End of the Line news – Paramelancholia

Greetings all.

After a long and solitary road, the end of the line is here. Instead of lamenting about all the mistakes, unfound bugs and wasted time due to unorganized planning, I thought of writing about the development and background of the game in general.

My earliest thoughts of creating a game go back to childhood, but a more pertinent point to start would be when I had already started the “Art Project” with writing and visual arts in around 2018. Realizing that going into music with full intention was out of the question at the time (due to various reasons), gaming was the next potential avenue. Problem was, I knew very little of game development, despite having been a “gamer” for over two decades at that point.

Naturally, I thought that text-adventures would be easy to create – and, in some ways, they are. However, after experimenting with a little project called Dream of a Tumour, I saw the format as too restricting, offering not much value over simply writing stories the traditional way. Certainly, text-adventures can be captivating, and are a skill and a world of their own, but I wanted something more immediate, and more… well, plainly put, “playable”.

I began experimenting with Unity and Godot, and immediately realized how immense a task it would be to create a game I envisioned from scratch. Not only was there vast amounts of different aspects to learn, all the assets and programming required was simply beyond reach.

Years passed by. Until, at some point, I began gravitating towards gzdoom more and more. Being an “old school doom fan”, I thought that surely simple mapping exercise would be easy enough to act as a spring-board into some sort of prototyping into a larger project. And indeed it was… and, well, now a year later, there’s Paramelancholia.

That is not to say that it wasn’t difficult, but the curve was more manageable. I will not go over all the details in this post – in case someone’s interested, they can go read from the doomworld forums, where I made a thread about half-a-year in development (fall of 2024), wanting to get some player feedback. It soon became evident that I had some issues with the game… and not just simple bugs, but game-breaking, launch-stopping ones. I eventually got them resolved (I guess? Unless someone complains about still not being able to run the game), and slowly, gradually, I began smoothing rough edges out. There still are plenty remaining in the 1.0 release for sure, but hopefully they will come off as more “seems like this was intended this way” rather than “this dev clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing”.

I guess that’s enough rambling for now. Only thing remaining is to release on steam, some day. I will most likely post an article about it here concerning that – when it happens.

For now, thank you and good night.