Before I begin this, I wanna thank @Stradomyre, @milkyace, @MajorWipeout, @ThaSpiciest, @GeloxLP, @Ico, and @LoudnNoisy for helping with this project throughout its development and putting up with pretty much all of my bullshit!!

I haven't really organized my thoughts on this at all so my writing here is probably gonna be very scattershot and aimless and meandering, but that's alright since I feel like I've got a lot to say and no surplus of time to actually write it down since our last update launches in about 13 hours and I really wanna get this all down before then. I'm going to be writing about my time working on Dead Estate over the last four years and writing sort of a diary about what else I've been up to in that time. I'm not expecting anyone to go through the whole thing but if you're willing to read through all of this, be my guest. Otherwise you might be better off skimming. I'm not gonna proofread this either, I'm gonna be posting this moles and all. Good luck!

A little over four years ago, we dropped Dead Estate on Newgrounds for the annual Halloween contest. The main thought I had going into it was that it'd kick ass if there was a full-sized roguelike available for free on Newgrounds; not just a demo or a little jam game, but something with some real meat on its bones that you could sink a ton of hours into! We started working on it in August 2020 and I just let influences from whatever me or the rest of the team were into at the time naturally seep into it. Resident Evil was obviously a big one aesthetically and thematically, but I think my biggest inspiration for it was Nuclear Throne. I played Nuclear Throne for the first time when I was probably 14 and as far as I'm concerned it's still the most fun roguelike ever made. Binding of Isaac's pre-built rooms and grid-based map were also a pretty big obvious influence, but in terms of roguelike inspirations Nuclear Throne and Monolith (or Star of Providence as it's called now) were by FAR the largest for me.

Looking back on that original version now (and after having replayed a little bit of the NG version last night), I feel like we succeeded in some places and failed in others. I feel like it's a fun and slightly addictive and decently challenging project, but (and of course I'm only saying this with the benefit of hindsight) we obviously could've done WAY more with it. Once you beat that original version once, you've really seen just about everything it has to offer. That's probably fine, but it's not exactly representative of the "full-sized free roguelike playable in your web browser" that I envisioned. Still though, I was clearly happy enough with the end product to continue working on it for three years afterwards. One thing I'm a little shocked by is how little the game's DNA has actually changed since that original version for better or for worse. Dead Estate now is very much supported by the same spine as Dead Estate in 2020, just with more stuff dangling off of it.

Anyways, after that initial version of the game I was pretty much ready to move on. I was very pleased that it won the Halloween contest and I sorta just wanted to get a start on our next project already, which was gonna be this Wario Land-type platformer called Pizza John. We never ended up developing that game. 2 Left Thumbs messaged me not that long after we released Dead Estate on Newgrounds offering to publish our game on Steam and whatever other platforms if we were willing to expand it a little.

I was VERY hesitant to take him up on his offer because we had been screwed around with by another publisher who shall remain nameless literally a few months prior. This unnamed publisher contacted us about another game we were working on before Dead Estate, we were in talks about publishing this project for maybe a month, and then out of nowhere they ghosted us after I sent them a build of our game. No money had changed hands by that point and no contracts had been signed or anything, but the whole experience left a horrible taste in my mouth and a bad impression of indie game publishers as a whole. If I ever saw the publisher who did that in-person, I'd spit on them. I dunno, I'm not really that brave or bold. I like to think that I would, though. That game we were working on fizzled out after that. Regardless, my gut instinct when 2 Left Thumbs approached us was immediately to tell him "no," but Milkyace and Stradomyre convinced me to tell him "we'll think about it" instead. I messaged Tom for advice about this because I figured he'd have more knowledge about it than anybody else I knew and Tom was kind enough to respond and encourage me to go through with it. After that, I finally told 2 Left Thumbs that we'd do it. I'm happy to say that our experience with 2 Left Thumbs has been very positive overall :)

Expanding on Dead Estate was easy in a lot of ways. A lot of "the hard part" had already been done with the Newgrounds version of the game. There were no core mechanics we needed to conceptualize or integrate or develop because they were pretty much all already in the game. We really had nothing to do except add on to that base, which I wouldn't say was particularly difficult (on my part at least) but it was immensely time-consuming. On paper, it was pretty simple: take the base game but add more playable characters, more levels, more endings, more everything. Probably the biggest roadblock I encountered during Dead Estate's development which never went away until very recently was the fact that I was in college. I was at the very beginning of my freshman year when we started making the Newgrounds version and I graduated about 6 months ago. I was actually pretty lucky that we started working on Dead Estate during the peak of COVID just because all of my classes were remote. It let me stay at home and gave me a lot of time to work on the game that I just wouldn't have had otherwise, also I just don't like driving and I would've had to commute to class every day.

