Choosing a Medium

07 Nov, 2025

This blog post is part-discussion, part-postmortem. I've been thinking about it for quite some time, and I would like to finalize these thoughts.

Truck Stop

A couple months back, I started work on a game called "Truck Stop". You played as a 40-something-year-old trucker in the not-so-distant future, who comes to a truck stop to stay the night. There are NPCs to interact with, puzzles to solve (we'll get to that), and an ending (we'll get to that too).

So I built out a couple systems - Russ (the main character) would find a magic stopwatch in a dumpster, and rewind or fast-forward time on relevant objects to solve puzzles. I created the movement system, the room transition system, a couple NPC dialogue things, and the tutorial where you get the stopwatch.

Then I completely stopped working on it. As soon as I had finished the stopwatch tutorial, I thought "welp. Now for the rest of it."

After a week or so of dodging Truck Stop, I went out to get lunch at my favorite restaurant. I took my little gamedev notebook with me, and started writing out puzzle ideas. I spent longer than usual there (I'm "that guy" who goes into a restaurant, vacuums up a dish, and leaves), writing a series of interconnected puzzles, character interactions, etc.

I got back to my apartment, satisfied with my ideas. I sat down at the computer, opened Godot, and stared at it for a couple minutes, before I closed it again. I never opened Truck Stop again. A couple weeks later, I put it back on The Shelf¹, to the disappointment of the people I had breathlessly told about it. This was the impetus for me to write this blog post, but I put the blog post off a bit. I wasn't quite sure where and how to gather my thoughts about the situation. I think enough time has finally passed that I can diagnose it.

Hammers and Nails

I have met a couple people who start at the conclusion and work backwards. They tell me, "I want to make a game!", but when I talk to them about the game, it seems they haven't figured out the game part, only that they want to make a game. It was in talking with one of these people that the gravity of Truck Stop and a couple other things finally settled. "Wait", I thought, "am I that guy who has one hammer and attacks everything like it's a nail?"

I haven't been able to get that out of my head. Truck Stop was the most egregious example of this behavior, but I started to look backwards, and pay more attention in day-to-day experiences. If I was watching a streamer play a game or something, I'd think, "man I should make a <x> game". 90% of these just fade into the background. But one or two, I spec out, and put on The Shelf for later. I wanted to make a game first, and worked backwards.

Tournament of Venus is one of these games. I played Oh So Hero, and thought, "man I like the context and art of this game, but the minute-to-minute gameplay is quite mediocre". So I spec'ed out an idea for a sex tournament - "what if it was a WarioWare game? That'd get the frantic-ness of it across!" - and ToV was born. Not long after, I wrote some code for it, did some temp assets, and promptly forgot about it. I was broke at that time, and there were more important things on my mind than floppy cocks. Eventually, things turned around, and I started work on ToV again. I had a friend-of-a-friend, Bandana, interested in working on the game, and the first part of ToV was completed and published.

Truck Stop was created and killed between ToV's publishing (June 2025) and now (November 2025). You have absolutely no idea how many projects I have in the graveyard / The Shelf. I put a lot of things back on The Shelf in order to focus on ToV after its publishing. I planned to have parts 2 & 3 of ToV animated simultaneously, by having multiple artists do the battle animations. Due to some circumstances under my control, that completely fell apart, and I was back to square one.

I took a bit of a break from gamedev. Starting August, I followed CGP Grey's theme concept for a season. Autumn was the Season of People - I wanted to spend time around people rather than putting myself into my ratcave and doing endless projects. It was wonderful, and honestly, I didn't really need to force myself out of working on games - I just wasn't working on them.

I popped out the other end of that in late October, with a renewed vitality for drawing and project work. I drew and posted quite a few artworks this year, and a majority of them have been in the second half of the year. I was ready to do some ToV work. I did a test animation to see if I was man enough to do the ToV battle animations myself. Turns out, I wasn't. Though the animation test turned out okay, I really do not get enjoyment drawing as "work".

ToV

So, here's the other issue with ToV. I do not possess the requisite time nor skills to do it myself (animating, drawing). I have a regular job I work 8 hours a day, so I thought, "ok, I can put some of my job money aside for hiring animators". Here's the thing: when you create artwork, you care about it. Even if it turns out like ass, or people don't like it, you still cared when you made it. This was the fundamental issue with ToV; I was the only one involved who loved it. The artists I hired to work on ToV did good work, yes, but this wasn't their project. They didn't need to care. And because of that, the sort of precision and tenderness that is applied to a personal project was not applied here. It's not hard to compare ToV and Washing Machine (WaMa) and see the spirit of each. ToV, from the start, was a static game. I had some love for it and its characters, but not enough to sustain a project this big. ToV's size was its worst mistake.

