Did Indexing Your Heart die?

TLDR; Simply put, no; Indexing Your Heart is not dead. I have been busy with a bunch of other projects lately and haven’t had the chance to give the game the attention it deserves. As I’m wrapping other things up, I plan to get back to the game.

It’s been quite a long while since I started developing Indexing Your Heart, feeling confident on where the project would go. With a story nearly ready for revisions and a general idea for the gameplay, I felt that I could get the game done in a reasonable amount of time.

However, as winter break began, things began to slow down. Certain aspects about the game became uncertain, such as sprite artwork, budgeting, and music. Although I had done some work over winter break with importing the story into the game’s codebase and creating prototype sprites with the excellent Mannequin creator, I didn’t really touch the project since February. The typical semester workload made it difficult to focus on the game and what I wanted to do with it in the future.

Fast-forward to today, where I’m writing this blog post on a brand-new Tumblr blog. On my own personal website, I discussed why I made the switch to Tumblr recently:

While I’ve had a blast being able to control every aspect of my website, I’ve found that I’ve updated my website less often enough to warrant using a static site generator like Jekyll. […] I feel confident in my content’s new home. Additionally, Tumblr provides the controls I need for my website and blog, along with a simple interface for writing blog posts like this one.

_Indexing Your Heart_ is still very much on my mind; not a single day passes where I stop thinking about the characters of that story and why I was so excited to build the game in the place. Because of this, I still want to develop the game and plan to finish it (at some point).

So, what’s changed?

In short, a few things have changed with the project going forward:

• First, while it was cool to have custom fonts and granular control over the website, I’ve migrated all content for the website over to Tumblr for the same reasons I listed before. This will guarantee that I spend more time on the game and less time on the website itself. I will revisit theming in the future.
• Second, I will be revisiting the premise of the game as a whole and determine how to proceed with the project in the future. While having a mix of a visual novel and an RPG seems fun and unique, I’m not sure if the story is well set up for this approach. Likewise, I’m partially considering 3D games or games designed for mobile devices.
• Finally, I will be more transparent about the development process and post updates as frequently as I can. Because this blog is now on Tumblr, this should allow me to express my ideas more quickly.

I’m excited to tackle the game that is _Indexing Your Heart_ again and give you all a wonderful experience.