It's strange to write a post-mortem style entry before the game even has files to download and play, but here I am, writing it anyway, lol. 

Before I can really talk about The Skin You're In, I need to give a bit of background on myself, just to give a bit of context for the events that caused the delays in development, and the actions (or lack of action) that was responsible for them.

Feel free to skip reading this entry entirely; it's not horribly relevant outside of framing purposes for this project.

The Story So Far 

About.... three or so years ago, I graduated from the game design undergrad program at Depaul University; after 3ish years of group projects, I wanted to make a deeply personal visual novel for my senior capstone. Unsurprisingly, no one was super interested in having a visual novel as their "definitive final project," so I attempted to do it on my own, and got a horrific case of burnout with not much to show for it. That game, Sour Cherry Twist, will never see the light of day, for a few reasons- the most prominent being that emotionally, I am now so far removed from the state I was in when I conceived it, that I feel I can no longer do it and the subjects it deals with the justice they deserve.

I got an industry job doing QA, and was pretty happy with it. But after leaving that...things sort of petered out for me. I was so burnt out, I literally couldn't even open any of the programming files from any of my projects without a panic attack. For the last 2 years, I've been working various retail jobs, and as anyone who works retail can tell you, it's exhausting. It was only within the last year or so I was actually in a state where I even could THINK about creating anything again. 

TL;DR- I burned myself out super hard and couldn't make games for a long time.

Why Spooktober Jam?

Well, to be honest, participating in the Spooktober VN Jam was a totally off the cuff, unplanned decision. Prior to this, I had followed the Lemonchan twitter, but never really considered joining the server. But 2 months of furlough and anxiety do something to your brain, and even though I had started, months earlier, to lay the groundwork for a game, I decided it was taking me too long, and that I needed a jumpstart to "get back on the horse." So, yeah, I joined the jam like, a week or less before it began, with no plan and no team. 

For reasons I will not expand upon here, I thought it would be a great idea to work on this project completely alone!

Spoilers: It was a terrible idea, and I should have brought other people in sooner.

The next entry I'll be making will be about the game itself, what lead me to pick the themes I did, and a few other things.