Unfortunately for me, we pretty much returned to in-person classes by my second semester, which was right when we began working on the Steam version of the game. At that time, I really struggled balancing my classes with my work on Dead Estate. I was never particularly passionate about school and I felt like I was mainly going to college out of a sense of obligation to my parents rather than because of a genuine interest or aspiration (which I understand is a horrible way to look at your own education, but this is almost four years behind me now). On top of that, now I felt like college was actively pulling me away from Dead Estate, which was something I was actually passionate about. I decided that I could afford to neglect my classes a bit if it meant getting more work done on the game, so that's what I did. Things turned disastrous quick; my grades all slipped hard and by midterms I had a couple F's because I just wasn't turning in my work or studying. It was INCREDIBLY stupid of me, I had a major scholarship on the line that required a certain minimum GPA that I was rapidly dipping beneath. More than anything I just didn't want to disappoint my parents, so I ended up dropping all my work on Dead Estate during the last month or so of the semester and I locked in hard to try to raise my grades. It was an incredibly stressful month and it was only my second semester and I was fortunate enough to have some good professors that gave me the opportunity to turn my grades around. Thankfully, I ended the semester with a good enough GPA to keep that scholarship and I returned to working on Dead Estate right afterwards. From then on, I was a lot more careful with how I maintained my balance between class work and personal work. There's a lesson in there somewhere. I also switched majors from computer science to digital art after coming to the conclusion that CS just wasn't for me.

For the summer after that semester, I spent about three or four months straight just grinding away on the game. I had literally nothing else to do that whole season. Aside from a couple days off to play through Resident Evil 8 when it released, a weekend in southeast Ohio for my brother's wedding, and a week or so on vacation with my family in Michigan, I think I spent pretty much every single day working. By the end of that break, the game was pretty much done. We had spent about 10 months expanding the game from the base version on Newgrounds and we were pretty quickly approaching the finish line by August 2021.

Somewhere in that time, we dropped the Newgrounds version of the game on Steam as a (pretty generously-sized) demo. I'm pretty sure it was during the Steam Game Festival (now Next Fest) in February of 2021. Before that, the game had something like 1,000 wishlists on Steam. Once it was featured in SGF, it ballooned to 8,000 wishlists and then 10,000 within a month or so afterwards. When I saw that number suddenly start to climb it really shook me just because I never really imagined that many people indicating any interest in paying for a game that I worked on. That was the point where Dead Estate began to feel like a "real" project compared to everything else I had worked on prior, not just because the game suddenly had an audience outside of Newgrounds but because the size of the project itself was also inflating fast.

Once we were finished with our work, we started preparing for release pretty fast. IIRC, we were basically finished in August 2021 and we released it only two months later on October 19th. I don't remember when we announced the release date, but it wasn't all that long before the actual release. Honestly, the whole month leading up to launch is very hazy for me. I recall feeling REALLY antsy and stressed out. I was doubting myself about whether the game we made was actually good or if I just wasted nearly a year of my life, I was trying to fix as many bugs as I could before release, and then suddenly it was launch day and I was in a voice call with my friends counting down the minutes until release. The worst part was probably the hour or two after release where I had no idea how well the game was performing because Steam takes a while to report sales. I know it's wrong to chase money and I would never in my life work on a project solely out of interest for financial gain, but I'd totally be lying if I said I didn't want Dead Estate to be successful. I feel sorta selfish and "fake" admitting that, but it's the truth. If I worked for a year on a project and only ten people played it, I'd feel a lot of disappointment completely separate from my own personal satisfaction with the project. That being said, I felt my heart pounding out of my chest for all of those couple hours after release where I was waiting for the reviews to start pouring in and for Steam to report its sales data.

