Part 1 is [here](https://cohost.org/Qwarq/post/5580339-the-story-of-project) and part 2 is [here](https://cohost.org/Qwarq/post/5680967-the-story-of-project). The spoiler warning continues, so read at your own peril.

Day 4 was by far the hardest to design. I spent weeks just coming up with a basic concept and several more weeks figuring out how the story would flow. My favorite genre of game is metroidvania, and I had been trying to make one for quite a few years, so I tried thinking of ways to incorporate the exploratory sort of gameplay where you find new abilities to unlock new areas. That's what lead to the Ether Network Map (ENM).

I knew early on that I wanted the player to be able to visit at least a few other Nexuses (Nexii?). They were originally going to be top-down RPG-like things similar to day 3, but much smaller. I realized the RPG theme would probably be stale by this point and that I've got a massive amount of creative freedom, with each Nexus being shaped by its administrator. Originally, Wendy wasn't going to be an administrator, but seeing the opportunity to make a mini-game based on her Void Witch lore, I had to change that.

I still had an itch to make a proper 2d platforming metroidvania so I jumped at the chance to make one out of Void Wanderer. The name Void Wanderer was inspired by Void Stranger, a game I love dearly, but that only came up well after Void Wanderer was finished. Up until that point it was just called "Game 4". Internally each minigame is referred to as just Game#, starting from 0: Game 0 is the minesweeper clone, Game 1 is Star Mountain, Game 2 is Slaying of the Orochi, Game 3 is the interlude with Botan, Game 4 is Void Wanderer and Game 5 is Icy Onslaught. Anyway, besides the ENM app itself, Void Wanderer was one of the first parts of day 4 to be finished because it was just a lot of fun to make.

VW's development was fairly smooth and straightforward, though I did experiment with a morph ball powerup for a while. I eventually scrapped it because I didn't want to deal with the changing collision boxes on the player, and because I thought it was too long already.

Icy Onslaught (I'm not particularly fond of the name) was developed pretty soon after VW. I honestly don't remember where the idea of a tower defense game came from. My best guess is that I had been playing a bit of Arknights at the time and I wanted to make something mechanically very different. A relatively late addition was the tower selling exploit. I like to put skips in the minigames so that players who aren't vibing with it don't have to put up with it as long, and I was thinking of something for IC. Adding an intentional delay where you could sell the same tower multiple times felt more like an exploit than a skip to where I thought it might be interesting to incorporate that into the gameplay. It's entirely possible to win without it, but I think it fits the vibe of the overall game pretty well.

Figuring out the flow through the ether network was probably the hardest part of developing all of Project RyME. Incorporating thematic puzzles, giving players a reason to move around the map, balancing it with admin side quests and making sensible clues took me literal months to nail down. Some of it wasn't solidified until about a month before release. Speaking of administrators, there are some pretty obvious references there, but here's a mostly complete list: - Celeste Madison is of course referring to Celeste creator Maddy Thorson - Pino Thistle references both the anime Ergo Proxy with a little robot girl named Pino, as well as Wonder Project J, with a little robot boy named Pino - Bloodgood is a nod to my friend @gnomebitten and his love of blood and farm animal reproduction - Lillie Gray is Lillie from Void Stranger - Brian Bartholomew is Brian from Quest 64 (Bartholomy is his dad's name) - Anelace Leafson is Anelace Elfead from Trails in the Sky - Estelle Luna is Estelle Bright, also from the Trails series - Geoff is Geoffrey from [Salamander County Public Television](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1521810/Salamander_County_Public_Television/) - Muse is a reference to the fan of RyME that helped me keep the motivation to finish it - Ryelle Quara is the names of 2 of my characters from the mmorpg Earth & Beyond. I played that game right up until the servers shut down in 2004. The cryptic messages in that node are basically just my angst at wanting the game to be finished.

The XSS exploit puzzle was one of the last parts to be finished because it I had a very hard time finding a balance between portraying something recognizable as XSS, and making it playable without deep technical knowledge. I don't like where it ended up, but I'm not sure how much better I could do.

Day 5 wasn't originally going to exist. There was going to be one final minigame that acted as the final boss and that would be the end, but I spent months trying to think of a minigame that would tie the game together. I thought about a weird hacking game where you had to write simple scripts to claim and defend various sectors on the game board, but that wouldn't work for a mountain of reasons. Eventually I had the epiphany that it should go out the way it came in: with a reference to Watmos Technologies Inc. A fully terminal based set of exploration and puzzles.

Given how short day 5 is, it went pretty quick, with almost everything working by September 2023. Content that it was in a decent state, I didn't really touch it again until early February when I was doing some full-game testing. I got to day 5 and... half of it didn't work anymore. I'm not sure if I just forgot to implement part of it, or the demo changes broke it, but I had to scramble to rework it. Ultimately it was probably a positive thing, since I think the rework smoothed out many rough edges.

Around the time I put day 5 down is when I needed to start working on the demo before Next Fest on October 9th. The work on the demo is where the crunch really picked up and didn't really let up until release on March 20th. The demo required a LOT of changes. Up until then, the game didn't even have a main menu. It started with a photo of my first desktop computer that you would click to simulate pushing the power button, and it would start straight away. That was a remnant of the web version. Browsers wont play audio on a tab until you've interacted with it in some way, so making players click a button up front ensured I would be good to play music and sound effects.

Anyway, another big addition for the demo was the E-buddy. I wanted to include some sort of cute mascot, so I went about [redesigning Botan](https://cohost.org/Qwarq/post/1750894-it-s-character-redes) as a desktop widget helper thing. I quickly realized it was a good place to put the hint system as well; up until then, hints were in a special tab on the scratchpad program, without any logic behind them. That also created a lot more work for me, since I needed to come up with conditions for which hints should be shown when. There are still a few places where the hints aren't perfectly aligned.

As the demo was coming along I realized that my horrendous music in day 3 really wasn't acceptable if I was going to sell this game for money, and I had no idea how to make music. Up to this point, I had spent all of $0 to make the game, but I finally gave in and found @epiglottal-axolotl to redo the day 3 music for me. Later I had @ogre working on the Void Wanderer soundtrack and the ending theme in parallel as well. Those accounted for about 60% of all the money spent on the game. Look, I'm just really really bad with music. The other 40% being paying my testers.

In the final weeks before release I managed to wrangle a few friends and acquaintances to finally do some proper testing. Until this point, almost no one had tested day 3 and absolutely no one had tested day 4 besides me. Unsurprisingly, it had some problems. I think there were over 200 issues listed in the spreadsheet at one point. After some of the most stressful weeks of my life, I had fixed the majority of the issues and was ready for release.

I had been going hard on development for almost 6 months, and developing it in some capacity for over 6 years, and the moment I hit the button to release the game was maybe the greatest sense of relief I've felt in my entire life.

Despite all of my hard work building and polishing it, I'm profoundly unhappy with the final result. To me, if feels extremely unpolished, unfocused, amateurish and not representative of the quality I'm capable of. That makes promoting the game and watching streams of it really hard for me to do. For anyone that's played it and found some enjoyment in it: Thank you, you're amazing, and I hope you'll enjoy my next game, which I promise I'll be more proud of.

If you have any further questions about Project RyME (or any of my other game dev pursuits), my ask inbox is always open.