Hey everybody. It's been a bit of a rough week for a few different reasons. I've been doing my best, but I'll just tell you that I've been having a hard time. My brain has been so stressed out that I've had difficulty sleeping and lie awake thinking about things entirely too much at night.

Wilson Wonka

For those who don't know who Wilson Wonka is, he is another developer who was working on the game The Hellcat Lounge. I talked about their game a while back, here calling it probably my favorite AVN in production. I talked to Wilson a few times since then and he was always such a good guy - funny, humble, helpful, and caring. I even put his main character, Noah, at the end of Come Home, and he was so gracious about letting me use him, and he had a laugh at the scene.

Unfortunately, Wilson Wonka passed away from cancer last month and we just learned about it this week. He was young, only 48. He was well-loved, both by his family and friends in real life, and all the people who interacted with him in our degenerate online community. He was a skilled writer, game developer, and artist, and he was a good person and he's really going to be missed.

It's so hard sometimes, having these friends online that you talk to and interact with every day, but you're not connected with in real life, so you don't really know what's going on with them. It's hard to remember sometimes that there is a person behind that screen and that they are going through shit, the same as you are.

For me, I have to keep walking this balance between making friendships online and keeping my identity concealed for my own safety. It drives me crazy sometimes. I don't want to be so isolated from my friends online, but I also don't want people knowing my name and showing up at my door or contacting my family members or something. It's always been tough, but this whole thing brought it to the forefront of my mind, because I can't help but to think that if something happened to me, would my online community even know about it? I'm working on creating some contingencies for that case, but it's all still in progress. Hopefully unnecessary, of course, but I'm still thinking about it a lot.

If you haven't played Hellcat Lounge, go check it out. Even if it will likely never be finished now, it's still a great game and you can see Wilson's love for it and his skill as a writer and artist in every scene.

Pour one out for a homie. He was a good guy and we'll all miss him a bunch.

Happy Trails

My work this week has been entirely on Happy Trails. I went through a bit of a crisis towards the end of my vacation, where I just couldn't stop thinking about this game and how I was going to actually make it. I'll be honest, I thought for a long time about whether I should cancel the game and instead focus entirely on Come Home 2.

The issue with Happy Trails is all about the art really. The art is expensive. I've invested a significant amount of money into it already and we're not even close to being done with the first episode (out of probably about 10). I was looking at finances and what is going to be required for the game and I'm thinking, there's no way. I don't know if I could even finish the game.

So, I thought about it for a while, went back and forth about whether or not I just wanted to cancel it. But I don't want to cancel it - it's a story I want to tell and it's a project that I feel very strongly about making. It's just difficult. MUCH more difficult than Come Home 2. Every time I work on CH2, I just have a good time and it's easy and everything comes very quickly. Happy Trails is exactly the opposite in every way to work on. It's difficult, there's a lot more coding, and I never feel very good about it while I'm working on it.

What I did this week was sort of peel back the layers of Happy Trails a bit. I've reshaped it into something that's more feasible. I've eliminated some ideas from it and I've trimmed down the excesses to the point where I think I can actually make it now. I had to go through this same process with Come Home as well - I've talked about it extensively, how originally I wanted there to be two semesters, I wanted more paths and more choices, I wanted there to be minigames and all sorts of other things, and eventually I had to pull back until it was something more manageable. That's what I'm doing with Happy Trails now.

Originally, I wanted Happy Trails to play sort of like Oregon Trail with a lot of random events and inventory and skill management. Now, it's going to be more like a traditional visual novel, where it's focused on story first and gameplay is very minor.

The problem with all those random events and the gameplay is not the coding really - I could do that - it's all the art that would be necessary to make all the different variations of play work. The art would just be too expensive and take too long and also be difficult to implement.

Anyways, bottom line is that after two weeks of working on reshaping Happy Trails, I feel much better about it now and am hoping to continue forward until completion on it. It's not the game I originally envisioned, but every piece of art changes once it hits the paper - nothing is ever exactly what you imagine in your mind. Concessions must be made for a thing to exist. It's still going to be a great story and I think people are going to like it - some will probably like it even more, since it's more focused on the story and characters and less on gameplay.

Next Week

Next week, I'm planning on going back to working on Come Home: Complete Edition and getting the new scenes done that were voted on by patrons. CH:CE Update 3 is going to contain 4 new scenes and maybe a new translation or 2. Probably not much more than that, but we'll see if I have any time left to add a couple more ideas I've been thinking about. Release for it is going to be sometime in August, but I haven't gotten the date down yet.

Other Shit Going On

Some of you know that I went on vacation and got COVID and I've been recovering from it. I'm mostly recovered at this point, but still have a lingering cough I'm dealing with. In addition, a friend IRL passed away yesterday and we're kind of processing and dealing with that as well.

It's been a really hard month so far. I know it's tough for a lot of people and I'm not alone here, but I'm hoping the next couple of weeks get better. I just took a vacation and I already feel like I'm running on empty here. Not so much burnout or anything (though I do feel like I need a break from working on Happy Trails), just overwhelmed with the stuff happening in life in general at the moment. I just want a few normal relaxing days in a row where I don't have to solve a problem or think about death.

I don't usually talk about my real life in these weekly posts, but I felt like I wanted to here because it's been just so much lately, and I wanted everybody to know about Wilson Wonka. So I hope you're okay with me sharing more here and thank you for reading and supporting. There may be a lot to deal with at the moment, but I'm very fortunate to have the support of so many people.

Thank you. Love you. Hope you have a great weekend.