For all that anxiety I felt leading up to release and waiting to see the sales numbers, I don't have a lot to write about what I felt afterwards, and that's maybe for the best. My worries were pretty much all alleviated, people liked the game and it performed better than I expected it to and that's pretty much beyond what I hoped for. I feel like Dead Estate is a kind of success story you don't really hear about often in indie spheres but is probably more common than you'd think. It wasn't a wildly successful thing that lit the world on fire and sold millions like Undertale or Shovel Knight or whatever's popular now (I haven't really kept up with indie game trends in a few years sorry), and it was by no means a failure either. It performed well enough to comfortably support the leads on our team financially and make us consider game development as a real career possibility, and frankly I'm happy with that!

We started conceptualizing ideas for free updates for the game before we even released it. Originally, though, our timeline for releasing those updates was a lot shorter than it ended up being. We wanted to just add more of everything (pretty much what we did when going from Newgrounds to Steam, but again) and we really wanted to expand more on the cast of characters we had already made for the game. We had decently-sized cast of 8 playable characters (now 10/technically 11) but nowhere in the game did they really get to showcase their personality or who they were outside of a handful of voice clips and their actual designs and a tiny number of cutscene appearances. That was where we got the idea for the first big content update: we'd add a bunch of new items and weapons, but we'd also add these cute little introductory cutscenes for each character that'd play when you unlock them. That way, players would know a little more about each of the characters before they started playing as them and the characters themselves had more of an opportunity to show off who they are and what they're about.

Like I said before though, the timeline for releasing those updates was way shorter than the time it took us to actually release them. I'm not exactly sure when we started working on the first update, but it wasn't that long after release. Probably November or December 2021. We planned on six updates and I anticipated being done with ALL of them by mid-2023. Needless to say, we missed that deadline by a long shot. It's nearly the end of 2024 now and we're releasing the final update today, nearly a year and a half after we expected. I'd blame myself for that more than anything because I 100% let scope creep take hold of the content for these updates, ESPECIALLY the last two. I also took a break from working on Dead Estate for a few months around maybe March of 2022 and didn't really get back to it until maybe July.

Despite how badly it impacted our schedule for the updates, I wouldn't consider that time off wasted at all. In the summer of 2022, I went to Colorado for a meetup that @PsychoGoldfish organized where I stayed with a bunch of Newgrounds buddies: @Droid, @poptaffy (who was with me for almost all of the >24 hour Amtrak ride to Denver), @Shal, @Goji, @heyopc, @maxxjamez, @StaggerNight, and our buddy Logan were all there and it rocked!!!!!! I felt super nervous and anxious leading up to that since I had never met any online friends in-person before, but going to that meet really encouraged me to get out there more and make more connections with people on Newgrounds. Also I released Shrimp OS while I was at that meet and I think that game rocks.

After I got home from that meetup I did a couple small projects (one that I still haven't released and I swear to God I will someday) and then I finally got back to Dead Estate. We got the first update done with all the new character intro cutscenes and items and weapons, released it on October 19th (the first anniversary of the game's release on Steam :]) and we announced a roadmap with it where we officially stated that we'd be done with the updates by summer 2023 and boy was that WAY off!

The second update went smoothly, we gave ourselves a deadline in December 2022 to add one new character to the game along with some extra optional floors and more new items and weapons and that's pretty much exactly what happened. Not really much to comment on there I guess, Boss was a character that Stradomyre had conceptualized way earlier on in development that we ended up passing on at first. As time passed, we felt like she'd be a good candidate for a playable character since we didn't really have a crazy over-the-top character yet. Fuji was close, but she was intended to be more loud and boisterous than outright insane, so we went with Boss to satisfy that niche. It seems like she's a fan favorite now so I think we made the right call adding her as a character. The update ended up coming out near the end of December, just like we had planned.

