Hello!

After a long radio silence, we are finally back with a status update on Brassica’s progress!

Since our last post on here, you may have seen the occasional social media post, dev-stream, or at the very least that we have been posting development updates on our Patreon. Because we don’t want to keep non-patrons who are still looking forward to more Brassica in the dark, we decided to summarize some of what has happened since our last public post, along with an abridged version of our latest Patreon post.

So! First things first: progress may be slow, but we are still working on Brassica and are motivated as ever to complete the game and release all the remaining Acts!

Because we haven’t gone into detail in our last status update, here are the major reasons why it’s been so long since we last released new Brassica content.

Time

Back when we started Brassica, BL+ was our full-time job. We stayed afloat with savings, mini-jobs, and a generally inexpensive lifestyle, but that was simply not sustainable. In the time since, both of us have gotten part-time jobs outside of game development that take up a lot of our time and energy that we could previously pour into BL+. Rohan has also continued his studies of psychology, which has already enriched our projects, but of course also takes a lot of time and effort.

Creative blocks

Around the time that we released Brassica’s Act 2, both of us were already in the beginnings of serious burnout. We had overworked ourselves in the years leading up to it and with financial uncertainty not allowing us to slow down, that eventually manifested in creative blocks. We tried a lot of different angles to work through it, but ultimately had to realize that we needed to rethink our creative approach as a studio, and our respective relationships to creativity itself. That, again, required a lot of time for introspection and experiments. We might not be back to the level of productivity that we had in 2017, but things are looking much brighter and healthier now!

Scope

This one was more in our control, but still felt like something we had to adjust.

Originally, Brassica was intended to be a short game jam project. A lot of major creative decisions were made with that in mind, including both the tone and plot of the game. It should be fun and not as polished or extensive as our previous “big” projects.

Well, since it’s been many years since the game jam ended, Brassica has unquestionably evolved into our next “big” project. Act 3’s outline has undergone major revisions. One part that would have been a handful of lines at most in the game jam version has now become the first half of Act 3 (already rivaling the entire Act 2 in length). Acts 4 and 5 have also undergone outline changes and have grown in length. All of that for a number of reasons. Mainly, we recognized that there were a lot of opportunities to delve deeper into the development of Brassica’s characters. Some of which we discovered through your feedback here on itch.io. Thank you!

We may not have released much in recent years, but we have both grown as storytellers and hope that this will make the wait worth it when we finally release the next part of Brassica’s story.

To close things off, here are some of the development updates we shared in our latest Patreon post. If you’d like to see these kinds of updates more regularly, you can join our Patreon or Discord server. Last year we also made Bluesky our main social media platform, so feel free to follow us there for occasional updates and insights into what we’re doing.

All major news will be posted here as well and be freely accessible to everyone.

Regardless of if you’ve been following our Princes’ journey since the beginning or only recently discovered the game, thank you so much for your patience! We will be doing our best to complete the remaining Acts so you can experience everything the story has still in store.

Excerpt from ‘Brassica Progress + 2024 in Review’

Forest Critters for Brassica - Rohan

The first part of Act 3 of Brassica leads our heroes into a strange forest with equally strange inhabitants. After a split in the story, our protagonist Saffron will encounter a bunch of different animals on one of the two possible routes. In the initial stages of planning this part, it was supposed to be as simple as the story on the parallel route.

In our last post Felix told how much optimisation is needed to make a sequence of text puzzles as simple as possible and yet engaging. This gave us a framework to decide the number of puzzles and as a result how many and what kind of animals would scurry around.

As development progressed, every animal picked up a personality trait. As a result, this route packs more weight than its twin route. Getting the other one up to par will be an interesting challenge.

Brassica Writing Progress - Felix

Writing Act 3 has felt very analogous to our princes’ journey, in that the more time passed, the more it became like this mountain that we had to get over before we could gain momentum again. And sure enough, this daunting image hasn’t exactly helped to make progress.

So, before I get to any quantifiable “this is how far along we are,” I’d like to write a bit about perception and planning.

Act 3 is by far the longest Act so far, and might even be the longest in the game, period. I knew that, and still it felt like chipping away at writing all the scenes didn’t seem to make any noticeable difference. That can be very discouraging, and frankly, I took longer than I should have to actively counter that. And it kind of started by chance.

Last month, I came across a script that gives you more detailed stats of your game. By default, Ren’py gives you total word counts, line counts, averages, etc. but this script lets you break it down by file, scene, and character. At the time I found it, the incomplete (first half) of Act 3 was already almost as long as Act 2 and three times as long as Act 1.

In my head, it had felt significantly shorter, and just seeing the total word count couldn’t fix that. Finally seeing the different Acts in numbers was honestly relieving, because yeah, it’s been taking a long time and a lot of that was due to creative blocks and life and my day job getting in the way. But also it’s a long Act and there is already quite a lot there.

Incidentally, the more detailed stats also revealed that Hans talks by far the most of the princes and Saffron doesn’t even have half as many lines. For structural reasons, this has already started to change in Act 3, but with his character development ramping up from here on out, I’ll do my best to let our protagonist (and Ode) not remain in Prince Hans’ shadow quite as much!

(writing progress as of early January 2025)

So! Knowing that the writing that’s already there isn’t insignificant, doesn’t change that there’s still a lot to do before we can release the next update. In a previous Patreon post, we wrote about the way we plan and track our tasks. In theory, all of that was great, but with the daunting image of the figurative Mt. Brassica in mind, I didn’t end up using our planning spreadsheet as much as I wanted or should have.

On Rohan’s suggestion I tried breaking down my list of writing tasks into smaller chunks. I was initially hesitant, because I felt like a longer list of tasks would be even more daunting, but as it turns out, a long list of smaller tasks also turns into a long list of completed tasks quite quickly. Where I used to be stuck on a single task, watching the progress bar slowly fill over weeks on end, I now had several that were already at 100% and suddenly progress felt more achievable again.

It sounds so obvious in hindsight, but I’m just glad I got there at some point 🙈

As an extension of this, I updated my list of writing tasks to also show a total percentage and… it currently sits just under 40%.

(progress as of early February 2025)

I’ll be honest, despite it all, I was expecting a higher number. But! This number doesn’t align exactly with how much still needs to be written. Some scenes in the list are shorter than others, and some tasks are just revisions or editing. So I would still guess that we’re currently more than halfway to the update in terms of writing.

My goal is to finish a first draft of everything before February is over. That’s ambitious, but not impossible. And as mentioned in the beginning, I finally want to get to the peak of this figurative mountain, because I’m certain that progress will be easier once we’re there.

Thank you for reading <3