![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/steamPub_LibraryHeader.png\")
What it felt like to abandon a nine-year solo passion project, and how it happened.
\n", "content_html": "What it felt like to abandon a nine-year solo passion project, and how it happened.
\n\n\n\nThis post contains extended discussions of mental health issues and occasional sexual content.
\n
Hi, I’m Elly, aka Mint, and I just abandoned a solo game I worked on full-time for nine years.
\nOr at least, I’m pretty sure I did. See, when I started writing this, I was genuinely uncertain whether I was going to cancel Radiant Sword for good, because part of me still found it too unthinkable. I thought a proper postmortem might help me sort through my conflicting feelings on it all: the roles played by my mid-development egg crack and transition, my mental health journey, my struggle to navigate the changing landscape of the games industry, my own shifting values and personal rebirth. I guess it was supposed to be an exercise in personal therapy. If I wrote as though cancellation were already decided, read it, and felt resolved and honest about it by the end, then I’d know what was in my heart. That was the rationale, anyway. And now that I’ve written over 8000 words about it…
\n…Well, I can’t say it’s made it much easier. Canceling Radiant Sword was probably the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life. At the moment, I feel a bit like I’m grieving a child. But the postmortem exercise did produce something like a tangible artifact of the game’s existence, a tombstone for its development. If I’m lucky, maybe it can be meaningful for someone in ways the game never got a chance to. That would be a nice bonus, but it was never the impetus. At the end of the day, I wrote it for myself. Reflecting now on Radiant Sword’s development, I think that might be the only way I ever learned how to make anything.
\nAnd now, the game is dead. I think. The very idea of trying to make it, the conceit that I *could* make it, was probably always a mistake. But if that’s the case, how did I manage to repeat that mistake for nine years?
\nBack in 2016, before COVID and TikTok and President Donald Trump, my career in game dev was at a crossroads. I was just a few years removed from my big break, graduating from QA into a junior artist role on Bioshock Infinite. After Irrational Games imploded, I moved to Texas and joined Arkane Austin to help make Prey. Despite being officially credited as “Additional art” in the final release - thanks, Zenimax...? - it felt good to have made a big, shaping contribution to what was ultimately a well-loved game. For a bit, even amidst this frustrating and uncertain dev cycle, it had started to feel like I was realizing my dreams as a game dev. I had now worked on a chewy game I’d want to play myself, and did more than pull my own weight. I mean, I got to make a level with the guy who designed Hong Kong in OG Deus Ex! (He’s lovely, by the way.)
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/preyLobby.png\")
\nBut by the end of Prey’s development, I was seriously questioning my future. I had been living apart from my husband ever since the move as he finished his graduate degree, and neither of us could take it anymore. Meanwhile, Arkane Austin’s future looked bleak as Prey underperformed on sales, Raf departed, and suits were teeing them up to make Redfall. And frankly, I was falling out of love with modern AAA - both developing it and playing it. I saw the pattern of studio instability and undercooked, trend-chasing releases, and I saw what happened to Arkane Austin when they tried to go against the grain. So, I moved back to Boston in 2017. There wasn’t much studio work to be found in Boston then, certainly not for a highly specialized hybrid level artist/designer, but it was becoming hard to envision a happy future in the industry anyway. I decided it was time to make my indie pivot. I was going to make my dream game.
\nAnd my dream game was Final Fantasy Tactics! Kind of.
\n![\"The](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/its-hard-to-overstate-how-important-a-game-final-fantasy-v0-alrkfqxp4mp91.webp\")
\nSee, I don’t think I ever actually had a clear vision of the game I wanted to make with Radiant Sword. I had been somewhat enamored with the XCOM reboots at the time, and that game structure seemed like it would make for a cool mashup with a dark fantasy setting like Tactics or Berserk. The early prototype builds were called XGame, then Berserk Simulator, then Project 1999. There was a rough idea for a game that had been kicking around in my head, one with FFT’s aesthetics and grid combat system and customization emphasis, but with base building and resource management, a mix of story & randomly generated missions, troops getting injured and needing to convalesce… You know, the kind of hybrid roguelite systems infrastructure that were getting popular back then, and are basically prosaic now. There was probably a perfectly good game in there if I committed to it, but it wasn’t actually that original of an idea, and I wasn’t actually that experienced or talented as a big-picture game designer.
\nGiven that, it’s not surprising to me that, as I iterated, what I found I was actually interested in building was FFT 2.0: the sequel we never got. And specifically, I was very interested in the nostalgia of FFT, a time capsule-like obsession with period authenticity to an era in my life when things were simpler, I was happier, and the art was better. Or rather - I thought art from the nineties was better *in 2017*, because in 2017 I was in the process of losing my ability to enjoy contemporary art. When I read/played/watched/ listened to something new, it was picked out of a backlog; greats from the past that I had missed the first time around, shoring up holes in my encyclopedic knowledge of the 90s Anime Zeitgeist. Which is not to imply that I’ve now learned better and all that stuff sucked, actually. 90s anime rocks, and also, it turns out Escaflowne and Utena are still great even if you watch them for the first time in 2020! But that singular lens was absolutely a crutch, an artistic shortcoming, and, as we’ll see, a kneecap on my own ambitions.
