After 8 arduous months, I can finally publish Derma. I originally planned to finish this project the same month I started it, which was December, but I got sidetracked HARD. Over this past period, I probably spent more time thinking "I need to finish what I started" than actually working on the damn game. 

A bug appeared early in development, which caused jitter whenever the camera was moving. I devoted a good amount of time to solving it, but to no avail. My failure disheartened me, so I kept running away, in fear of more failure. The fact that I didn't meet my self-imposed deadline made it even worse. It weighed on my mind like a book that hasn't made its way back to the library for a year. Yet, I couldn't bring myself to try. 

But in the end, I failed to get away from it. I made a bit of progress in May, and after another pause, continued seriously working on Derma about 3 weeks ago. I decided to make fixing that bug the LAST thing I do, and focused on art, sound, and level design first. Game development is a wonderful thing; there is always a lot of different things to do, so I realized, if I find one thing so tedious, I should focus on something else in the meantime. I had my cousin help me with recording the sound effects. It was fun.

When I ran out of other things to do, it was time to finally face my arch nemesis. After all the optimizations I tried, what ended up mysteriously resolving my issue was simply moving my project to the newest version of my game engine,  which wasn't out back in December. It took way more time then I thought it would, but I ended up learning a lot about making games. I also increased scope a bit, which I think greatly benefited the game. I originally didn't plan to add any cutscenes because I'm still an amateur at art, but they ended up looking rather charming (maybe in the same way a child's crayon drawing would be, lol). I didn't have certain obstacles in mind, or a certain section with different gameplay, but I'm so happy that I ended up working those in. I felt miserable about being slow, but the truth is, I took exactly the amount of time I needed to do this story justice. And there is nothing to regret.

From now on, when I start a project, I will work steadily on different parts of it, without putting it off, and I won't get bogged down by any one thing not going right. The obstacles I'll face will not be insurmountable, which means that my drive to make my stories come to life will inevitably conquer them.

Here's to the beginning of a long road to understanding.