I know I haven't been posting much on here yet, but it's not for lack of stuff I could toss up, for sure. For more than a year now my game's been sitting around as a half-finished prototype (the prototype being half-finished - not the whole thing! It's sitting at like... 1%, if that~) collecting dust while I work on worldbuilding, story bits, trying to wrap everything together and flesh out more of the universe. I spent a few days this week designing a species that I'm certain I wouldn't even be showing in my first game at all. It's just that the scale of this universe is such that I kind of need to know more about these little odds and ends so I can better understand the characters I actually go into detail on, and where they came from, and where my story will eventually go. I'm sure I didn't need to spend the time coming up with their appearance, but that's part of the fun~

The weird thing for me is, I'm still in this strange spot where I know I've shared so much stuff that I now consider half-baked, or in some cases just straight-up raw, and I stumble a bit with how to manage that. The familiars have changed a ton since I originally decided Bit wasn't just a glowy one-off half-computer thing. I feel like I give people the wrong expectations when I just show the things I'm drawing, like I start to feel like I can't change them.

But I can, and I should! Heck, I recently had more revelations for the familiars and how they work which explains design elements I previously left to pure aesthetic, and in doing that I've gone back and touched up the newest designs once again to make sure they line up with that logic. I've had finished refs for a lot of characters waiting around, but if I posted those months ago, they'd already be (sort of) outdated. I'm not sure it matters at all, but for some reason I get tangled up inside thinking about how I need to change a character I just got done changing and posting, like if I put them out there for the world to see then I'm putting my 'finished' stamp on them and that's that.

That's all to say nothing of spoilers, which I'm still sort of internally grappling over. I'd love to open up all about the familiars and what they are (so people can make their own and they would fit the universe), the different categories and how their powers work, but then how deep can I really go without giving away everything? How much am I going into the nuts and bolts of my universe which would give away secrets that make the systems so much more intriguing? The familiars tie in deeply with a 'magic' system which subtly influences pretty much everything and I think that's one of the bigger things my universe has going for it... which is definitely something I don't want to give away.

I guess when it comes to this stuff, I'm lacking a point of comparison. I don't have good examples to follow except for big game studios, who basically just coldly keep every single thing tightly under wraps until the whole project drops in finished form. That's not what I want to do. I want to share things, but I need to get over this strange fear of letting people see 'too much' or 'unfinished' stuff.