Well, we did it, gamers! Amadeus: A Riddle for Thee ~ Episode 1 ~ Waltz is built and playable from start-to-finish.

That's the long and short of it.

...But obviously, I have more to say than that. The bulk of this update is not so much about tangible accomplishments, but about maintaining passion and focus for this project, and seeing it through now that I've come this far. For a very, very verbose meditation on what still lies between now and release, feel free to read on!

A Very, Very Verbose Meditation On What's Next

The fact that the whole game is built is a little insane to think about, but there's still so much to do to get it actually release-ready that it doesn't feel as much like an achievement as it should. I've written previously about how motivation is incredibly valuable currency for one person making a whole game, and I've been thinking a lot about how to sustain it all the way to the final finish line.

I believe the answer lies in the problem itself: the game's incomplete art and music.

I have spent the past 6 months solely dedicated to building the remaining scenes. It's gone by so fast that I had to double-check that number, but it's accurate! I've been putting my head down and knocking out a huge scene-by-scene checklist nonstop since January. For half a year, my primary focus has been in-engine game development.

Of course, that development work included the creation of art and music assets to implement, but many of those are very... placeholder-y at the moment. The bulk of the work I have been doing is just Getting It All In And Working. After 6 solid months of this I was definitely getting burnt out, enough that I still can't appreciate the enormity of what I've achieved.

I have built the entire game! But all I can think about is what still needs to be done, and how unfinished some scenes still look.

When I got the last scene in the game working, a milestone I had been working towards for half a year straight, I found myself just feeling drained. There was no sense of pride or accomplishment. So I told myself to take the rest of June "off," and really thought about how to get myself pumped up for the final steps of development. How to turn the source of my dread and anxiety—"there are still so many placeholders in this game, will I actually finish it on time?"—into a source of motivation.

I first considered continuing as I have been, focusing on a certain handful of scenes every month and getting them from "built" to "release-ready" one by one. But between the asset replacements and bug fixes and mechanics tweaks that are needed, that just felt overwhelming. I need to feel excited right now; not overwhelmed.

How can I get excited about this game again?

Well, Amadeus's first prototype began development when I was in music school. The main character is literally named after Mozart. The only convention I have tabled at—MAGWest 2024 represent!—is a convention focused on game music.

But for 6 months, the music has been a backburner item.

And I really miss making music.

It's time to return to my roots. Next month, I am going to just eat, sleep, and breathe music again. The game build itself can take the backburner for a moment; I'll flesh out the BGM tracks that need more development, workshop the mixes, really give them all the same amount of love and detail that the finished tracks have. I haven't been able to do that while also splitting my attention between narrative revisions/bug fixes/implementation/thumbnailing art assets, so I want to give myself a month where I do absolutely nothing but work on the soundtrack.

(One of the tracks I need to flesh out is a reworked version of "Uncertain Fate" from the old prototype. I wrote a little about it, including a preview you can listen to, on the Tumblr blog!)

I think this music sidequest is going to be in the game's best interest, too. I take pride in every aspect of Amadeus, and some people have told me that its visual aesthetic is what drew them to it; but in my eyes, the music has always been its most important driving force.

That's the beauty of multimedia, right? The most important feature for one person may not be so important to someone else.

Once I make the game, I have no control over what it means to someone else who plays it. But because of my own motivations for making Amadeus, I really need the whole soundtrack to slap. Hearing a fully fleshed-out soundtrack will help maintain my confidence, motivate the writing and art revisions I still need to do, and guide the rest of the game's direction to the very end. It's absolutely vital.

If July goes well, my plan for August is to do the same but for the art assets. I want to give myself a month where I can just immerse myself in the medium of visual art and bring the remaining CG's, backgrounds, and character portraits to life.

All this to say: I have been a game developer for 6 months. Now, I really need to just be an artist for a while.

I still won't make promises I can't keep, but as a tentative release timeline update: if I do finish all (or even most) of the assets by the end of August, I will need September for implementation & narrative, and October for playtesting. Game release would likely occur in November. That is the goal, but I will have a better idea of how realistic it is after these two months of art focus.

I really didn't think I would still be working on this first episode so far into 2025, but here we are. I've learned a lot about development in this time. Episode 1 has taken me about 3 years. How long will Episode 2 take? Episode 3? 4? 5? I have no idea. I don't know whether I will take the foundation I've built here and the others will go much faster, or if I will move the goalposts each time and make each episode progressively more and more of a production. Only time will tell.

I'm not worrying about that yet. I said I would release Episode 1 ~ Waltz in 2025, and I am going to do just that. For now, that means it's time to make some music.

As fortune would have it, I got a little bit of a head start on this "music month." A friend asked me to score their Toxic Yuri VN Jam entry Beaconing: A Lost Cause, and I've been working on some of the most utterly deranged music I've ever made for it. It's been a great way to de-rust my mixing skills and just... have fun and go nuts. Writing music for someone else exercises different muscles than writing music for myself does, and even though the whole thing is scored with Logic Loops and random sound files I already had lying around (it's a game jam game okay), I like to think nobody else would make Logic Loops come out quite this particular flavor of fucked up. Not to mention that writing bullshit purely with Logic Loops and random sound files is just fun!

Please look forward to that game dropping soon, I'll be sure to shill it in the next update.

And as my work for that is mostly done, I intend to wrap it up soon so I can throw myself back into Amadeus. But the priority shift has worked: I'm really excited about my work for next month. It's going to be a ton of fun.