I just wanted to talk about the development of my game for a bit. I've got a lot of emotions tied up in the game after working on it for over 6 years, so maybe someone will find it mildly interesting.

There'll be spoilers, so if you're still considering playing it or just haven't finished, you might want to skip this for now.

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I've been interested in game development for as long as I can remember, but I hadn't really gotten anywhere with it. By 2017, I was lamenting that I had very little to show for my enthusiasm, education and many failed projects. I made a promise to myself to see a project through until the end.

I was always very impressed with the mini browser games scattered throughout Homestuck, so I thought to myself "What if I did a highly episodic game, like a web comic? Something I could get started quickly and then fill out over time." My original idea was to build an engine and release a short 10-15 minute experience every 3-4 weeks that slowly advanced a story. I never originally intended for Project RyME to make any money directly; it was more meant to be a little browser game to get my name out there or to put on a resume.

The concept, genre and story formed pretty quickly. I took one of the few games I had finished, [Watmos Technologies Inc.](https://qwarq.itch.io/watmos), and expanded on it. Watmos is a browser game that takes place entirely in a simulated terminal where you connect to other computers and try to solve puzzles. In fact, the final section of Project RyME is almost directly lifted from Watmos.

The story centered around the concept of the Reality Manipulation Engine pretty much from the start (though it and the game were called just RME for the first year or so), but the plot points and characters changed dramatically during development. There was even originally going to be another character in The Hive. His name was Silas, a retro computer collector from Spain. Most of his personality got rolled into Akane.

To expand on the character changes, there was also going to be a mechanic where each of the main cast would have stats describing their relationship to the player. Certain dialog choices would adjust these stats and eventually change how they would respond to you.

Very early on I also planned a separate channel in Concourse that would link to an actual IRC channel where players could discuss the game, help each other with puzzles and theorize about the upcoming story.

I spent the better part of a year just setting up the framework for the game. I expected the story to be much longer and broader, lasting maybe 20-30 days, so I ended up creating a bunch of systems that would see little to no use in the final game. By the time I was done with the framework it was pretty clear there was no way a 3-4 week dev cycle for new episodes was possible, so I decided to go with fewer, but longer episodes.

By this point I had poured a ton of time and work into the game without much to show for it, so I was getting the same itch that started me on this journey. I wanted to make something small just to say I finished it, but I still wanted to work on RyME. This is about where the idea of the minigames solidified. I realized I could kill 2 birds with one stone by making a full, small game, put it inside RyME and tie it into the story and puzzles.

Once day 1 was completed, I threw it up on itch.io as a browser game and, predictably, no one played it. That didn't really bother me too much since I had long abandoned the idea of a community around an episodic game, so I got to work on day 2.

There's still a lot more to talk about, but I think that's enough for now. I'll do a part 2 sometime later this week.