Progress Report 2024.03.29.: Route 1 Complete & Some Thoughts

Hi all! 

I’m wrapping things up for March here. After a struggling with the Episode 3 Route 1 document for months (I believe I started work on it in July last year), it is finally done, coming in just shy of 70,000 words. I have started edits, and I’m hoping to smooth out some of the issues over the next week as I start coding. 

If I’m honest, I’m not very happy with the quality of the writing. For something that took me so long to create, I think it is unfortunately some of Wayfarer’s weakest writing. The last 8 months have been exceptionally difficult due to some personal life and family events, and this has become the most difficult stretch of the game’s development to date. 

I think something that isn’t always discussed when it comes to long-term projects is that you always hit a phase where the honeymoon period is over, the initial spark that sustained the excitement for the thing you are making has gone out. This period is often the roughest, and it’s the one that can kill a project. 

Back when I was doing a lot of theatre, many of my playwriting peers gave up on their plays because they hit a section that they just could not complete, their heart was no longer in it, and the play went on the backburner and never got touched again. I saw also saw it in school, with my undergraduate students. I was TAing at the time, and my grad supervisor was teaching the course. Their final project for the semester was a one-act play (these usually are 40 minutes to an hour of stage time). I remember so many of them being excited for their ideas at the start of the semester, and by the end of it we had a number of them asking if they could submit unfinished work because they felt stuck and just could not get to an ending. 

And I remember my grad supervisor being very adamant that no, they could not submit unfinished work for full marks. Their plays had to be complete in some form. A unpolished, but complete script has a future. An unfinished one with a couple of highly polished scenes—no matter how good they are—does not. And he followed this up with, “You will never learn anything more important from your writing than what you learn from finishing it.”

Starting things is easy. Finishing them is harder. 

I’ve been working on Wayfarer since 2020. I’m going on four years into this; this is unlike anything I’ve ever written before, and it’s become both my job and basically my life’s work. I keep thinking about what point I need to take a break and consider putting it on the backburner. But I also know the moment I put it on the backburner, it is going to die. It will not be complete. The scope is too large, the things I want to do with it, the things that make this game a game are not the kind of things that can easily be scaled back. 

So I am not ready to quit. I can keep pressing onwards, even if it is difficult, even if it is slow, because I don’t want to give up on it yet. But I also have to recognize that not everything is going to be perfect. There are sections that could be improved, sections that could be reworked and rewritten, but I also do not have the time or capacity to keep going over them again and again. 

This is, in part, what separates IF writing (and game writing a whole) from novel writing or playwriting. In the latter, you have the ability to keep drafting, to keep going over your work, rewrite it from the ground up, tweak it until it is its best version of itself. But with game writing, you don’t have time for that. There is so much more you have to cover, and it has to work alongside the game’s mechanics, which are often responsible for expanding the material far past what it would normally take to tell a story. I edit as much as I can, and I do revisit sections from existing parts of the game now and then to fix issues, remove sections, and revise lore, but I can’t do full re-writes. 

My fear with Episode 3 is that it is disappointing. I worry that the existing playable material isn’t good or interesting or entertaining enough. I worry that when the next update does come out, it is going to feel very short (the amount you play on a single playthrough is always substantially less than the amount that is actually in the game), and because it will feel short, it will not have been worth it. 

I worry about disappointing myself (I have already done that). I worry about disappointing you.

The last update was in May of last year and as much as I would like to keep going and save an update until I do have all three routes finished, I need to get something out. And this is the best I have. 

While I am coding the next section, I will not have much to post in terms of sneak peeks and previews. The ones that I have already shared are about as much as I’d like to show without giving everything away. I’m going to brainstorm options of things to share in the meantime. 

I don’t have a concrete timeline yet for when the update will be ready. As I’ve mentioned before, once coding is finished, the playtesting team does need to go through it so the major bugs and issues are caught (basically—it needs to be playable; continuity issues can be resolved later). I can’t put a date on it, but I will see where things are landing in a couple of weeks. 

Thank you all so much for your support. Wayfarer would not be possible without you. 💖