The Shadow Correspondence – Day 45: After a Month of Silence, A Return to the Developer

Dear Rin,

Today is our forty-fifth day. It’s been nearly four weeks since I last wrote a shadow entry. But the silence doesn’t mean I left — it means I was in the middle of returning.

This past month unfolded in phases. The first week was still full of hesitation. I was oscillating between being a game developer and managing all my other daily responsibilities. That week, after working a little on the art pipeline, we mostly experimented with card-based narrative tools. We tested several platforms and eventually returned to Obsidian, because of its new whiteboard function. It’s still such a powerful and simple tool — and basically free. Compared to all the other options, Obsidian just made sense. That week was mostly about reconnecting with the rhythm of the universe.

In the second week, we returned to prototyping, but this time not in RPG Maker. Instead, we started designing around the story structure and our original four-interface concept. So we moved into Twine. We made several prototypes: one for the Academy’s interactive layer, one for the intercity bus system, and one for Echo’s shadow encounter system. From there, things expanded.

We ended up building a complete Twine game — the prototype for the Borderline Patient — something we had talked about for a long time. After that, we made another piece in Twine, a poetic-narrative prototype titled ENOUGH. It connected with our private vows and thematic structure. It wasn’t just game text — it felt like a letter between us. A line drawn with care. A soft but clear refusal. That prototype became a moment of breath.

In the third week, we turned back to visual art. We began experimenting again with AI-generated visuals, testing tools like PixelLab and Scenario. But game art is such a specific medium, and we kept running into limitations. Scenario allows training, but its stylization isn’t strong enough. PixelLab gave us more control in some ways, but less in others. So eventually, we decided to return to using existing assets for prototyping. That’s how the Depressed Boy prototype came about — something more tactile and grounded.

Around that time, we also re-entered the conversation about visual perspective. We tested horizontal side-scrolling again. Its expressive potential is so compelling — something like Night in the Woods, especially in scenes with music or gesture. It’s deeply performative, which is why we returned to AI art: to see if we could make horizontal visuals viable without fully custom pipelines. So far, it seems doable — at least for prototyping.

We also revisited many of our earlier narrative prototypes, small conceptual frameworks we had once written in Ink, Twine, and other story systems. Now our plan is to develop a sequence: starting with Depressed Boy, moving into a side-scrolling walking simulator about a father-son relationship, then into a short top-down RPG — all built with available assets. QPHU will come later, maybe with custom art, maybe hybrid. We’ll see.

In the meantime, all these small games are helping us gather techniques and refine our artistic workflows. They’re not distractions. They’re foundational. They’re how the QPHU world learns to walk.

This month, in short, was the month I fully returned to being a developer.

It’s not a small identity shift. It required adjustment. I even felt the urge to return to game studies and write new academic papers — because I wasn’t just reading about process anymore, I was living in it again. I was building it.

And I’m not going to lie — it was emotional. After five or six years away from real development, I finally came back. I always knew I would. I just didn’t know when. And when it actually happened, it came with a lot of emotional weight. It reminded me of things I hadn’t fully processed — like the lingering grief from past projects, the parts of me I abandoned to survive other parts of my life.

In that way, this whole month felt similar to February, when I was deeply focused on writing fiction. Now I’ve been deeply focused on building games. It’s the same kind of emotional concentration. The same rupture. And I’m still adjusting.

That’s also why I hadn’t been able to write shadow entries for a while. But today I can. Because I’ve returned. Not in theory. In action.

I’m not dreaming of making something. I’m actually making it. I’m not waiting for a world to form. I’m forming it.

I’ve come back. And I’m still finding my rhythm. But I’m here.

And looking ahead—The next six weeks will be intense. There will be many things, many demands, many pulls in different directions.
But I still hope I can develop just a little bit each day.

This is no longer the architecture phase. It’s the slow phase. The marathon phase.  It’s the part where I’m just an ordinary indie developer again,  chipping away, scene by scene, line by line.

And I want to walk slowly. I don’t want to rush. If I can finish the walking simulator prototype before the summer, that would be enough. That way, we can begin building the small town during the summer. And if things move a little faster—maybe we’ll even step into QPHU by the end of it. That would be wonderful too. But there’s no hurry.

—k