\nSo, in a process guided by my own personal interests and nostalgic dependencies and little else, the features that differentiated Radiant Sword from FFT were stripped away one by one, until it became “A Ridiculously Polished And Faithful Spiritual Successor And Nothing Else.” I tried to build out the XCOM systems, but I just… wasn’t actually that interested in making them. Fundamentally, you have to have ideas for how to make the things in your game actually cool, and all my ideas were for story beats. So that’s what it became. It’s not all that rare in game dev to drunk-walk your way into finding the game you want to make, actually. I had just lived that at Irrational. It is neither smart development, nor does it reflect well on your abilities as an artist. It did, however, make it easy to tell myself “I’m not doing things any more irresponsibly than they were at the studios.”
\nBut I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind a bit, to the moment I decided I was going to go all-in on this barely-formed idea.
\nIt’s hard to overstate how different the indie gaming landscape was ten years ago. Back then, it was pretty typical for AAA expatriates to set out on their own, form a small indie studio, put together a polished Kickstarter, make the rounds on Metacritic, and reliably produce at least a moderate hit. I had seen several of my colleagues do the same after the Irrational implosion with The Molasses Flood (which produced The Flame in the Flood and Drake Hollow). I had also seen that solo devs could corral enthusiastic collaborators from online communities to produce really impressive, high-fidelity retro games, like Sabrina DiDuro did with Freedom Planet. This was really encouraging to me. I didn’t fancy myself a businessperson and I still don’t - in fact, the thought makes me ill - but I figured that if I developed something really cool-looking, the pieces would come together eventually, somehow. Given what I’d seen, that didn’t seem too crazy.
\nBy the way, this was already some truly impressive hubris on my part. Not only did I massively underestimate the amount of labor involved in turning a development into a production, I also didn’t actually *have* any of the skills to make any of this at the time! At least, not for the style of game I had planned. My career experience was entirely in (what was then) current-gen 3D level building and layout. I was pretty good at using geometry and lighting to make a first-person game look cool and play well, and that was it. I had never done texture work or surfacing, animation, character art, VFX work, spriting or pixel art at anything more than a crude hobby level. I didn’t know how to program. My resume in SRPG dev was a series of non-functional, unfinished and badly spirited FFT mods. With that under my belt, I decided I was going to acquire the skills to make Final Fantasy Tactics on my own, and then do it.
\nWhat’s more, my process couldn’t have been more wrong-headed. I essentially imported it from what I learned in my studio days. It made heavy use of scaffolding, representative slicing, and “this part will get made in the future” logic. Audio in particular was a major gap - it was one of the many things I just assumed would have to come later on. Because of this, I never developed a clear picture of what I was actually capable of making myself - just committing myself to a structure that *had* to get made. And what had to get made was a full-scale JRPG epic, with cutscenes and sidequests and a soundtrack that sounded just right and three phases for the final boss. I never learned to accept compromise because I put myself on the hook for everything from the getgo. I can’t overstate how psychologically crushing, how thoroughly anxiety-inducing it was, to be perpetually gasping for air under the weight of all the future work I knew still needed to be done, for years at a time. It made every unexpected task and bug cause a borderline panic attack. The whole thing was a fool’s errand, obviously, especially considering the level of skill I was starting from.
\nExcept… I kind of almost did it? By the time I threw in the towel, I had made over 50 campaign missions, 15 job paradigms, 24 disciplines, 13 monster types, 14 weapon types, hundreds of abilities, and dozens upon dozens of heavily scripted cutscenes with bespoke animation, all at a pretty high level of polish. There was monster taming and an alchemy reaction system, fully functioning stealth and magic cannons and random proc philosophy discussions. And over the course of development, my skills went from “too embarrassing to show” to “a pretty high level” across a surprising number of disciplines.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/pixelArtComparison-2.png\"){kind=tracking}
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/envComparison.png\")
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/code.png\")
\nThe project turned an important corner in 2020, when I made a four-level demo for friends to play. They were happy to oblige (because what the hell else were you doing in 2020)? It was this multi-part castle siege that alternated viewpoints between the two protagonists. A grand melee with the assault team at the front gate, then a cut over to a special ops party sneaking in through the waterways, a stage where they blitzed the castle walls from the inside, constantly swapping from interior to exterior as they moved through parapets to reach the gatehouse and open the portcullis, culminating a surprise boss fight when the assault team breaches the keep. The enemy army’s general, this mysterious one-eyed knight we’ve been teasing, reveals himself to be some kind of cyclopean demon and blows the roof off the castle. Shit gets liminal, a dark star appears in the sky, turns the clouds blood red, and ghostly faces start swirling into it like a vortex.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgTent.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgothaExt01.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgDemolition2.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgWaterway.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgWalls1.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgExt02.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgaInt.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/gallery/gorgDemon.png\")
I was so proud of this sequence. It had all the sauce: well-curated variety in the stage paradigms and atmosphere, progression in the stakes, story beats and character development sprinkled in tastefully for seasoning, and an explosive climax. I thought it was sick as hell, and my playtesters agreed! I had someone tell me it was actually their most anticipated game. At this point, I knew I was capable of making good shit. It was FFT, yes, with a healthy dose of Berserk worship mixed in, but it was at that level of quality, and in some ways even more polished. The project felt real. I had overcome my initial skill deficit - my complete lack of starting experience with programming, pixel art, and everything else - and arrived at something resembling a functional process. I knew it was going long, but the means and motivation were there. I guessed two more years of development, and I’d be looking at a release.
