Next month will be the first anniversary of the first Github commit for State Route 52. With that said, to say I've been working on the project for a year would be a little bit disingenuous. For one, there was that gap of a couple months at the start of this year when I moved. Even beyond that though, my motivation to really buckle down and make progress on the game has been pretty sporadic. There's lots of different reasons why that's the case, but it's been something I've been interrogating recently.

What's for sure is that, in the abstract, I haven't stopped wanting to make State Route 52. I still think about it all the time, even during that break I took earlier this year I would constantly have ideas and jot them down, or idly doodle the characters while listening to music. But when it came to actually sitting down and putting code to paper and implementing game systems, it felt like a chore every time. Friday Doodles were something I started dreading rather than something I worked on for fun, because I felt like I had an obligation to both myself and my audience to keep working at the game. Otherwise it would never get done, right? I think it was the right call to hold myself accountable to actually make progress, and no matter what when you're working on a big project like this it's gonna be boring and suck sometimes. But since this has been such a constant feeling, I wanted to go back and really figure out why I wanted to work on State Route 52 in the first place. What was the spark that's led me to stick with this idea for so long, not just for the past year but long before that when it was being conceptualized.

Whenever my mind would drift to ideas for State Route 52, what I kept coming back to was the setting and the characters. Whenever I would jot something down, it would be a setpiece, a character moment, even just a background location or a line of dialogue that I thought would be fun or fit well. My desire to work on the game was a desire to tell a story in this world with this cast of goofballs. This led me to the natural question: Why does that have to be a video game?

At a lot of points in the process of sketching out the game, I kept running into the hurdle of "Okay, but it has to be a video game." The core conceit of "a card game RPG where each card represents an NPC" is a neat concept that I stand by being neat, and I think it compliments the thematic core of the story well, but that concept kept creating new problems. How can you have enough cards in the game to keep deckbuilding interesting? How many unique combat encounters can you create that actually feel like distinct characters? If the matches are played symmetrically with both the player and the enemy able to summon creatures, what kinds of creatures does the enemy summon? With the scope requirements of needing few enough NPCs to give them all unique cards, how can you have "random encounter" type combat? If you don't have that or it's very limited, how can you make sure the pacing of the game isn't far too fast? Doesn't this prevent you from having duplicates of cards, and does that creep the scope up further? I want to have the core cast of 4 characters be important, but you're only directly traveling with yourself and Kit, how does that work?

Some of these questions I still never found solid answers to, and even while I was working on coding the game I just kept thinking "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it." (Tip for game designers: Don't do that if you can avoid it.) Entire worldbuilding concepts like Ghosts and Dreadstorms only existed to solve these problems, which isn't a bad thing, but it did honestly feel like I was compromising my vision for the setting in order to fit the needs of the game design. That's inevitable sometimes, but looking back I'm not sure the game design did enough to enhance the story in return, if it ever did at all. It really just felt like it was getting in the way of it. After all, on top of writing, I'd need to have gameplay, art, music, and code all up to a standard of quality that I was proud of. That's a lot for one guy, especially for an RPG that would probably have quite a bit of content to it, and this is such a weird pet project that has zero budget that I don't reckon it would be an easy time recruiting more people.

So, is the game cancelled? I don't know yet. This is still something I'm turning over in my head. If a video game isn't the right medium for State Route 52, then what is? Whatever winds up happening, even if the game is fully scrapped, I don't regret the time I spent on this stage of the project. It was an important stage towards figuring out what the best form of State Route 52 is gonna wind up being. I'm definitely gonna take a pause on grinding out new code and gameplay stuff for now at least, but my hope is that Friday Doodles will continue. They'll just go back to being actual doodles more than likely. I'll probably use this time to experiment with some different ideas, see what really captures my interest. One of the coolest parts of the game so far has been experimenting with mixed media, spritework and edited photos and video footage all working together. So that will likely make up some of it. I'll keep you all posted here on the site.

Thanks for bearing with me on this weird journey. It's my earnest hope that someday I'll be able to say "State Route 52 is finished and I am proud of it." I don't know when that will be or what it will look like, but I'm committed to making it happen.