Not a lot happened in between update #2 and update #3 except more work, which I was happy to do because update #3 was actually the first one that I had conceived. Dead Estate largely lacks any kind of meaningful progression that persists between runs aside from unlockable costumes and new levels, which I think is part of the appeal. Personally, I was never a fan of games like Isaac treating a single item as a meaningful unlock in a pool of hundreds and I really wanted to avoid that with Dead Estate. I wanted every unlock to be either purely aesthetic or change the way you play the game, and I think I achieved that with the new Curse system and costumes we introduced in this update. Curses were meant to fundamentally alter how each character plays, letting you fine-tune characters to suit what you want out of them and offer more ways to play as each character. I also wanted each Curse to reflect an aspect of whatever character they were intended for to further flesh out the game's playable cast. Now that I think about it, "fleshing out the cast" was the motivator behind a TON of decisions with these updates. We also reused the characters Filia and Faith from our old unfinished project Holy Smokes (same game Digby came from!) as shopkeepers for this update, which I'm really glad about because otherwise those characters would've been left to rot. UNFORTUNATELY, this was the first update on the roadmap that we missed the deadline for. We initially planned on the update releasing in January 2023, but it ended up coming out a month late in February. Not that bad of a delay compared to the later updates.

Again, not too much happened between updates #3 and #4. We didn't have that much content planned for update #4 to begin with because we wanted it to be sort of a break before #5 and #6, which we had planned from the start to be the two largest updates. With update #4, we just wanted to add one new character and then focus on fixing bugs and other issues introduced by the other three updates. By this point, the playable women characters in the game outnumbered the men by 5 to 4. Not only that, but aside from Luis the game sorta lacked any traditionally attractive adult male human character (Mumba is an alien and Digby is literally 14). On the other hand, we had woman characters like Jules and Lydia who were obviously attractive in a traditional sense and Cordelia whose design very blatantly contains a lot of sex appeal (I'm actually surprised it took me this long to bring up Cordelia's design in this post). So, it seemed kinda natural we should go in a similar direction but with a male character instead, which is how we ended up with Axel. Axel was designed with hyper-masculinity in mind and we also gave him a healthy dose of narcissism that most of the other characters lack (Fuji is a little conceited too but it's entirely for show). He's somewhere between Ash Williams and Johnny Bravo and I LOVE how he turned out. Because of the delay from update #3, update #4 ended up coming out in late April rather than in early March like we had wanted. Not too bad of a delay either, but still nearly two months later than intended.

Update #5 is where our plans really went off the rails and scope creep took over and it's ENTIRELY my fault. Our basic plan for update #5 was VERY simple: we'd add 12 unique challenge modes and 12 more Curses which could be applied to any character. A good amount of content, but nothing too crazy. I had planned on the first of these challenges being a short mock-traditional-survival-horror type thing where you would control Jules or Cordelia in a pre-built map, finding keys and unlocking doors and maybe working around limited ammo. It would've taken maybe 15 minutes to complete.

Then, when I was looking at Axel's intro cutscene for update #4, I realized that I loved the design for the unnamed actress character in that cutscene and that she heavily resembled an archetypal survival horror protagonist like the one from Haunting Ground. I decided that she would be a unique character who would only be playable in this first challenge, and suddenly the idea for that challenge just started expanding like crazy. I drew an entire Resident Evil-style mansion map in Paint complete with puzzles and shortcuts and scripted events. I started programming a whole inventory system and stealth mechanics and out of nowhere this thing was basically becoming its own game separate from Dead Estate (although still using the same framework). I called it Assignment Anya (you'll never guess where I lifted that name from) and I worked on it from March all the way up until December 2023, along with the other challenges and Curses which took WAY less time than Assignment Anya itself.

I had a good amount of stuff happening between March and December. Besides two semesters of college, I also had a couple trips planned that summer. In June, I went to Michigan with my family again. I flew straight from there to Philadelphia for the TooManyGames meet that @CorTat-G organized. I stayed with almost all the same people I went to Denver with the year prior, but this time @Linethickness and @HekDiggity were with us and we also hung out a good bit with @Owen! Honestly, I met and hung out with too many people in Philadelphia to even count, so I'm really sorry if I talked to you there and I don't mention you here - but it really was one of the most fun experiences I've had in my life. I met @ninjamuffin99 in person for the first time ever and he was basically my introduction to Newgrounds. A good chunk of my friends now are people I've met through these meetups and NG circles in general and that absolutely would not have happened without Cam! @MKMaffo also came to our AirBNB along with @Broly and @PKettles, neither of whom I'd ever spoken to before and it was awesome seeing those three. Droid made a bunch of spaghetti and Broly ate a huge plate of it and left none for me. I had no idea at the time the impact that meeting those guys would have on me or my life but I'm truly glad that I did :)

I just realized I'm at two-thirds of the character limit now so I'm gonna have to wrap this up pretty soon!

