Hello to the one person reading this (that's you!),

This is another devlog, which I haven't done in a long time, how time flies. My last devlog for this game was in mid-2024, we are now approaching the end of 2025. 

And what a year it's been! A lot of low points, a lot of high points, it has been a very interesting year, a lot of interesting personal things happened. But this isn't the sticker of what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how I feel about Lockjaw and NIMIS in general, especially the Endyear build of the game.

To put it simply, the endyear version of the game made me hate NIMIS. Whenever I showed people my games, I told them specifically not to play the NIMIS Endyear build or to play it while I pointed out everything I disliked about it. The lore I wrote for it made me depressed and it just felt wrong and unfitting.

I felt geniunely ashamed to put out a version of the game I disliked that much, and while I will never fully pull it from being playable, I will probably shelve it somewhere and keep it playable but that version of the game is to me at least, disowned.

Now you may be asking, "Kiera, the endyear version is kind of fun, why don't you like it?"

Because I wrote this version of NIMIS to be a direct critique of GenAI specifically, and while i agree with its sentiments still, I think shoehorning it into NIMIS, a fun little game I made in 4 weeks for the college assignment "Building Playful Worlds" as a homage to games that inspire me to this day like Nuclear Throne, Binding of Isaac and Terraria just felt and still feels wrong. 

Other mechanics like the dialogue system, human corpses and music as a whole just felt off. It felt like trying to make NIMIS dark and edgy instead of just being, yknow, a funny little game about a cannibalistic scrap robot. Like, I had pages of lore written for this, stuff like a tech ceo committing mass genocide and like sure, while the final boss design does kick ass and I will probably reuse it, I have no idea why I decided to write in like mass genocide and death into a game where it just kind of doesn't fit or feel right. 

Did you know that my lore for Lockjaw in the Endyear build is that they were basically mass produced and sent to kill human survivors? You aren't even an interesting one, you're just Lockjaw clone number 39429583 sent to kill people and things. They also got sent to alternate universes to kill people which sounds dumb as hell. I also had an idea to make every single version of Lockjaw canon to the game, which while interesting, opens up weird questions. 

As for the music, it's about high time I start looking for composers. I hate using stock assets for games and honestly, I just picked out the first stuff that looked like it somewhat fit.

"Ok, but Kiera, why is this game such a stickler, you've made dozens of games, why call this singular version of one of your games out specifically?"

Well, person reading this who totally just asked this and is nodding along to everything I just said, the Endyear build just feels like a giant stain on everything to do with Nimis, especially considering how Lockjaw has kind of become my mascot character of sorts. If a game has multiple characters, Lockjaw will most likely be one of them. If there is a morally grey company mentioned, it will most likely be ORACORP.

I just feel like if people see Lockjaw or Oracorp mentioned in a game they'll be like "Ooooo! I heard about the fact Lockjaw originally came from Nimis", and then just play the endyear build, coming to the conclusion that  the game sucks.

The point is I should probably create more unique characters... 

I'm working on it don't worry

"Why is it even called the Endyear build, it wasn't even uploaded at the end of the year?"

College, I had to present this in front of my course leader and everything! Basically we had to make a big game to show to our teachers that we were a good fit to continue studying Games, and instead of making my own game for that project, I expanded NIMIS to become the Endyear build! I made a bunch of really cool stuff for it, and many features such as different weapons, a level-based system and loose lore elements were initially just endyear concepts.

"Why the hell are you embracing this random Prealpha version? It sucks!

This leads into a pretty major can of worms, the fact that the current build of Nimis, Prealpha 1.0.3 is still incomplete. While I was making the Endyear build, I basically did the gamedev classic of stitching and hammering things together while praying to whatever higher being i found most suitable at that time to just get a version of the Endyear build out, ignoring anything I broke in the process, and because I was not aware of git repostitories while I was actively developing Nimis, any and all older versions of Nimis are basically lost media. (Spooky!) 

Because of the shaky way I built the endyear build, this means that unfortunately, fixing the game is basically fruitless because to put it lightly, my initial code I built EVERYTHING ON was shoddy at best, actively terrible and inefficient in every way at worst. (Don't put all your crucial player functions in the PlayerMovement script, folks!)

This basically means adding anything new to Nimis requires either a total recode or remake, and as of now I'd rather focus on larger and different projects, I want to have more games that aren't just "gun gun shooty bullet"

This is more an embrace in the sense of "Well this is the latest version of Nimis that isn't the endyear build, so yeah have fun"

"Ok, Nimis 2 when?"

That's a tricky one, but when I feel like it. I know it feels like a copout, but I want to give this  project time to breathe, and one thing's  for sure, I'm not making it alone. Making the endyear build just  made me realize, working solo on a smaller project is really chill, but when that project gets bigger you're gonna want to get more people involved or else it's super tedious.

CONCLUSION

I want to conclude this by saying, it's fine to dislike your old work. It's your old work for a reason and as long as you can see the flaws in it and what you can change to iterate for next time, that's fine! Just don't delete your old work. NEVER DELETE YOUR OLD WORK. Instead, archive it in such a manner that you and people who want to see it can seek it out, and do it in such a manner that if you ever change your mind, it's easily reversible.

TLDR: Basically I'm thinking about what to do about the endyear build. I will probably move it over to the archives. For the forseeable future, Nimis will have its Endyear build linked to the main page to showcase the cool things I added there that I do like. Also yeah I was a dumb stupid 18 year old who thought they knew everything and as a result made a version of a game I hate, yeah that's it basically

In other news, I have a website now! I now own the domain https://keyaura.games, and am currently working on building the website with its own dedicated blog section which I will try to actively maintain! Wooo! Expect the site to go up somewhere around early 2026.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk,

/Keyaura