Flockin

i didn't want to celebrate my first anniversary alone. today marks exactly 12 months since i started developing a game for Otherside. 365 days. this isn't a game announcement. i just want to share what i've been through over the past year and what's really been happening behind the screen. 12 months ago, when i opened unreal engine 5, there was nothing but an empty world in front of me. today, that world has 4 different stages, dozens of mechanics, and hundreds of interconnected systems. i've handled the entire technical development process on my own. but that doesn't mean this has been a one-man story. ABP has been the founder and the mind behind the original idea from the very beginning. his vision, ideas, and constant support have played a major role in shaping this world. my job was to turn those ideas into working systems, playable levels, and a real gaming experience. what started as an idea in one person's mind became thousands of blueprint nodes on another person's screen. 3d modeling, animation, level design, blueprints, multiplayer systems, ai, physics, ui/ux, odk integrations, backend infrastructure, apis, databases, leaderboards, and much more. all the technical work that would normally be handled by different people across a game studio, i've taken on myself. some days i was working on character animations. other days i was trying to figure out the data flow between the game and the server. sometimes the ai refused to follow the player. sometimes a system working perfectly for one player would break another player's experience in multiplayer. the funny thing is, something i spent days building might only appear as a 3-second action on your screen. nobody will ever see the 3 days behind those 3 seconds. and they don't need to. game development isn't about showing players how difficult the process was. it's about making sure they never have to feel that complexity. over the past year, i've been wrong countless times. i've broken systems that were already working, deleted entire mechanics, and abandoned ideas i'd spent weeks developing. but one thing never changed. i never wanted to just put another playable experience into Otherside. i wanted to build a world people would keep coming back to. a place where they could compete, lose, try again, and eventually overcome something they thought was impossible. an old-school side-scroller, built with the possibilities of Otherside. and today, we're no longer talking about an idea. we're talking about a real game. one that's running, being tested, and getting better every single day. ABP's vision and support have been a huge part of this journey, and so has the community that's been sharing ideas, feedback, and encouragement along the way. i wrote the code myself. i created the models, animations, and environments myself. but i don't want to claim this entire story as mine alone. because some things are built alone, but only become meaningful when they're shared. we'll see each other in @OthersideMeta very soon. after 12 months of building this world, i'm more than ready to see you playing in it. and there's also foxy farm. yes, while all of this has been happening, i've also been developing a second game. a completely different world, different mechanics, and a different experience. sometimes i ask myself why i'm building two games at the same time. then i open my computer and get back to working on both. a year ago, all i had was an empty screen. today, there are two worlds. 12 months. two games. countless failures. and we're just getting started. for apes. for @apecoin . 🦍