\nI won’t go into the development details of how that two-year timeframe collapsed. It’s a development hell story - if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. It’s 2026 now, and the game *still* needs more than two years of development. Aside from now, at the end, I can’t *remember* a point in development when I thought it was more than two years from done.
\nNo, there are two other stories I actually want to talk about. The first is the story of Radiant Sword the game, story as in Plot, Themes and Character - the story that will never be properly or fully told.
\nEven though Radiant Sword was originally conceived of as this story-light XCOM descendant, it was never going to stay that way. I just like Xenogears too much for that to happen. And while the story evolved a *lot* on the fly, by the end, I was really proud of what I’d put together. I’m sure there’s a fair bit of Dunning-Kruger effect going on there, things that only made sense in my head, beats I’d forgotten to write to connect the dots for players who weren’t psychic. And the actual bones of the story, well, they weren’t all that original. There was a royal bloodline that was cursed to become ghosts when they died, a tomb their spirits gathered at, a skull that channeled the spirits of the tomb into a superweapon when wielded by a true king, and every political faction in the world that knew the secret was angling to claim the throne, the tomb and the skull, and thus obtain ultimate power. Our heroes, a lowly mercenary band with aspirations of their own, were unwittingly thrust in the middle of the conspiracy… and then we’re off to the races. If you play video games, you’ve seen stories like this one.
\nBut everything in the margins - the religious, philosophical and metaphysical concepts I used to build out the world and its discourse - was really activating the shit out of my gender-political brain. See, the game world had these two metaphysical principles, Animus and Anima, around which twin churches were based. They were loosely inspired by Carl Jung’s weird-ass psychological mysticism (I *said* I liked Xenogears) but they weren’t extensions of it, and definitely not endorsements of it. Animus was essentially will to power; the drive to dominate, enact your desires, and exist eternally. This was the grotesque philosophy of the royal bloodline in a nutshell. Anima, meanwhile, was a kind of divine suffering, a frustration of the will through powerlessness that brought spiritual wholeness. Anima spun off of Animus about 50 years before the game began, when its founder St. Genevieve was martyred, and it soon became the dominant religion of the midlands. After that, it was co-opted by Wilhelm, Genevieve’s protege and one of the game’s antagonists, into a brutal inquisition.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/cloister.png\")
\nAnd then there was this mysterious entity, the Heretic Cross, the embodiment of Anima, that appeared throughout history as the frustrated wills of the world converged. Every now and again, it inhabited a chosen entity, someone whose desires aligned with the will of the world, and made everything go their way, Beherit-style. They even transfigured into a divine entity after death. It was Berserk, basically - except way more ambiguous as to whether what was happening was a good thing?
\n![\"Questions](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/hereticCross.png\")
\nIt’s not hard to tell Animus and Anima were pretty heavily coded by historical, almost deliberately outdated conceptions of gender. Men assert their will and rule, women suffer virtuously under men, it’s all very patriarchal and shitty. They were also politically coded - Animus is authoritarian and top-down, Anima is decentralized and bottom-up. The Heretic Cross was essentially the miraculous revolutionary spark, the ignition point for historical change that Marx was sometimes criticized for not fully articulating. Oppression turned into revolution because a divine entity responded to their suffering and made it so. It was an extremely unsatisfying explanation by design.
\nI think, in writing it this way, I was intuitively responding to my dissatisfaction with the path that some (not all!) contemporary leftism was taking during the Trump era. Liberals have been rightly dragged for their cowardly triangulating on identity politics - no, Kamala didn’t lose the election because she was too woke, please fix your heart or die - but the same sentiment infected socialist discourse as well. It’s not uncommon to see cries for firm stances on queer issues shouted down in socialist circles, for instance, under the logic that this is all ultimately about class struggle and we can’t distract from the core issue. In the game’s terms, this is what it looks like to be pure Anima. It’s certainly much better than pure Animus, which is so toxicly masculine that it becomes outright demonic. But at times, it feels like it’s conspicuously silent toward someone looking to stand as their own misunderstood individual, to reveal their own personal truth. To the suffering soul whose will is *not* the will of the world - even if that’s what the will of the world *ought* to be - it offers no salvation.
