This game was made in 2 days 

Well that's clickbait. But the majority of the game (sans visuals and writing polish) was set up in 2 afternoons thanks to me having been here before and literally working on an easy-to-pickup DIISIS demo to accompany the public launch. That's really fucking neat!

Development Timeline

Since the release of Onyx Heart earlier this year, I generated a huge backlog of tasks that I still had to tackle before I could release the DIISIS dialogue tool to the public. Now, about half a year later, most of that backlog has dissipated and I was able to start with some informal dogfooding around my friends roughly around June 2024. There are still many bugs to squash and features left to implement, but the software is in a way better state now.

I originally had two other game jams in the time between Onyx Heart and Curse you, Entropia but sadly they fell through due to varied circumstances, so when I caught wind of the O2A2 jam, I had to do something, and thus this game was born.

Functionality vs tech under the hood

The gameplay functionalities of the three games I made with diisis so far (When The Sea Received The Sky, Onyx Heart, Curse you, Entropia) are all largely identical. That is because they're all made by the same weirdo with the same tool, big shocker. The major difference is, however, in how that functionality is achieved. All the updates for DIISIS are either an improvement for the developer-side dialog editor, or the integration of an additional feature. By now the feature suite has grown into a good package that the few gamedev testers have been satisfied with. Yay. (You can look at the source code on GitHub)

You build tools in production

Due to me not actually making a game with diisis in a few months, several very-obvious bugs snuck in over time, which I fixed during the development of CyE. Many QoL features too, have their origins in live development environments, because that's where their absence is actually noticed.

This worked out

Overall, I was really pleased with how smooth the development went this time around. I can't wait to do more with this!