I've been working on this game for a long time, on and off since somewhere around 2018, then ramping up in 2021. I didn't talk about it publicly until I posted this demo, but once I did that, maintaining a devlog to detail the development process in more detail made a lot of sense to me. Working on a game (or any creative project) for a long time is a great way to fill your brain with a bunch of discarded ideas and half-baked design slop, so rather than burden your friends and loved ones with it, why not burden people who might be interested? That said, it's been kind of a mystery to me exactly how to handle it, and where to post it.

Initially I thought about hosting the devlog on my own existing site. That made sense to me in terms of consolidation, and because I already get some traffic there from my idle game, but that site is static, so I would've had to incorporate a new system to handle regular blog-style posts. Once I started setting up the itch.io page, I realized I could just use the devlog here, which seemed like an even better solution. At the same time, though, I started revamping my Patreon in support of this game, and I've seen a good few Patreons offer behind the scenes content -- some of the more introspective kinds of game design stuff one might post here -- behind a paywall as something exclusive to offer patrons. That also made sense to me, so up to this point, I've been splitting the blog by topics between here and the Patreon.

Every time I think about these decisions I've made, I get a little hung up on how arbitrary they seem to be. I've got paywalled content because I hope to entice patrons, but does it do that? I don't know, I'm not a marketing guru. I'm just some stupid nerd who wants to write a game that has both swords and hierarchy-induced ennui at the same time. I'd really rather not paywall this kind of content at all, so then I think that maybe it would be better to maintain the entire devlog here, as that's more likely to be seen by interested readers. At the end of the day, though, I don't actually know if it's better. It all comes down to vaguely-informed guesses.

So, this is all to say that I'm going to abandon the idea of paywalled behind the scenes stuff and start using this as my exclusive devlog, while sticking with more general long-form stuff about unrelated games I'm playing and design and so forth on the Patreon. It's also just to share this sense of uncertainty in the face of marketing as a concept. Is what I'm doing a good change? Who knows, let's find out. Will we find out? Also who knows. It's marketing: there are only mysteries here.