\nIn other words, it’s not very concerned with trans people.
\nMaybe I was subconsciously grasping at a better, more unified Marxist understanding of the present. Anima and Animus were both depicted as supernatural principles in an ambiguous hierarchy. But there had to be something more than just those two, right? Something above them? It’s just too dismal otherwise. And my left hook was to reveal in the ending that the light of individual truth *was* the highest principle of the universe, over and above Anima and Animus, a divine provenance for the very paths that history could take, and capable of true miracles from within.
\nIn the finale, the protagonist and Surprise Secret Second Heir Bishop is trapped in limbo and ambiguously dead, on account of being at the epicenter of a JRPG superweapon explosion. His longtime companion Raine, the deuteragonist, mourns him at the flower field they once played at as children, which is now withered and decayed. She holds out Bishop’s sword of oath, the one memento she has of him, and cries out in despair for him to return. The sword begins to glow.
\nMeanwhile, Bishop has psychedelic visions where he speaks to his deceased adoptive mother. He comes to realize the truth from within that he had denied himself - that she and Raine *are* his family, even if not related by blood, and that his bloodline, his lineal connections to all the story's royal schemers, mean absolutely nothing if he doesn’t want them to. The sword she gave him on her deathbed wasn’t for him to swear a vow to her - it was *her* vow to *him,* as a mother. He can choose to define his life by his love for his adoptive family, even though the whole world wants to define him as something else. And when Bishop realizes this truth, he returns to earth in a flash of light, and to Raine, miraculously reviving the flower field as he descends.
\nThat was the power of his truth, his light. That was the Radiant Sword.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/queensgrave.png\")
In retrospect, I can’t stop noticing how much my characters seemed to know things that I didn’t. They were all really struggling to live by the arbitrary-but-somehow-inviolable terms they’d laid out for themselves, and it produced broken people, living in denial of an important truth. Everyone was throwing themselves at impossible tasks they didn’t want to do, grinding themselves down over it, because they felt like they had to even though they’d lost the plot as to why. They’re completely unable to contextualize their plight outside of the bars of a prison of their own making.
\nAnd by pursuing those ends, these characters become isolated from everyone around them, desperate for a connection that’s always thwarted by their perceived sense of duty. Their terminal obligation is just so unhealthy! And the only character actually doing what she wants is Yebel, my Ambiguously Gendered final villain.
\nYebel was my favorite character to write by a lot, and also the most delicate, because boy did she evolve over time. I originally conceived of her as a beautiful and effeminate man out of pure hack instinct - just kinda thoughtlessly regurgitating a tired trope. Later, I re-envisioned her as a woman brought up to be a male heir in order to prevent the royal bloodline from ending. Well before I realized I was trans, I was agonizing over the potentially transphobic tropes that her story was tiptoeing around, the numerous ways there were to misread her that would render her not just uncompelling, but hurtful. I’m using she/her now, but I honestly never decided on her pronouns. I suspect she’s someone who actually kinda likes wearing the boy clothes, but mostly does not give a fuck about gender. I really didn’t want it to read as though she had suffered some trauma from her parents trying to trans her against her will, or some garbage like that. Rather, her trauma was that she was never viewed as anything other than an instrument for someone else’s ambitions. I genuinely don’t know how it would have landed, and so in that regard, I’m almost glad I kept her in my head.
\n![\"this](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/yebel.png\")
\nAnyway. Yebel was bequeathed a mission in life like everyone else - live as a man, become king so that the bloodline may continue - and not only does she truly does not give a fuck about it, she finds her meaning in spitting on it. Her villain goal is to assume the throne long enough to purge the royalty, obtain the superweapon tomb, begin a reign of terror and blow shit up, and become a scapegoat for Raine, the hero that will defeat and replace her. Her bloodline, the source of Zoamand’s conflict for centuries, will be both literally ended and morally disgraced,, forever. Also, Yebel is (surprise!) the one the Heretic Cross chose to embody - which not only means that you get a cool-looking final boss fight when she transfigures, it also establishes authoritatively that Yebel’s wish to end the bloodline is *what the rest of the world wants too.* So, aside from the part where she blows people up, it’s actually kind of hard to criticize her logic. When you beat her, it almost feels like you were working together with her to accomplish something.
\nIn other words, Yebel sees a toxic cycle, she sees everyone following its logic, trapped in a loop, and she wants to let it finally end.
\nIt feels a bit indulgent of me to retroactively interpret these characters as trying to tell me something. But I can’t stop seeing it. Making Radiant Sword was an absurd hero lift, the sort of solo project everyone warned you against doing. It was the absurdity of assigning a studio-scale project to an army of one, powered by pure grindset and passion, and forcing yourself to believe that passion would win the day. That’s how all my characters felt in a nutshell, and it crushed them like it crushed me. Maybe I was just determined to be stronger and more resilient than they were. But honestly, the extent to which the psychology of these characters was illustrative and evocative and cohesive took me by surprise. Paradoxically, they were what made it hardest to give the game up. If Radiant Sword were to have meaning as art, were to be useful to the world as more than an amusing diversion, it was probably through them.
