quick Menu).
• Disabled rollback when a save is first loaded to prevent bugs from rolling back prior to the save state.

OBJECTS OBTAINED SCREEN

• Upon acquiring certain story-significant items, a custom screen now displays!
•  This screen contains an image of the item in question, a brief name, description, and accompanying SFX.
•  Items obtained in this fashion always populate in the "Inventory" section of the player's Journal.

JOURNAL

• IT'S DONE!!! AAAAAA
• This feature unlocks shortly after completing the Prologue!
• Many changes were made under the hood to have cleaner and smoother code for Journal navigation.
• Fixed bug by adding a missing asset. The "Time" bookmark in the Journal menu now works as intended at all stages of time travel.
• Navigation for the Journal is now in alphabetical order, with all tabs spelled out (rather than using images alone for deities).
• The Journal bookmarks, sub-menus, and pages now remember where you last left off!
• The scrollbars in the player's Journal remember your place too!
• Massive improvements made to its layout for accessibility, ease of navigation, and to match the final art style.
• That's right. Final art. you do not want to know how many components make up this menu system oml but I am so proud TwT
• New hover image added for the inventory so you always can see where you are!
• Final art for all isometric maps are complete!
• Reduced the needed dynamic components from the isometric maps from 11 to 8 with improved layers and programming, yeeting 28 redundant lines of code and 1.54MB out of the game's file size!

ANIMATIONS

• Massive amounts of dynamic camera work have been added throughout the entire demo! I have only 1 1/2 chapters remaining left to sketch/code/test, out of 15 total.
• The timelapse at the end of the prologue has been finalized!
  •  Height has been adjusted so there isn't so much empty space before the last sentence.
  •  Scrolling speed has been cut in half.
  •  A bug was fixed which occurred when the player skipped past this screen with transitions disabled.
  •  This animation does a full pause when it finishes playing, and only proceeds when the player clicks the mouse so the player has time to read the final sentence before continuing.

WRITING

• Trailing spaces on em dashes have been removed.
• To account for the final art asset of your loyal dog, Ray, new content has been added to 8 separate chapters across many individual scenes in the demo (and oh my god the amount of content updated for the full game)!
  •  Many of these edits are minor, accounting for continuity and immersion.
  •  Several of the edits are major, changing the dynamic of combat or bolstering the narrative.
  • A new choice menu occurs immediately after the start of Chapter 1, in which you have a variety of ways to pet Ray. The other choices menus and scenes to pet him are still present in the demo. (hoW mAnY cAn yOu FinD? :^) )
• Editing has been completed on all chapters in the demo! The demo script is now 100% complete, with no edits required for future updates or the full game!
• For the full game, about 95% of content has been fully written and edited for the "trunk" of the story, which can be merged into by most of the other 9 hard branches in the full game.
  • The "trunk" encompasses over 600k words of script, with 130 unique chapters, containing hundreds of unique choices which can lead to 5 completely distinct endings (or numerous potential bad ends along the way).
  • 4 months earlier this year were spent with sensitivity edits to those chapters, bolstering the quality and authenticity of body horror and other mature themes.
• Writing for the "Vengeance" hard branch is in progress!
  • All related choices in the first 14 chapters of the game are written!
  • 3 new chapters just for the hard branch are fully written and edited.
  • This is far and away the most difficult content I have ever written, so it is taking far longer than any other content will for the game: averaging 1-3 weeks per chapter (for all drafts, sensitivity reading, and editing) rather than 1-3 days. It is well worth the effort, however!
• Tagline on the game's itch.io page was overhauled thanks to some awesome feedback!

ART

• Made the leap to Clip Studio Paint!!!
• Character Concepts, silhouettes, and shape language has been worked on for:
  • Richard
  • Ray
  • Celegwen
  • Ofelia
  • Yech
  • Orgoth
• Art direction cemented for the full game!
• Numerous UI assets finalized!
• Sketches for the final composition of approx 60% of the demo's art is complete!

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Achievement names for several demo endings are revamped, by our Official Discord Community vote!

COMMUNITY

• Huge participation in our Discord community server over the last year, with a surge of new members, fanart, fanfic, meme machines, streams, and community events.
• Huge support on the Patreon and Ko-fi, which has unironically helped with groceries, medication, and utilities this last year. Thank you guys so much for your support.
• Made the jump to Bluesky, which has given the warmest and most awesome welcome possible! I'm shitposting like mad so feel free to follow for some shortform updates and memes :^)
• Updated all of my socials quite recently, looking very fine. Sexy as hell. All that CSS work paid off hoo hoo hoo
• Looking forward to bringing you all more news very soon!! uwu

Whew! You made it!

Let me know in our community Discord or the comments here if you have any thoughts, suggestions for future devlogs, or if there was anything in particular you liked!

So proud of how much work has been done this year and can't wait to share more with you soon. Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed!