Hi everyone, thanks for reading the devlog of The River of Rebirth!

This game is a peculiar one: after all, it was created to celebrate my twitter account reaching 300 followers… and it took me MONTHS to produce for some reason…

Yet, this game is not a particularly big one, not one I feel very strongly about. Don’t get me wrong, I love all my games, I’m passionate about all of them, but it’s not a game with an emotionally-draining story like High School Lolita or The Day Being Ace Made Him Stronger, or one I was really anxious about the execution.

It has made, to be frank, my relationship with this game rather… strange. At the same time, I’m happy with the result etc. but working on it was a pain for some reason? That’s why I kept the GUI quite simple for example: I wanted to be done with it quickly (I was particularly unmotivated to do the GUI for it). But of course, because I felt bad for keeping it simple, I still put some stars and clouds animations (yes, in case you didn’t notice in the menus, the “mist” moves… it’s very subtle, maybe too subtle, but hey, it’s there).

The story in itself was interesting to conceive because I had several polls to let my community decide: I had to make a fairy tale romance, with several endings, involving a non-binary protagonist.

I then had the idea of making a story involving a ghost. I asked if it should be a comedy or a tragedy. My audience being my audience, tragedy won of course. (For anyone curious, the comedy was about a highschooler not having a date for prom and therefore deciding to invoke a ghost; the game would have been trying to convince him to go to prom with you).

Then I asked for non-binary names and a proposition grabbed my attention: River. The idea popped to mind: you would play as River, a 72-year-old lonely soul on the might their lifelong efforts come to fruition: they manage to invoke Ambrose, the husband they lost forty-eight years ago, to possibly bring him back to life.

Of course, River’s enterprise raises a lot of questions: Ambrose is now much younger than them now, since a dead person won’t age. Moreover, Ambrose isn’t the only one who died on that fatal night: River lost both their husband and their child, Aries. And bringing Ambrose back to life would be bringing him back to the sorrow of losing their child.

It was an interesting conflict and I appreciated exploring it through the different endings. There isn’t much to say about it: admittedly, the one I consider “canon”, and the actual “chimcore” one is the ending where River and Ambrose agree that bringing the latter to life wouldn’t be the best solution. The other endings are just explorations around the theme, so I hope they’re fun!

Now, that’s all I have to say about the game. The end of this devlog will be about an announcement: I’m taking a sort of break?

Obviously, I won’t stop working, but I’ll shift my attention to Waterlily on the Froth and my otome jam project only. It is quite difficult to me because I have a lot of ideas and I want to make as many games as possible to make them all come true, but… I have to face the truth: I eat one meal a day, I am burnt out and I get sick every other day (this is not an exaggeration). In the last few days (I’m writing these lines one week before release), I’ve spent roughly 14 hours per day sleeping and I still manage to feel tired and weak. I last had several symptoms six years ago, when I had a burn-out. So I have to face the truth, admit I have to take things more slowly and focus a bit on getting better.

Similarly, I’ll admit the last weeks as a dev felt… EXHAUSTING, to say the least. Between the random itch users giving horrible ratings to NaNoRenO entries and the drama regarding a specific game I won’t mention because we’re all done with it, I think I need to get lighter thoughts. I even got a user mass-rating my games poorly for no reason other than spite I suppose (one more reason to give those 5-star ratings to the games you play: some users are just obnoxious lol). So I think I just need a break and to put lighter thoughts in my mind!

I also want to play more games, to do more side-art, finally get onto tumblr, basically, just do things which are fun to me. So I’ve decided I would develop games at my pace: if my otome jam project isn’t ready for otome jam, fine then, I will release it later. WOTF will get released when it is ready too. And that’s fine, I don’t need to stress myself out!

So, I hope you’re looking forward to my future games and won’t be disappointed by the fact I might not be as present. But hey, that’s something I need and I hope you will still enjoy the games I end up creating.

For now, I wish you a nice day and will thank you for your read. Toodaloo!