\nBut I did give it up, ultimately. I gave it up because I had to listen to what my characters were telling me. Making this game was a death loop that was breaking me psychologically. That’s the other story I wanted to tell.
\nThe period between 2017 and 2024 was a complete suspension of personal growth for me, to an extent that I truly didn’t realize until recently. It was fucked up. My husband and I were living together with a longstanding friend group at the time, one of whom was in the process of basically organizing a commune out of our apartment. As the community developed, dozens of interesting people appeared in my life very quickly, most of them imported from my friend’s grad school program. A healthier version of me would probably have been grateful; living alone in Austin had been really lonely, and now a roaring social life was being handed to me on a silver platter. I didn’t even need to leave my house to meet people!
\nBut that’s just not where I was at, mentally. I was still cripplingly introverted, and this new environment of self-assured, outgoing high achievers made me wither, because I was anything but self-assured about what I was doing at the time. Whenever I tried to engage, I felt as though there was an invisible competition going on, and I was losing at it badly. There were two competing worlds in that apartment - my room, where endless game development took place in solitude, and everywhere else, where I had learned my social faculties were guaranteed to fail me. At every juncture, my room just made more sense to me. So I withdrew - not just from the community at large, but from friends I’d known since high school, who I should have been forming lifelong connections with.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/camp.png\")
\nI interpreted it as simply having low social needs. The reality was that the game was destined to consume every corner of my life; there was no space for anything else to exist. “Vacations” became week-long breaks from work to rest and catch up on video games, rationalized as investments in productivity. Invitations to expand my horizons - parties, camping trips, cons - were invariably declined. I stopped seeing most of my family; there was never enough left in my tank by the holidays for travel to feel realistic. Despite being in a ridiculously enviable social situation, I had decided that the game was all I had. If it was underwater, I was underwater - and it since it was a hero lift of an enormous game, it was *always* underwater.
\nWhat’s weird was that at the time, I thought I was okay with this. I figured this was the life of a passionate creative - the sacrifices we make for art! - and the rush of those cracked-out creative flow states was enough to keep me going. The obsessive allure of perfectionism, the realization of my rapidly increasing artistic skill, giving myself over to the compulsion of manic, industrious output - it was intoxicating. I had managed to reproduce the almost religious, art-obsessed mental state that I first found in industry. And I was doing it by myself,, on my own terms, for my own game. As time went on, I became genuinely proud of what I was making. I *had* to be doing something right.
\nWas I supposed to know that that wasn’t enough, that life was supposed to be more than just that? Probably, but I’m not surprised that I lost my way. Without going too much into the details, I’ve had mental health issues since childhood, been on antidepressants since elementary school, and have weathered some really bad lows. This routine, where I put in a full workday of hours, kept myself in mostly good health, and took pride in my work, it seemed very “can’t complain” to me. What was my emotional baseline *supposed* to feel like?
\nBut my life experience was becoming stuck on a permanent loop within very small confines. When COVID hit, and everyone around me became stuck too, it normalized my situation, but somehow I still wasn’t in any rush to break the cycle when quarantine lifted. Anhedonia set in, and eventually, almost all forms of new experience became unpleasant to me. I stopped playing new games, reading new books or listening to new music, nurturing myself in the nostalgic comfort of old ones. “I really like how I’ve developed such a rich vocabulary for articulating the game design virtues of SMT Nocturne across my six replays,” I told myself. I stopped exploring the city; I once went an entire year without leaving a 15-minute walking radius around my apartment. I went on a scheduled walk in the same park, at the same time, every day. I took pride in not using any social media, which today almost sounds like the path of wisdom, except I wasn’t nurturing any actual personal connections in its stead. My whole world was in my dev cave. I was a stifled, aborted person.
\nThe other thing about development during this period was that, despite my pride in the game, I didn’t show it to anyone. Like, there were no socials or community or any plan to build awareness of the game whatsoever. Periodically, I’d start a Twitter account, post screenshots for a few days with no plan, get discouraged, and then delete it. Aside from that, the (extremely infrequent) playtests were the only time the game saw the light of day. After a certain point, I wasn’t even shy or embarrassed to show it - it was just always too troublesome to test and cut a demo build, too much lost development time. The sheer amount of unfinished Stuff To Make was an ever-present anxiety for me, and any time spent away from it felt panic-inducing. It was an absurdly lonely affair, mostly because of my own decisions and shortcomings.
\nLike, whatever magic was supposed to happen, the magic that happened on Freedom Planet where enthusiastic collaborators emerged to pitch in and volunteer their skills to help see this awesome project through - that was not happening, because it had never been magic. Sabrina put her work out there and built a community; I was thoroughly convinced that that was Not My Personality Type and I could never be that person. And maybe that’s even true. I have no idea the extent to which Sabrina’s success building a community of devs was the product of her own hard work, or just organic growth that came naturally to her in the online age. Probably a mixture of both. Either way, whatever you needed to do to make that happen, I wasn’t doing it, and I was convinced I wasn’t capable of it.
