A monumental work. Huge in scope, and incredibly human. I don't necessarily agree with all the ideas espoused, but that has never been a pre-requisite for engaging with a great story! The ideas were certainly thought-provoking.
btw, it did take me much longer than 1 hour to complete the entire thing, but it was worth it.
Thank you, thank you so much for your evaluation! Actually, some of the viewpoints in the game are things that even I, the author, still have a lot of doubts and confusion about. These past few days I've been thinking a lot and have revised a huge amount of content again. So in the second part, I will readjust the story arrangement and add more foreshadowing and depth of thought. I think that, for me, this is actually also a process of self-organizing and finding myself.
Sometimes when I look back at it after several months, I feel that this first work really has quite a few immature aspects (actually, sometimes I even consider overturning it and starting over, but I'm a perfectionist. If I insisted on achieving perfection, I'm afraid this work would never be born lolll. I'm already working hard to reconcile with this stubborn flaw). So I can only hope that my second work can rise to another level, and use that to arrange the related content more thoroughly.
Thank you very much for your feedback! Understanding different people's attitudes is also a process of continuously refining my ability in game narrative, so I truly believe the next work will be better than this one. However, perhaps after finishing the next one, I should properly play through it a few more times myself and also analyze what its actual playtime length is.
I totally understand what you mean about the urge to overturn the work and start over (because every time I work on a big project too, I'll find that I've learned so much throughout the process and I have changed so much internally from the beginning to the end of it), but I also like to look back at older projects and think about them like a snapshot of my ideas that I had during that specific period of time. If I was able to execute those ideas fully, even if I have changed my thinking or my goals for future projects, then it was a success.
I kinda count myself lucky as not being a perfectionist, even though I care a lot about atmosphere, details, and a certain kind of authenticity. Perfectionism can work for people, and it can help you hold yourself to a high standard, but I think it can also hold people back from moving forward and finishing the things that they started. I think it's a good idea to make things as complete as you possibly can in your own time, and then let them go free.
I understand that this will part of a larger work, though, so some revisions here or there wouldn't be totally out of the ordinary if you wanna do that to!
You're right,Even now, while working on the second installment, I've already overturned a great deal of past content, and I've even come to feel that some of my old ideas seem rather outdated (though, funnily enough, to me back then they already felt incredibly cutting-edge and groundbreaking—it's just that the present me has overturned them). Still, I hope I can make the second installment more outstanding and more complete than the first.
Reconciling with one's own perfectionism is truly an agonizing process. Around May, after I finished organizing the English edition (though I don't think I did a particularly good job on it—by the later stages I was so exhausted that I even forgot to update the formatting), I had barely rested before I started conceptualizing the second installment. My mind keeps running through all kinds of profound, philosophical stories, yet it's very hard to actually ground them in reality. Many ideas already begin to distort the moment I put them into words, and after going through translation into another language, the original meaning suffers yet another round of loss. But the good news is that I've more or less come to understand this point, and I've found quite a few philosophical works to analyze this kind of problem (I might devote a large portion of the author's afterword in the second installment to discussing my thoughts on this?).
All in all, objectively speaking, perfectionism has set a very high creative benchmark for me, but it has also brought enormous obstacles. I can't bring myself to be half-hearted with my own work, or to convince myself to accept something flawed. Because of my strict demands and my tendency to overthink, I also constantly push myself to do just a little better, to go one step further no matter what—and this drains my mental state immensely, while also causing my project to be delayed again and again, from August to September. Sadly, even now in September, it still isn't finished. At the same time, because of unpleasant experiences in childhood and in my past dealings with the people around me, I've grown accustomed to doing everything alone, and I'm not very willing to accept help from others. Even asking a programming-related question in a community is something I need to summon up my courage to do. But now I'm slowly realizing that if I want to create a truly outstanding work in the future, I will inevitably need to learn to seek support and feedback from others. I'm currently trying to improve on this, bit by bit.
Still, whether it's perfectionism or my preference for toughing things out alone，these "problems"，perhaps one day I'll make peace with them. After all, if something that was meant to express my own thoughts and liberate my mind ends up turning into a weapon that torments and whips me instead, that feeling is truly unbearable.
