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A few thoughts about the future of _fade

Hi there!

It’s been months since the last time I decided to write a little something for this project.
I’d just like to be honest with you for a sec and tell you how things have been here.

The main reason why I haven’t been releasing anything new for this game is because during all these months many thoughts have matured, and I think it would be beneficial for everyone to give ourselves a bit of a retrospective.

The idea came around at some point in 2014, following a series of other concepts that were quite beyond what I could afford in terms of scale and indeed resources. They still are, mind, but we’re gonna get to them in the next paragraphs. _fade was, in a sense, a distillation from the way I used to organize my own ideas and work load.

Ironically, the more I dived deep into its development, the more I kept adding content that would inevitably push the project further into the already uncertain future. Meanwhile, I had the privilege of working on game projects as both a composer and a writer/game designer, and therefore building up experience as I chugged along through the grinder.

Over the years, I had come to the realization that what I was doing was part of a vision, but I couldn’t fit the puzzle pieces together just yet. I knew something was amiss, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. At some point, I simply started accepting the fact that all ideas have their own scale and cycle, and all of them contribute to something.

As I’ve stated earlier, _fade wasn’t the only concept I had in mind back then. There are a lot of ideas I haven’t shared publicly yet and _fade represents only a fraction of what will hopefully be in the bigger picture. So, it all comes around to be sincere with oneself and coming to terms with reality, as well as our own intellectual honesty.

Trust me, it’s never easy. It’s nothing you can learn from someone else, it has to be achieved through trial-and-error, countless failures and in my case a lot of anxiety, disappointment and frustration. To me, _fade is still a very personal game and because it is so symbolic, I think the project deserves a special treatment.

Right now, I consider the currently available version as some kind of prologue/demo, just to get a hint of what the project can possibly be about. What I actually imagine for the game is much vaster and almost entirely different. I want _fade to be a world riddled with detail and lush, desolate surreal environments, and because of this goal in mind the actual effort that will be spent will be likely doubled, tripled, even quadrupled.

I want to do things right, as they should. I want to bring out as much potential as I can from this game, and I’m gonna tell you right from this very moment: you won’t likely see any update here for a long while until I feel ready enough to embrace the challenge again. I have other smaller projects that I would like to develop, starting from the recently released .defrag (that you should totally check out, by the way), and this time I do have a road map of all these countless concepts I’ve been writing over the past few years.

In short, the current version of _fade only represents a rough sketch of what the project will be like in the future. Now, I don’t wanna overhype it, but this is what I have been thinking this whole time and it seemed right in my head to share my thoughts with you all.

So, that’s about it for now. Thanks for reading this extremely long post and until the next update, please support my other available projects, present and future! :)