First update of 2025! YAY! Better late than never...

The truth is, there is this shared phenomenon in gamedev, a hardship of turning your grand vision into reality, and sometimes even just taking hold of said vision. We love to think in abstract concepts, our minds love to work with these mental images, and gamedev is an activity where two worlds clash when we try to turn these abstract concepts into detailed reality. 

Why this is so hard : Aside from programming taking a lot of specific knowledge, which ironically is the easy part, we Indies fall back to a more intricate form of masochism - since knowing how to do stuff alone isnt enough for us. After all, we also require purpose. What is a machine without its instructions.. So we burden ourselves with yet another role, a creative one. Now we need to not only know how to fundamentally transfer a task into code, we also need to come up with said tasks ourselves.  This is one big factor that promotes scope creep. We need to be able to take all these high level concepts that make up our games vision and dissect them into underlying systems. This is also the point where, atleast for me, it becomes very appearent when stuff isnt really planned out and just floats around as a mental concept. Its why Im able to start out fast but come to a grinding halt eventually.

We need to step out of our comfort zone, wether we are a more technical or creative person. In the end, we need to find a compromise, but its of uttermost importance that we keep a keen eye on the stuff that we're actually bad at, in my case bringing myself to doing atleast the minimum creative work required for stuff to not fall apart and to have an actual direction to work towards. For HZ this means a lot of behind the scenes work now, to lay out actual story elements, environments and enforce an overall creative direction that enables me to tie everything together and create a playable experience. As a result, this will be the last update for a while focussing on the technoligical side, the work ahead is what will enable the differentiation from a tech-demo into an actual coherent game. There is is still a lot to implement and to polish, but we cant continue work without a decent scaffolding. After having the story in a workable shape this means dedicating resources towards creating scenarios/interactions and different areas. These will be the puzzlepieces from which we can piece together a coherent picture and have concrete stuff to work with. With that being said, the current update fixes some crucial flaws and hopefully serves as a solid base to work off of.

Dev on... no shame in stepping back for a bit or to have some sideprojects, we cant force creativity - but we can enable it.