No real updates this week; I spent all last weekend playing video games (Isles of Sea and Sky and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, both highly recommended) and my morning was consumed by fixing DNS issues with my websites. But I realized it’s been just over a year since I started working on Eldritch 2, so I’m going to take stock of my progress over the past year.
Jan-Apr 2023: Gild
Following the release of my 7dfps game jam Thief homage Li’l Taffer, I planned to develop an expanded version with a campaign, to be released as a premium game titled Li’l Taffer Gold (because Thief Gold). Li’l Taffer was codenamed Lily, so I called this project Gild. I didn’t make it much further than high-level narrative and mission planning. My heart wasn’t in it; the scope felt achievable and I wanted to ship something, but there wasn’t any part of Gild I was truly excited to build. I spent a few months making virtually zero progress and feeling bad about it.
May 2023: Inception
In the early morning of 20 May 2023, I was trying to force myself to work on Gild, when suddenly,
“Oh no, I got a really good idea for a video game.”
(I actually can’t remember whether the idea came to me that morning, or whether I’d been thinking about it the night before, but I posted that about 50 minutes after creating a new Trello board for Eldritch 2.)
The general idea of a sequel to Eldritch was something I’d been considering since almost immediately after I shipped that game. Before I started developing NEON STRUCT in early 2014, I was briefly planning “Eldritch 2020” as a retro-futuristic cyberpunk spinoff. But a sequel needed to be something different and special to justify its existence. Simply making “Eldritch, Again” wouldn’t get me excited to do the work, just as Gild wasn’t getting me excited to do the work. And there was the looming question of multiplayer. But finally, the muses aligned and I saw a reason and a way to make Eldritch 2 work.
Jun 2023: Piet
The end of May and the start of June were mostly focused on building Piet, a procedural texture generator I’d been wanting to write for a while. Working on Lily and Gild had finally convinced me that most of the tedious texture pixeling work I was doing in GIMP could be replaced with an automated generator, and the outset of a new project felt like the right time to do some major tools works.
The remainder of June saw me building a test map, getting dual-wielding working again, and playing around with VFX; but progress slowed as I dealt with closing on a new home and summer parenting duties.
Jul-Aug 2023: Hiatus I
The demands on my time intensified over the summer, and I made no progress for a couple of months. Whenever I did find room to think about Eldritch 2, I wasn’t sure what I should do next. I was beginning to worry that this would become another abandoned project in my big pile of abandoned projects.
Sep-Oct 2023: Wolf
Game jams are usually good for breaking me out of a gamedev rut, so I started thinking ahead to what I would do for 7dfps in December. I landed on the idea of a minimalist zombie survival FPS, and I got so excited about it that I decided to start immediately and do it on my own timeline instead of as part of the game jam. Schloss der Wölfe took longer to make than I anticipated and left me exhausted, but I came out of it with an improved engine and tools, and a renewed confidence in my ability to tackle the scope of Eldritch 2.
Nov-Dec 2023: Hiatus II
I briefly started another project for 7dfps, but withdrew from the jam after deciding that I should probably stop doing game jams if I were ever going to make progress on my main game. Meanwhile, my day job got intensely busy toward the end of the year, and I didn’t find time to work on Eldritch 2 again until the holidays.
Jan 2024: Multiverse
I finally returned to the project with a burst of energy and tackled a couple of the biggest technical challenges on my plate: online multiplayer and the “multiverse” it occupies. I’m going to continue to be somewhat vague about the nature of this, because it is part of the central mystery of the game (and the original “really good idea”), and it needs some time to cook.
I started figuring out the game’s level design structure, and improved my procgen and navmesh code to support it. I revamped my texture generator based on my experience using it for Wolf. I found an art direction that I was happy with. The project was finally back on track.
Feb-May 2024: Blog
With Eldritch 2 back on track, I began sharing my progress openly—something I hadn’t done since NEON STRUCT‘s development. Most of what I’ve worked on over the last few months is already documented here, so I won’t repeat it. This month, I decided to establish a regular weekly cadence: a new post every Friday, whether I’ve made significant progress or not. I’m hoping it helps to keep the fire lit.
Jun 2024: Prototype
That brings us to the present. I’ve spent a lot of the month of May in planning mode, and I need to pivot back to implementation now. My immediate goal is to complete a gameplay prototype by the end of June. In prioritizing new tech features this year, I’ve been punting a lot of things that I already know I can do: weapons, powers, enemies. Now I need to actually make those, and validate the primary gameplay loop to myself.
I actually wrote a second half of this post looking ahead to future milestones and an approximate timeline for the whole project, but I scrapped it because I’m not ready to share that. My velocity has been good this year, but Eldritch 2 is a solo project and a side project. It has proven very easy for other things in my life to completely derail progress for months. So for now… it’ll be done when it’s done.