I decided to write this post to talk about my experiences and what I've learned from making the story of SCP Texted, and about its cancellation before getting past a first act.

[HISTORY]
After talking with a friend late at night, I had the idea to make an SCP visual novel as a joke, and to try the Dialogic plugin for Godot. I spent a few days prototyping a small story and some scenes, but then I realised the idea could be expanded and made into a full game. As such, I decided to rewrite the story to got from a small act of around 30 minutes, to 3 full acts + an epilogue, with branching paths and multiple dialogue options. To fulfill this vision, I needed to write, 3D model, and create scenes for around 5 months, until I made a trailer and set a launch date, October 1st.

[POST LAUNCH AND FEELINGS]
Finally, after 5 months I had launched the first act, promoted the trailer in many discord servers and reddit, now I only needed to wait for the reception and see people play the game. And then I waited, and waited, only receiving a few amount of people's feedback, mostly negative. The excitment I had over making the game blinded my mind and I didn't realise the many problems there was in the gameplay loop and the story. Characters felt like exposition machines, there wasn't much rythm to the scenes, you could only get the correct answers if you knew the SCP articles beforehand, the story had many convenient elements to push it forward, the endings were goofy and the tone wasn't helping the serious story, etc..., etc..., etc...
All these realisations gave me a small depression for a few days, making me feel angry for all those months I spent in a wasted concept with an horrid story and bad gameplay, with the only reedming qualities being decent graphics and a couple designs I liked. It made me not want to do anything game dev related for some time, until I got invited to my first gamejam, where I created Waythed, one of my favourite projects so far. This inspiration from Waythed, combined with wanting to work a little again back in SyS KillMirror, led to me getting the inspiration back to finish the 0.4 update for SyS KillMirror, and later carrying it to make Waythed 2 during the summer.

[SO WHAT NOW?]
Now I have moved to new projects like Waythed 2 and its updates, and to focus on my main project SyS KillMirror. Even if I really despise this game now, it still helped me to learn more on how to make menus and make my 3D modelling skills better. I also made a final update for optimisation for more machines to be able to run it. If anyone wants to continue the project I can give them all the project and art files. I thank all my playtesters and people whoe helped me make the game, even if it was cancelled. Good day, and I hope people enjoy my other games.