You can read part 1 [here](https://cohost.org/Qwarq/post/5580339-the-story-of-project) if you're so inclined. Again, there are heavy spoilers for the game, so read at your own risk.

So, the development of Day 2 actually went surprisingly smooth. The framework was well established with Day 1 and I was getting a good feel for using it.

My plan was basically more of Day 1 while inching the story forward a bit, but with the much slower dev cycle trying to find the right pace took a bit of time. Ultimately I realized to keep it from ballooning to 6-7 parts, I absolutely needed to introduce the Reality Manipulation Engine and Ether concepts here.

Slaying of Orochi started with the concept of one of the first games I ever wanted to make: a top-down 360 degree sci-fi metroidvania with dodges and weapon powerups and puzzles and the story would be based on a book I had been planning in my head since high school. Clearly that wasn't viable for this project, so it became a small, linear thing. I do want to revisit the idea at some point, maybe.

I'm not entirely sure where the minigame with Botan came from, but part of it stems from the old windows disk deframenting visualization, with blocks of data being shuffled around slowly.

Quick Day 2 trivia: Justin Poplin, essentially the antagonist of Day 2, is based on a friend who has a rabid hatred of the pokemon Popplio (popplio da bes).

Once Day 2 was finished, deploying it was surprisingly a major problem. First off, itch.io does this weird thing with web-based games where it does a *depth first* search for a file named "index.html". Most of the fake internet sites in the game had an "index.html", so itch ended up serving whichever of those was first and breaking the game. The solution was to rename index.html to index.htm everywhere except the main page. They would still load in the in-game browser normally, but itch wouldn't get confused. This was actually a problem in Day 1 as well - I just forgot to mention it.

The other problem with deploying Day 2 is that itch.io caps the number of files that can be in a web game, and I had hit that cap. After cleaning up some files and optimizing website files, I just barely got it under the limit, but it posed a serious problem for future versions.

Around the time I finished Day 2 I had been convinced by a friend to try this JRPG called Trails in the Sky. For an idea of how that went, I've since completed 9 games in the series with over 700 hours of playtime. So, yeah, I was JRPG brained for a while there, which lead me to the idea of Day 3. I felt like I had mostly explored the standard computer interface in Day 1 and 2, so I wanted to take things off the rails and said "fuck it, Day 3 is a JRPG". The city of Astarl is basically one giant reference to the Trails series.

A warning to the reader here: the next few paragraphs might get a little heavy, with discussion of real life death.

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Zu being dead the whole time was there mostly from the beginning, but confronting the remnants of him came about fairly early in Day 3 dev as a result of things happening in my life. Around this time my mother's health had been deteriorating due to an unknown condition. She was being hospitalized more and more frequently. Eventually she had a particularly bad episode, ended up collapsing and required a week-long stay in the hospital. I was basically trying to prepare myself emotionally for what seemed like her imminent death.

I should say now that my mother is fine. A doctor finally figured out what was wrong and was able to prescribe a treatment to help manage it. Anyway, the whole situation was a big influence for most of the Day 3 writing. The implication is that the monsters across the world appeared as a reflection of Mira's grief surrounding her father when she was pulled into the nexus. In fact, the odd dialog from some monster when they're killed vaguely follows the stages of grief.

Alright, enough of the heavy stuff. Now the battle system. Easily the most fun part of the day to code, but it wasn't the first battle system. Initially I had plans for something much similar to the Trails series - turn based grid movement with a variety of arts and magic that can be targeted in various ways. I had a mostly functional prototype working. There was a grid, a separate program window for the party's stats, and another for the timeline showing who's acting next based on their speed. I'm still pretty proud of how it was turning out, but I realized I needed to drastically reduce the scope of the day.

Reducing the scope gave rise to the text-based battle system, but it also created the text adventure segments. The original idea called for 30+ maps, including a completely cut area involving a forest to the northeast of Astarl. The terminal-theme of the overall game lead into the text adventures taking the place of interior maps. Considering how slow I typically write, I'm not sure it was much of a time save in the end, though.

One thing I bizarrely didn't cut back on was the music. For some reason I insisted on making the music myself despite being the most musically illiterate person on the planet. I loaded up [Bosca Ceoil](https://boscaceoil.net/) and just bashed my head against it for a few days until I had a few tracks that didn't make my ears bleed too badly. They're VERY BAD, but I eventually fixed this. More on that later.

Around half way through developing day 3 is when I really started losing my enthusiasm for the game. It had been in progress for over 3 years, no one had played it, and I wasn't happy with the quality. This is when I got a random comment on a random stream VOD I uploaded to youtube. It was someone asking how day 3 of RyME was coming along. They supposedly had been in rehab for drug addiction, and days 1 and 2 of RyME had helped them through a rough patch, even saying the game may have saved their life. To this day I'm still not sure if they were sincere or just internet irony trolling, but that was enough of a push to get me to finish day 3.

With day 3 finished, there was no way itch.io would be able to host it as a web game now that there were hundreds more files. I made the painful decision to pivot to a standalone chromium based platform. Packaging everything with Electron meant file counts weren't an issue. I released day 3, but I was deeply unhappy with it.

I needed a break from RyME, so in early 2022 for about 4 months I took a random tweet I saw on twitter and focused on building a small horror game around it called [Acid Spinner](https://qwarq.itch.io/acidspinner). It was the first and still only 3D game I've made. It wasn't a terribly interesting game but I was satisfied with it. That break between day 3 and the start of day 4 was really essential because it made me realize that, if I ever wanted to be more serious about game development, I needed to do something about it. That something was to establish my own company and release RyME under it.

I decided I wanted to release RyME on steam. Both to give it some sense of legitimacy and because I had fantasized for many years of having a game listed on steam. One of the first things I realized is that I would probably need to adjust the name, since there's already a game called RiME. It's even styled similar to mine. That seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, so I tacked "Project" onto the start of it.

Wow, this went on way longer than I thought. I'll cut it off here and finish with a part 3 later.