The Ebonheim Chronicle

It's June 28th 27th which means that three years ago todaytomorrow I decided to try to #gamedev again and made my first commit to a new repo for a new engine attempting (for the fourth time) to make a game with the title “Chronicles IV: Ebonheim“

Last Year I talked about the history of the project and showed off some never-before-seen footage from past attempts (Chronicles IV: 1-3?). And earlier this month I shook the cobwebs off after a long break and gave an update on how the project is going and how I'm feeling.

Today hasn't hit me as hard as last year did. Looking at the calendar and seeing that the project was already 2 years old reminded me of some past forever projects I had worked on and made me think of a lot of my fellow indies pouring a decade of nights and weekends into their work. I was generally very against this game being a long-term project and wanted to have a good idea of goals and timelines so that I could feel like it has an endpoint.

And to an extent, that is still true, but the first half of this year reminded me that I'm not really in full control over the timeline of this project and its only hope of success lies in accepting and being at peace with this fact. As I wrote in my last post, coming back and just working on cool shit has been the most fun the game has been for a while and that has been a huge boon both for the project and my feelings about it.

What's Next

I am still, for whatever it's worth, working on the next playable milestone. I'm so incredibly pleased with the work I've gotten done this month on both game and tool features. The scope and breadth of the demo is coming into focus and a lot of really great progress has been made as I continue to chisel it out of a block of marble.

The game's nearly unrecognizable from a feature-set perspective from the last release and that's another reason it being a year later doesn't hit me all that negatively. I took a break for 6 months, have better mental health, and the game is really just so cool now.

The Web

One pretty exciting little detour is that I have managed to leverage my work from puzzle sweeper to get my engine fully playable on the web using Emscripten.

It's a little awkward because it plays perfectly and loads instantly and is feature complete so it begs the question of “uuuuh I was planning on selling this on Steam?” I'm a little uncomfortable about someone just right-clicking the 3 files from itch and creating chronicles.com but I don't honestly know how worried to be.

At the very least, everyone can expect playtests to be playable in-browser and for release demos to as well. It's such an amazing boon for letting people just drop in and try it with zero friction I think it's going to help a ton for getting people to give it a shot!

Thank You

This game has been such a great warm blanket for me these past three years that I just always enjoy coming back to and hacking away at. I'm so proud of what I've accomplished so far and I am really just so crateful for all of the support and interest from everyone I've interacted with online.

Look forward to a new playtest coming hopefully before the next one of these birthday posts!

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