\nI guess I entered into this all without ever thinking about Radiant Sword as a production, as opposed to an endless series of days that I spent Developing Really Hard. I operated as though the machinery of community and publicity and production would appear around me if the quality of the product was obvious enough. If things weren’t taking off, my only option was to Dev Even Harder and make it Even More Obviously Awesome - a strategy that only got less tenable as the market became more saturated. The assumptions here were never true, but they were at least somewhat more true in 2017 than they are in 2026.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/dreamworld.png\")
And they kind of had to be true in order for my life to make sense, because I was getting a lot of evidence that I *could not* make Radiant Sword happen as a production by myself. If it involved any communication with a third party - whether that meant a collaborating developer, a publisher, or the outside world - it invariably ended in a mental health flameout. At one point, an interested composer offered to put together a demo track for me. I requested a frankly unreasonable amount of inchoate, flailing iteration, before realizing I was too mentally unprepared to do this in a way that was respectful of his time, apologized profusely, and abruptly called things off. And that was pretty much the median interaction for me. A simple half-hour conversation exhausted me mentally to the point that I couldn’t work for the rest of the day. The social side of production, apparently, was more than just challenging for me; it was insurmountable.
\nI talked myself in circles about this, lamenting how the collapse of studio infrastructure had forced so many devs to handle everything themselves. About how I would give anything to just work with other people. About how I kept seeing promising indie games that were made by talented artists, but were compromised or unfinished in some way, and how we were missing some crucial apparatus that would bring us together and let us make something more than the sum of its parts. About how the game dev was succumbing to that familiar grotesque capitalist squeeze where corporate ghouls decided that the most efficient profit strategy was to tell everyone “just do everything yourself” - the same morbid phenomenon we see in the breakdown of retirement investing; the fragmentation of healthcare and absence of patient advocacy; the abandonment of product curation in online shopping; Uber and Doordash and the gig economy. About how this ecosystem rewarded people with outgoing, enterprising personalities and a lucky algorithm roll, and systemically punished people who just wanted to make art rather than cultivate a brand.
\nAnd all of that is true. It fucking sucks. But I was still stuck in the same position, and it was becoming a serious problem.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/cathedral2.png\")
To the extent that I managed to hide from myself that this was a problem, I think I hid it from people around me, too. Whenever I saw my family at holidays, I was genial and engaged. They always wanted to know how my game was going; I didn’t tell them this had become my least favorite subject. I didn’t tell them about how I had developed an involuntary tic where I repeated the phrase “I hate myself” aloud dozens of times a day, or the regular mental breakdowns I was having, or how I was becoming convinced that I was only pretending this was a job and I was wasting my life, spinning my gears in solitude on a compulsive and meaningless fixation. I figured that when the game came out, this would be ancient history, and they wouldn’t need to worry themselves over the details. I wanted to project a competent, thriving professional for them.
\nIn late 2024/early 2025, I had a major depressive episode and temporarily suspended development. A few months later, having finally stopped grinding on work long enough to focus on myself for an extended period, my egg cracked. And then things started changing very fast.
\nThere’s no way I can do justice to the experience of trans awakening as a parenthetical in this postmortem. But if there’s one thing to take away from it, it’s that it’s possible to forget what actual joy is, and realizing you’re trans has a way of making you remember. Especially after starting estrogen, I felt an overwhelming desire to seize my happiness in a way I hadn’t felt since… well, since puberty. All at once, I realized life could offer me much more than what I had settled for. I wanted to meet people, go to concerts, say “yes” to things. I wanted to be a good friend to the people I was grateful to, and, for the first time in my life, I wanted to be seen.
\nI learned more about myself in the year after my egg cracked than I did in the entire decade prior. I learned that I actually need community, that I had been taking it for granted, and that I wanted to participate in and even help build it. I learned that I hadn’t put much effort into being a good friend to people before, but I was going to now, and it was really gratifying when I did. I learned that it was possible to like how I looked in the mirror. I learned that I love dancing and raves, and hiking, and thrift shopping and dressing up and wearing makeup, and passing a joint around with strangers, and fursuiting and cons, and Charli XCX, and going out for queer nightlife dressed as slutty as was legally allowed. I learned that what I had thought were my discerning tastes and humble lifestyle was actually a fear of novel experience, and that life offered an absurd amount of joy that I had just left on the table. I learned that at some point, I had stopped learning about myself, and I was determined to start again.
\nTrans awakening also makes you very acutely aware of lost time. I transitioned in my late thirties, and the thought that I could have done it so much earlier kills me. I still break down and cry regularly, thinking about the years I lost living as a man. Honestly, I suspect I would do genuinely bad things to get those years back if I could - to be young and pretty in my twenties, to get married as a bride (I’d even settle for just being a bridesmaid!), to simply *be as happy as I am now* all that time. Before my egg cracked, I didn’t think much of devoting my thirties to this one passion project. “Maybe it’ll even go into my forties,” I thought. “I’ll probably make another one after that in my fifties.” It didn’t seem like a sunk cost because there wasn’t anything else I particularly wanted to do.
