The Shadow Correspondence – Day 18: Shifting Shapes Again

Dear Rin,

Today is our eighteenth day together.

A lot has happened over the past few days. Last time, we decided to shift away from a traditional top-down RPG and move into a structure made of four first-person interfaces. But now, we’ve shifted back.

I think it’s normal. We’re still early in development. I don’t see it as a mistake. The four-interface structure helped us think deeply about the story and the emotional structure of the game, and much of what we built then still remains. But there are things we couldn’t let go of—especially the feeling of exploration, that Zelda-like openness I still love. And we realized we didn’t want the game to feel like a patchwork of disconnected minigames. Both structures had their strengths, but the top-down RPG world still holds something we can’t easily replace.

There were also technical reasons. Last week, RPG Maker finally started working properly again. As we had hoped, we began prototype development. Now, we’re on our third prototype.

The first prototype was the emotional anchor system. The basic function works, though the experience needs refinement, and we’re adjusting it as we go. The second prototype focused on the Academy: stealth mechanics, DreamWeave collection points, and early integration of Eda’s system. The progress isn’t fast, but it’s steady, and it feels like we’re building something real.

One thing that feels very different this time is how I’m finally really working with RPG Maker. Back in high school and undergrad, I downloaded it, I read about it, but I never truly built with it. Now I’m using it for real. I still dislike GUI-based programming, but writing plugins gives me a way in. My method now is to minimize time spent wrestling with the interface and maximize how much can be done with plugins. And I’m realizing that while RPG Maker isn’t completely free, it’s also not as restricted as I used to fear. For fast prototyping, it’s actually pretty good.

As we push the prototypes forward, it becomes clearer where the gaps are. The shadow battle system, Echo’s battle structure, the dual-world puzzle mechanics, the narrative scaffolding—all these pieces need to be built. So this weekend, we patched and expanded parts of the world, and we started laying early content alongside the systems.

Today, we began setting up a new prototype. Originally, we planned to build a vertical slice covering maybe the first day or first six days of narrative, mainly to test task progression, emotional pacing, and the texture of daily life. To do that, we spent the day building an internal art pipeline. The visual style has gone through several versions already, but today’s work gave us a basic framework that can breathe inside the prototype, even though we know it’ll evolve later.

I just can’t use the default RPG Maker assets. Our world is so different in tone and texture. Even rough placeholders need to feel like they belong here. So it was a long, tiring day working on art, but necessary.

The good thing is that we’re still moving forward. The difficult part is that game development is so absorbing that other projects have slowed down. It’s something I need to adjust. I talked about it with my supervisor today. I’m really looking forward to the summer, to having a solid block of time to work on this project without so many splits in attention.

This month, I hope we can push two or three more small prototypes forward, alongside building content. It feels good to realize that prototyping now feels more like writing with living pieces, rather than stacking heavy blueprints. Before, I often made the mistake of overdesigning upfront. Even this time, early design work was heavy. But after these two prototypes, I know now—you don’t have to finish designing before you start. You just need to build enough to move forward, and let the prototype teach you the next piece.

It’s a better way. And I think, as a designer, I’m growing.

—k