Written in Chinese, translated by Claude Sonnet 4.5.
It’s been almost a month since “Escape Everlit” launched. Not many people have played it - only yesterday it reached 10 reviews on Steam - but 100% are positive, and the refund rate is only 5% (compared to the typical 10%). Players who completed the game have given very positive feedback on the game’s quality, especially the story.
Thank you all for your support. To have people willing to venture this far along a nameless unpaved road, then praise its view - what more could I ask for?
One year and eight months ago, I quit my job, aiming to do something interesting.
At that time, I knew nothing about game development. I had no art or music background, nor any formal software engineering education. I had only written some short stories that were never published.
But I was a veteran gamer with over 30 yoe. I believed I could do it, so I went for it. After 2,742 hours of work - both painful and joyful - this point-n-click adventure game with lite puzzles was born:
- 9-10 hours of gameplay
- 4 playable protagonists
- 22 socially connected supporting characters
- 10,000+ dialogue lines
- 5 “level” maps
- 4-5 endings
For this project, I had set two success criteria:
- Spending one year solo to make a game that I’d consider to be of acceptable quality
- Ultimately having 300 players complete the game
The “solo” and “acceptable quality to myself” parts worked out. In order to polish the story for completeness, it took a year and a half in total - timeout.
The “300 players completing” metric was based on me having spent 2,700+ work hours on the game, with a single player needing about 9 hours to complete it. So if 300 people completed it (not counting time from players who quit), it would mean for every hour I worked hard, someone enjoyed entertainment for an hour - a one-to-one life span exchange. It now seems this metric will be difficult to achieve.
The sense of loss is real, but as a gamer who now finally having a full game of his own creation, there’s still a fundamental joy of “smiling in my sleep.”
Over the past year and a half, I’ve learned many new things and shared some in devlogs. You may find them on this site. Hope they may help who come after.