With any medium, there's a minimum amount of work necessary for the medium to be realized. With drawings, a sketch is satisfactory; with writing, a short story; cinema, a short film; etc. Games are, mathematically, the most complex artistic medium. They require sound, visuals, and interactivity. Each medium is additive - recited stories to writing to novels to comics to movies to games - and the amount of work to go "up" a tier is indescribable. Where does that leave ToV? To make a satisfying game, it would require more than a handful of battles. I had 8 planned, specifically, which is the bare minimum, in my opinion. Each battle set took one animator about 100 hours to complete. Hence my thought to hire out; but paying someone for 100 hours of work is not cheap. This became one of the bottlenecks.

The lack of personal investment in ToV by the artists and such that were involved was another bottleneck. When you go into an office, you are physically there, and your investment is getting a paycheck. Whether or not you care is secondary to completing your tasks. If you're really fed up, you leave. But this is an inversion from my situation; an employee asks the company if they can work, but in my case, I ask the contractors if they can work. Inaction on the part of an employee is fireable; inaction on the part of a contractor gives you fist-shaking at best.

Finally, the lack of skill on my part was not initially an issue, but became one. When you're put in a situation where you have to take over because a contractor is unable or unwilling to continue their work, a lack of ability in that area is devastating. I do not have the animation skills of the contractors I hired, and it would take a lot of time, effort, and care that I simply do not have in order to learn. All of that while under the gun of an ongoing project. I am not like some of my contemporaries who are okay with letting an unfinished project rot publicly.

In my opinion, ToV should have been, at most, a long-running comic, rather than a game. Player interactivity was pretty low on the list of things ToV expected, and I prefer games where the player is impacting the world or mechanics more directly. Either something where your actions have narrative consequences (snore), or a much less static game (i.e., an action game). Bramblestone changed my opinion on action games in a yiff context, and I am perfectly okay with a game that has either casual nudity or cordoned-off sex sequences, provided they are in service of the gameplay or context.

Thing is, ToV started as a minigame engine, and the lobby was an afterthought. I really do not and did not enjoy working on the lobby, and yet, that took the most time to develop. But a minigame-only project would have a horrible effort-to-gameplay ratio. The structure was fucked from the start, but I was too naive to see the issues until it was much much too late.

Where to?

I have learned a few valuable lessons from ToV, so it was not a total loss. I hope these can assist someone else wondering if they want to be a game developer.

1. Plan. Plan. Plan. I was so woefully underprepared when I handed off ToV work to Bandana, and didn't understand the magnitude of that. I don't think it's feasible to have a full game in your head before you start, but for reference, ToV's design document is about 6000 words. Wrangler's was about 3000.
2. If you're entrusting a large portion of the game to someone (code, art, music, etc.), make absolutely certain they are as in love with the project as you. Tepidity will not grant you what you need.
3. Do not start a project you are unable to finish. This is the biggest one. If you can't take over when your compatriots leave or fail to produce work, you either need to pick up that skill, or abandon the project.
4. Keep cutting things out. Trimming is a valuable part of the gamedev process in my opinion, and being unwilling or unable to remove things will drag you down. If you're bumping up against the lower bound of what can be a game, you have a fundamental issue, and need to re-spec it entirely. This is what ToV ran into, but I was unwilling to re-spec. Don't be like me.

My next projects will be of a significantly smaller scope than ToV. I am thinking more in the realm of WaMa - games that could be game-jammed in one or two weekends. But, with my schedule, they'll be cooked over a few months instead. ToV, if I had let it continue, would be entering year 3 of development, and that prospect alone kills me. It likely would've taken another 2+ years at least. No way man.

I don't think I'm done with yiff gamedev. The enjoyment and focus I can get while working on one of these projects is fulfilling, and beats the hell out of the code I write at work. Nonetheless, I am taking a break to figure out exactly how to pare down my scope and size, and maybe do some experiments with different engines. I used to think WASM-4's claim about the bigness of engines was a bit overblown, but now its four colors and imperative programming design are appealing to me.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for the tone of this one; shitcanning ToV has been a decision I've flip-flopped on since March. I probably shouldn't have released it in the first place, but I felt pretty awful throwing it in the trash. I like what ToV became, but not what it is, both for my mental, and in its execution.