So! As promised I've been considering a lot of options for the future of the project, thinking about what I want out of it and what course is most likely to lead to something getting finished and in the hands of everyone. To be honest, there were some alternate ideas that seemed pretty appealing, and I got pretty close to just shutting down any plans for the game.

However, I'm glad I spent as much time as I did thinking about this and didn't just immediately jump to a conclusion, trying to figure out the root cause of my lack of drive to work on the game and if another outcome would better serve the project. What I ultimately landed on is that a video game is still the best path forward for the project, but that some of the stuff surrounding it is going to change.

From functionally the very beginning, State Route 52 was envisioned as a video game. It's a foundational part of why the world works the way it does, and the game mechanics were from the very beginning meant to enhance the themes of the story. That's still a space I'm really excited to play in. Beyond that, storytelling in a video game is just something I feel more confident that I'll be able to execute on. I'm pretty intimiately familiar with the medium but as a player and as a creator in a way that I'm not for the other alternative mediums I was exploring. Storytelling through game mechanics is part of the reason why I wanted to make this thing in the first place. (It's also probably not a coincidence that I started working on State Route 52 right after Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4 came out, and I came to this decision not too long after 5 did. Seeing good ass video game storytelling makes me want to do it too.)

With all of that said, the concerns I outlined in the last post still very much exist. I've got a pretty huge, complicated task ahead of me if I'm gonna bring this project all the way over the finish line. So I put a lot of scrutiny into figuring out why I dreaded so much about the project and what I can do better. What I realized was that Friday Doodles are actually more counterproductive than anything. While they did in a sense hold me accountable to keep working on the game, they also created some awkward incentives: Every week I had to have something presentable in a screenshot or video form. There's a lot of game development that doesn't fall into that category, or work that would eventually lead to that but not within the time frame of a week. When I sat down to work on the game, I was thinking more about "how can I get to the next Friday Doodle" rather than "what's the best next step for development."

So, what's changing? Well, Friday Doodles will no longer be published, at least not weekly. I still want to share development progress, but it'll be in larger chunks and not at any regular pace. To be honest, this feels incredibly liberating in itself. I can just work on the game and not have to worry about being beholden to weekly progress updates. That alone is motivating to me to buckle down and work on this thing!

Thanks for bearing with me through this awkward period of development. I don't know when you'll next hear from me on this project, but when you do I hope I'll have some really exciting progress to share.