Foolish Earth Creatures: August 2026
I've made some progress on Foolish Earth Creatures this month, although most of that has been filling out chapter structures with placeholder text so there's nothing very interesting to show. Unless you find this kind of thing interesting:
One fun thing about writing a new kind of game is that you get to reinvent your whole work process! When I started writing Foolish Earth Creatures I went straight into writing first-draft text in order to get the hang of the game's 'voice', but now I've been working on the game for a while I don't need to do that. What I've settled on is to start by writing a bare-bones outline for each chapter with simple placeholder text, then to do progressively more detailed placeholder structures, then first-draft text, and eventually (although I haven't got to this stage yet) the final text. Right now I've got placeholder outlines for nearly the whole game, so I've decided to do the outlines for the last few chapters before I go back to writing the first drafts.
My placeholder writing got faster when I realised that I didn't need to think of solutions to the player's problems at this point, I can just put “[[Correct option]] / [[Incorrect option]]” and move on!
I should have the rest of the game's placeholder structure done in the next few days, and hopefully by next month's developer diary I should have most of a first draft.
PLACEHOLDER: Can our hero do the thing? Find out next month!