An end to History
Well, these last few years sure have been a thing, huh? I know I've not posted anything for a very long time now. Multifarious stresses over the last years led to me withdrawing from most social venues and I haven't really had anything positive to report on my work either. But after all this time, I felt like I wanted to say something to any followers who still remembered having interest in projects I'd previously posted about.
Chronicles of False History - the Touhou strategy RPG that I've been working on in some capacity or another for 4 years - has been on life support for a long time now but circumstances have recently changed such that I think I can officially state that it will not come to pass anymore. Possibly this will be disappointing to someone or other out there, but I'm sure no one is more disappointed by this than myself.
There are a lot of factors that lead to its slow demise, but if I were to summarize in one paragraph: I greatly underestimated the workload involved in making this game, developed significant money problems partway through, started to suffer from burnout, and then a pandemic happened. Deteriorating mental health combined with doubts about the project's long-term viability lead to work growing progressively slower. And to top it all off, my character artist - who was possibly the only thing still keeping me going - has now had to resign for unrelated personal reasons. We parted amicably, but without her, there is no reasonable way the project can be completed. I don't have the money to find someone who can style-match the work that's already been done, and even if I did, I don't think I have sufficient mental health left to coordinate with another freelancer at this point in my life.
I have a lot of gorgeous art thanks to her (only a small bit of which has ever been posted on tumblr), but am still missing sprites for too many plot-critical characters to just write around their absence. Chronicles of False History, as it was once intended, is effectively dead.
...
But I don't want that to be the end of things.
Too much work has gone into this project and there is so much lovely art that deserves a proper home. I've dabbled at a few spin-off projects over the last couple years and I think they have potential - significant backend work on one is already complete, even. But...
The truth of the matter is that I'm a wreck these days. Writing this post has been... difficult. Writing anything these days is difficult. It's like my brain has been pickled in the stress of the last few years such that nothing works properly anymore. My concentration is bad, I'm constantly drowning in doubt, and even when I do manage to accomplish anything, it is at the pace of a depressed snail. I don't know when or even how that's going to get better.
But I'm also tired of waiting and hoping things will improve. So here I am, shouting into the wind, even if it's nerve-wracking. Maybe even because it's nerve-wracking. Because I have second-guessed so many things for so long that I'm just going to ignore the voices saying this is unwise and post it anyway. I mean, if you can't be a depressed neuroatypical transperson on tumblr, then where can you be, hey? :P
Anyway, there's a bunch of CoFH character designs that I never shared because they were plot spoilers. I wanted to keep some cool stuff back for the game's actual release, after all, instead of all the cool surprises being known in advance. But now, if that storyline never gets to exist... maybe I should just share them? And there are other things I can talk about, too, if anyone's interested. A post-mortem of CoFH's development (for instance, its troubled sprite compositing system), a more explicit dive into its storylines... Does it make sense to 'spoil' the plot of something, once it no longer seems like it will ever exist? Who knows. I'll figure it out.