After I got home from the Philly meet, I continued my work on Assignment Anya for a while until the semester started back up in August. In September, I stayed with @LeviRamirez (who I forgot to mention I hung out with for a day in Defiance, OH with Droid earlier in the year also), @Bill, @ForgeFrog, @Slimygoo, and Cortat up in Michigan for a few days (also Pkettles was there for one day) and it was a blast, then I saw pretty much the same group again give or take a person in early December. By that point, the update was pretty much done and ready to release.

Assignment Anya was a nice detour from the usual routine that I'd gotten accustomed to over the last few years of dev. To be totally honest, I was a bit tired of working on just Dead Estate by that point and felt like I needed to do something new. Assignment Anya let me do both at the same time, since it was technically part of Dead Estate but also very much a separate thing. We dropped the update on December 21st to a sort of a mixed reception? Part of me expected it because Assignment Anya plays VERY differently from the main game, but I think I had assumed more people were interested in traditional survivor horror-style gameplay just because the main game borrows so heavily from Resident Evil. I was definitely wrong about that, but either way I was REALLY happy personally with how Assignment Anya turned out. I had an intense urge to make that kind of game for a while and I finally got it out of me with that update and the audience that Anya was intended for seemed to really like it. It's just that there's apparently not too much overlap between fast-paced arcade-y roguelike fans and traditional slow-paced survival horror fans, which seems obvious in retrospect but I dunno. Whatever. This update was supposed to be out in spring of 2023 and instead it released in December, so it was delayed by quite a bit.

Finally, we started working on the last update right before we released update #5. Update #6 was always planned to be the biggest one, but I don't think I correctly anticipated at all exactly how long it would take. We ended up adding a new set of costumes and a whole new set of levels with new unique endings for every single character. It pretty much ended up taking just as long as the original Steam release: we started in December and now, finally, we're releasing it in October.

Part of the reason this one took so long besides the sheer size of it is that I was wrapping up college and I was away for a pretty good duration of its development. Right after Assignment Anya came out and Christmas happened, I visited Droid and Poptaffy and @BrandyBuizel (who I had met previously in Philly) for New Years! Again, it was a ton of fun and I got to meet a lot of new people on that trip. I started my very last semester in January and, in one of my classes, I actually saw somebody playing Dead Estate on their laptop during a lecture. It was the single most surreal thing I've ever experienced. I genuinely thought I was daydreaming or that I was just hallucinating it because I had been working so much -- but no, the guy in the seat directly in front of me was playing my game during class, completely unaware that the guy right behind him programmed it. I talked to him a bit after class and it was such a crazy cool interaction, I just never expected anything like that to happen.

In March, I skipped class for a few days and I went to PAX East with Broly, Cortat, Droid (who I last saw a few weeks prior), Heyopc, and Cam (who showed up really late lol). Fun time, me and Broly got to meet Suda51 and it was probably the most memorable interaction I've ever had with anybody. We also hung out with Tom a lot at the Behemoth booth! AND we went to the Mega64 panel!!!!!!!!

After that, I graduated a few weeks later in April and then I immediately went to see Droid, Poptaffy, Brandy and co. again for a few days! Then after that I went to Brandy's Pico Day meetup in New Jersey with Droid and I met too many people there to count! Broly was there too and he introduced me to @leroyalmess who's a good pal now! Then literally a day after getting home from that, I flew to Japan in mid-May with some of my friends from high school and I was there for almost two weeks. A couple weeks after that, I went to Michigan with my family again (this is an annual thing) and then a few days after that, I was back in Philly for this year's TMG meet. This time I stayed with Broly, Maffo, Pkettles, Leroyalmess, @Anislug, @Hibachi, and @LIQUIDHEADED and I'll be damned if it wasn't an amazing time. Watched a ton of Nirvanna the Band the Show (one of the best shows ever u should check it out) AND Fargo (THE best show ever imo u should check it out). Played/watched a lot of arcade games and did a lot of karaoke and giggled at a lot of tacky decor in our airbnb. Philly this year was truly an enjoyable experience and I wouldn't trade it for the world. I was traveling around a TON at this time, you get the picture. After Philly I was finally home for a good while and I got most of the work on the update done after that, which I'll finally get back to talking about now.