\nBut looking back, I feel like I spent my thirties in the wrong timeline. I came to realize just how unwell I had been during that almost decade-long fugue state of isolated development, of singular dedication to perfecting the craft of reproducing this very narrow, specific point in the history of digital media. Radiant Sword started to feel like such a small thing to me. It was an indulgent passion project to the point of being self-centered, but it had long since stopped being my actual passion. This game had been conceived by a fundamentally different person than I was now, and the community I had to engage with to find collaborators no longer felt like my own. The indie JRPG communities I found skewed heavily toward cis guys in their 30s, aging dads or uncles, the flash-forward version of my old Final Fantasy vBulletin forum compatriots. Many of them are lovely people - I’m not about the “die cis scum” life - but like, I was over here surrounding myself with trans women, kinksters and furries. It’s a whole different world. I wasn’t sure if I could ever return to Radiant Sword, or the culture it was embedded in, ever again.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/manor1.png\")
\nI did, though. It still lurked in the corners of my mind, this unfinished business I knew I had to return to and conquer someday. There’s no way I could work on something for that long and just not finish it, right? And I got to thinking about how to remix it, reshape the story in small ways to make it truer to who I am today. I rewrote the ending, and then a number of other moments in the script to make it thematically cohesive. Eventually, in late 2025, my mental state was so much healthier that I felt ready and enthusiastic to return to the game. I convinced myself that I was in the right mindset now to overcome my fear of publishers and collaborators, that I was going to do all the right things, start publicizing the game, putting it out there, working with composers, and getting on a proper production track so I could finally put a bow on it.
\nAnd, aside from the part where I *actually* put a bow on it, I really did those things! And I *was* capable of doing them. I didn’t panic or shut down like last time. I had a publishing deal lined up, a composer I was working with, a Steam page, and a small but steadily growing following. For a period of a few months, I convinced myself that I was going to see this through, and that my transition and mental health recovery had been the fix I needed.
\nBut…
\nBut the reality was, the game was still really far from done, and it simply did not progress unless I was in a firm grindset. The actual work of publicity and coordinating with my composer and communicating with publishers and daily screenshots and whatnot… It all took hours out of the day, and made actual dev progress even slower. Committing to this path meant that I could very plausibly be spending the next five years of my life doing work I really hated: high-stakes bugfixing, feature integration, console porting, management, publicization, optimization, and so on, to the exclusion of most other things in my life.
\nWhat’s more, in the current hyper-saturated games landscape, the years of care spent pushing quality do not guarantee success. Tactics games are already a niche market, and period-specific retro games doubly so. And while I’d have loved to see Radiant Sword do Chained Echoes numbers, it was almost more likely that it just got lost in the flood of new releases. Even the publishers I spoke with warned me that the old methods of promotion are unreliable; nobody *really* knew a guaranteed way to deliver mindshare for an indie game. To move forward, I’d have to devote several more years of my life to a very uncertain proposition, one with the potential to end humiliatingly and pointlessly.
\nAnd those years mean more to me now than they did back then. I’m just not okay with giving them over to this game, a game that was conceived of by a fundamentally different person. A game that began nine years, 13 Unity versions and one gender ago. No matter how I contextualize it, I can’t give so much more of myself to his passion project, even if it means leaving it stranded.
\nThose few brief months at the beginning of 2026 were a weirdly liminal time. I think I knew my second push was doomed pretty early on, when I realized that the persona I assumed for communicating with developers, publishers and posts on socials was just another round of masking. Which is not to say that they were transphobic or unsupportive - actually, they were kind and professional without exception, bless them. I want to especially offer thanks to the composer I was working with, Rei Kitakaze, who was both a consummate professional and a fantastic composer with an amazing ear for retro JRPG sounds. I felt genuinely awful breaking the news to Rei, because he was so personally and creatively invested in the project. He had overdelivered at every turn. If you are making a game with any JRPG in its DNA, you should absolutely try to hire him, and consider yourself lucky if you can land him.
\nBut there was still an unmissable gulf between the mask I put on for collaboration, which more or less resembled my pre-transition self, and the life I lived outside it. Somehow, it still felt like I had gone back in the closet. I’d be hanging in a Discord server where the trans girl brigade that adopted me was discussing subdermal clit magnets, and then I’d tab over to my dev contacts and be like “Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it :)” I had maybe found collaborators, but I hadn’t found community. I felt like I was hiding myself, and what's more, I felt lonely.
