In November, I received a $5000 grant from Game Devs of Color Expo to help with the development of my first commercial and large scale project, TO:RI. Since then I’ve wrapped up two other smaller projects, The Light of Our Yearning and ocean::ephemera. I’ve also been travelling to visit family overseas which was a much needed break from thinking about anything game development related. It’s been a bit of a hectic last few months but things are starting to calm down a bit and I can focus my energy on TO:RI.

Development started over a year ago and has a long way to go. A big milestone I reached is that you can play it from start to finish. Now I have to rework pacing, replace temporary assets, rework interactions, UX, and UI. Team up with the writer to find the voice and tone. Learn new technical skills to better realize the visual vision, and countless other small and big changes. The last 10 percent is extremely difficult. On the way to 90 percent, every percent leaves a massive list of fixes and changes that compound and conflict.

All my focus and free time will go towards this one project. No more 3 month long side projects. No more juggling 5 projects at the same time. It means deprioritizing anything that can have a negative effect on my focus on making TO:RI. It’s a bit of a spiritual experience in a sense. Realigning my life towards a single piece of art. It’s creating more solitude and less distraction. It’s taking long walks and being in nature. It’s studying a range of topics and reading more. It’s watching and listening to birds. Everything I do needs to be in service of this project. TO:RI is like a good teacher to me, guiding me in the right direction in life and encouraging me to make the right choices.

I want my development to be more transparent. I’ll be starting a devlog, and microblog for TO:RI that will share in more detail what this project is, the progress, struggles, milestones, and mundane. This is inspired by Spencer Yan, and William Chyr, who I really respect for sharing in extreme detail their development process. To start, here is an Excel sheet of how I spend every dollar of the grant. It’ll be updated whenever I make a purchase related to the project. So far, I have bought a new PC which has been a huge upgrade over my Macbook Air M1 (no more constant crashes and freezing). My motivation to create has been significantly increased.

Thanks to everyone who already wishlisted TO:RI on steam. It has over 1000 so far which I think is pretty great considering I have spent $0 on marketing. There’s going to be a long exhausting marketing process I will have to navigate for the first time in my life, so every wishlist and share will help a lot to offset that difficult climb. Thanks for reading.