I think we actually added more content in this update than we did in the Steam release when you include stuff like Chunks mutations and new challenges. By the time we finally started working on this update, we had been toying with ideas for future games for a long time (basically since 2022) and those concepts -- along with the more character-focused aspects of the previous updates -- absolutely made their way into this update. We came up with all these crazy ideas for what happens to the characters after the game, where they're at and who they are in the future, etc,. I even pitched an idea for some comics about the characters in the future a couple times; still undecided about whether or not we'll actually do that, but I'm hoping we do. We came up with so many concepts that we couldn't feasibly squeeze into the game, it'd be a complete waste if they weren't teased or alluded to in some way. I don't think anyone on the development team really wanted to part ways with this cast of characters or the world that we've built up over the last four years, but we had to say goodbye to Dead Estate sometime. It was just an inevitability; there's just no universe where we'd be able to continue updating Dead Estate for free indefinitely since we literally need money to live. While Dead Estate was pretty successful, none of us are millionaires. We've gotta move on to Game #2! But I'm really happy that we were able to dedicate so much time to this one project and I'm even happier that it actually found an audience that embraced it. The content of this new update should indicate to everybody that while we're done with Dead Estate, we're absolutely not done with its world or the characters in it.

I don't think it's even possible for me to ever completely leave this thing behind. When you work on something this long and this extensively (which I had ZERO intention of doing when we first started doing this) I think it becomes a part of you. I absolutely feel that way about Dead Estate now, like it's been embedded in my brain. I wouldn't be able to get rid of it if I tried. But once this update is out in less than 9 hours from the time I'm writing this sentence, I'm gonna take a little break. Not from game development, but from anything Dead Estate-related aside from one little thing I can't talk about here (it's not another update don't ask!!). I've had a lot of ideas for other games, too, during the four years I've spent working on Dead Estate. Almost all smaller projects, though.

Right now, we have a very clear idea of what our next big project will be. That much should be conveyed by the content of the new update. But this idea is so ambitious and big that I feel like I need to practice with some smaller stuff first. I'm gonna have to figure out how to do 3D, how to do online multiplayer stuff, how to make a level editor, etc,. I think if I dove into this next big project head-first right now it'd possibly never get done, and I also think I've made it very clear what this next project actually is but I don't wanna say it out loud because I don't wanna make any big promises yet!

In any case, I've started working on another project recently that Stradomyre and a few friends have talked a lot about -- or really a group of projects. But the first of them is a WarioWare DIY-like thing that'll let you make your own little microgames straight from the web browser. I've posted some screenshots of it on twitter and I'll probably post more. Trust me when I say that this is also a practice project for our next "full-size" game. I plan on learning as much as I can about customizability and user-generated content through this. It's definitely a big undertaking for something that's supposed to be a smaller project, but also I've REALLY wanted to make my own spin on WarioWare DIY for YEARS now. When I was a kid, that game pretty much served as my introduction to game dev and there's no chance I'd be where I am now if I never played that game. Making something similar to it that's even more customizable and accessible sounds like a lot of fun to me and I really can't wait to work more on this thing. There's another related project in the pipeline that I plan on using as an opportunity to "study" 3D game design, but it's not anything we've properly started working on yet so I'm not gonna talk about that one. I'm still sticking with Gamemaker thru all of this because it's the best engine ever also. If I can make a 3D game in Gamemaker, I can do anything.

This is probably a good place to stop ranting now. Dead Estate and Newgrounds as a whole have really allowed me to do a lot of things, meet a lot of people, and go a lot of places that I never would've otherwise gone. I feel incredibly excited to finally work on some new games, but it's VERY bittersweet finally being done with this project that I've dedicated four years of my life to. In the grand scheme of things I know four years isn't much, but I'm 23 and that's nearly a fifth of the time I've been alive. The really scary part is that the next thing I've got planned will probably take even longer before all the content updates! I'm ending this post here, you were warned that it was gonna be long and ramble-y; sorry to anyone that I met in the last four years and didn't mention here, but I'm running DANGEROUSLY close to the character limit here!

The update drops in 8 hours, so if you haven't bought the game yet here's a link!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1484720/Dead_Estate/

thx 4 reading :)