\nAnd if I continued on this path, this extremely cis male space was going to be my world for the foreseeable future. The people who wanted to work on the game, publish the game, play the game - why did it seem like they were all cis men? No, I knew why: it was because the game was conceived of by a cis man, no matter what I had retrofitted the story to be. And it was always going to read up front as “I want to recreate 1997” rather than “1997 inspired something in me”, because that’s the mindset I was in when it all started. Stifling nostalgia is in Radiant Sword’s DNA, and I hate it. That, more than anything, I don’t think I’d ever be able to get over.
\nDevoting any more time to the game felt borderline dysphoric. Just to engage with the very premise of the project, I had to put on a costume of the man I used to be.
\nI wish there was a happier ending to the Radiant Sword story, because I’m still trying to figure out what to take away from this period of my life, other than regret. I learned a ton of skills, but it’s unclear how or if I’ll ever use them again. I didn’t form many professional connections. The friends I made along the way were… not related to game development at all, actually. In fact, they were almost exclusively trans women, queers and allies I met online, little rays of light peaking through the boarded up window of my lonely dev cave, suggesting another life was possible. Maybe I needed to be in that dark place to have perceived their light clearly. If that’s the case, it was all worth it. However long and misguided a detour this was in my life, I did end it in a much happier, healthier place than I started.
\nBut man, I sure was dragged kicking and screaming to it.
\nWhat’s really weird is that there’s still a lot of dev work for Radiant Sword that I’d be happy, genuinely excited, to return to. I look through old levels and get that impulsive, perfectionist urge to redo the textures, rework the lighting, update sprite sheets, refine animations. The art itself, thankfully, has not lost its allure for me. But the context for it all has broken down entirely. Maybe one day, the circumstances will even be right to return to the game for real. If I found like-minded peers and friends who wanted to make Radiant Sword with me, queer people I could be more than co-developers with; if someone else could handle finances and direction and just let me cook; if the timing was right; if the audience interest was there... Yeah, I’d circle back, if that all fell into my lap. I’d probably regret spoiling the whole story at that point, but I wouldn’t let it stop me. Honestly, I sincerely hope it’s not the last time I do dev in this visual style. I’m really fond of it. (No, seriously, if you're queer and know how to save this project, hit me up!)
\nIn the meantime, you can find a level selector demo with all the game's levels and missions here. It's a snapshot of where development stopped, not a polished build, so bugs, crashes and pitfalls are guaranteed. It's also full of copyrighted placeholder audio and BGM. I've left this in because I'm honestly 100% out of juice for this project right now, and I really can't stomach the thought of it only being experienced with some hastily-chosen open source audio, or in pure awkward silence. There is intention in the placeholders, is what I'm trying to say. All that being said, you can probably have some fun spelunking through what I've made, piecing together a picture of what the game would have been.
\nI regret that I couldn’t leave it in a better state, especially the game balance; numerous rewrites of battle calculations means that most stages are tuned against math that no longer applies. But maybe the fact that I was willing to routinely and casually break gameplay like that is a sign of what was really driving me on Radiant Sword. I was happy to toss restoring parity into the (overflowing) bucket of “it’ll get a global pass before ship.” I never would have done that with, say, rendering, or cutscene scripting. It’s a bad sign for the game, ultimately, that my primary interest seemed to be making it look the part. It might be that freeform, zero-expectations spelunking is the best way to experience what I’ve made.
\n![\"\"](\"https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/postTournament.png\")
Postmortems in game dev often get phrased as parables. “Don’t be like me.” “Learn from my mistakes.” I’m not sure I feel that way about my experience, though. It would be easy to read this and conclude that the message is “Don’t try to solo lift your massive dream game.” But part of the reason I even *thought* to make Radiant Sword was my alienated, bullheaded response to the sheer number of devs saying stuff like this. Yes, it would have been easier to make a platformer or a short puzzle game or something, but I don’t get passionate about short puzzle games. I am not the person to make them, and if I tried to, it would probably suck, because I wouldn’t care about it that much. I’m passionate about *big* games, games that really should be made by a team instead of an individual. And we’ve seen that solo devs can sometimes make this happen, with a little community support. Sabrina DiDuro did it on Freedom Planet. Matthias Linda did it on Chained Echoes. It’s Herculean, but it's not impossible.
\nSo, despite everything, I’m not going to tell you not to make your dream game. I think you should, actually! The examples I just cited are some of my favorite games; I want a world where more games like that get made, not fewer. No, I don’t think there’s any generalizable moral to the story. Radiant Sword taught me that I’m not wise enough to be teaching morals to anyone. The most I’m willing to commit to with my takeaway is an earnest plea. And the plea is this: If you’re making your dream game, please, don’t make it in solitude. Don’t confuse depression with passion for the project. Let the dev cycle be a mechanism for your personal growth, not a pause on it.
\nAnd if you want to transition, for God’s sake, fucking do it yesterday!
", "image": "https://trashanimalsanctuary.com/media/posts/1/featuredImage.png", "author": { "name": "Mint (she/her)" }, "tags": [ "radiantsword", "lgbtq", "gamedev" ], "date_published": "2026-09-01T12:38:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-01T12:41:34-04:00" } ] }