Today I’ve announced my upcoming game: Elumina. And with that exciting announcement, I also need to deliver a dose of reality: making games is hard.

The past few months I’ve been polishing the bits of Elumina that I’ve created so far. I managed to clear out all the bugs that I could find and felt pretty satisfied with the art style and game play. But there was one issue that I discovered needed a lot of work: the game in its current state is very poorly optimized. 

Everything right now definitely works, and I could foresee publishing a demo much sooner, but if I want to scale the existing game to have a larger map, more mechanics, etc. it’s just not doable in its current state. It will be extremely buggy, slow, and honestly very hard to program. I know how to fix a lot of my problems, but it’s definitely going to require me to redo a LOT. 

This is a mistake that I honestly should have seen coming. I jumped right into Godot attempting to make a great project while it was only my second time setting one up. I made scripts based on tutorials and then squished in my own needs based on my hacked together coding knowledge. It wasn’t until I began to think about the full roadmap that I realized my game is not set up at all to scale. It’s unfortunate, but at least I’m catching this all now while I’m still fairly early in the process. 

Redoing my game is what will probably slow down my social media presence and marketing for awhile. There really won’t be much to share as I’m simply redoing whats there. If you do see anything, it might be some occasional pixel art since I can work on that regardless of the state of the game.

Just to add in a bit of hope, I pretty much have a full blueprint of the game drawn up. I have a map, I know the mechanics, I have at least the first big section of puzzles made (although not fully tested). So it’s easy for me to keep pushing at the project knowing I have a solid plan. I really don’t want to abandon this project.. it’s just going to take time to build.

Anyways, that’s all I have to share. Thanks for reading- I really appreciate all the support.