Two weeks ago I stopped adding things to Legend of the Ultimate Dragon.
Not forever. Just until someone who isn't me has played it. Getting to where I could say that took a while, though, so let me back up.
This game has been around in some form for a few years. Notes, ideas, a version of it in my head that I'd pick up and set down. It didn't really start until the beginning of this year, when I sat down and started making actual decisions. What the town is. Who lives in it. What thirty days should feel like.
From January on, it was serious work. Then around the end of March I stopped treating it like a side project and started pushing, and since then it's been eighty hours a week or more, weekends included. Late nights, early mornings. If you've ever worked the week before a big deadline, it's been that, except the deadline never came, so every week was that week.
If you're wondering why this is only devlog number seven when I'm this far in, honestly, I didn't even think about doing devlogs before July. And I didn't really know what to share until I had some concrete things put down.
I'm not telling you any of this so it sounds impressive. I'm telling you because a couple of weeks ago I looked up and the thing was built.
So I sat down and took a long, honest look at everything that's there. Every place, every person, every scene, and what's still on paper. The question I went in with was the obvious one: is there enough game here?
The answer turned out to be yes. And once it was yes, the next question was a lot harder, because I can't answer it myself. Does anyone else play it the way I think they will? Do they find the things I hid? Do they move through thirty days at the pace I built them for, or do they rush it, or stall halfway? Do they care enough to see it through?
I can't find that out by building more. Every new scene I add is one more thing nobody has tested, and one more thing a tester's opinion has to get past. So I drew a line.
There are about twenty-five scenes that are written and not built. Good ones, some of them. They're on the shelf. They aren't a to-do list anymore. If testers come back wanting more of something, I know exactly where to look. If they don't, those scenes stay where they are, and that's an answer too.
What I'm allowed to do now is a much shorter list. Check that what's built works. Fix things that are actually broken. And clean up anything that would get in the way of what a tester tells me.
That last one matters more than it sounds. If a tester tells me a scene felt off, I want it to be because the scene is off. Not because a typo knocked them out of it, or a line showed up at the wrong time of day.
That second one is a real example. I was playing through the tavern one morning, and the barkeep greeted me with a line about the cold night. At breakfast. Nobody would write in a report that the timing of one greeting was wrong. They'd just come away feeling the town was a little fake, and I'd never know why. Lines that mention the time of day now wait until it's true.
Another one: every quote mark in the dialogue was facing the same way. The font was drawing the opening ones backwards. You'd read past it and never think about it, but it makes the whole thing look a bit off, and "a bit off" is exactly the feedback I can't use. That's fixed. The asterisks around actions are staying, though. That's how we marked an action in the BBS games I grew up on, and I like it.
So most of my hours right now go to walking the game. I go through it scene by scene with a sheet next to me, and each scene has a button that drops me straight into it with everything set up the way it would be if I'd played there. I read it, I check it against the sheet, I write down what's wrong. Then it gets fixed and comes off the list.
It's slower than building. It's also the first time all year the list gets shorter instead of longer, and I'll admit that feels good.
When the walking's done, the game goes out to outside players. The first wave plays the opening of the game. The second goes further. Each copy keeps a small record as they play: how many fights they took in a day, when they got strong, where they put it down. Nothing gets sent anywhere on its own. When I ask, they send me the report, and I'll know where people stall without anybody having to explain it to me.
Which is where you come in, if you'd like to.
I'm looking for a handful of people to be among the first outside my house to play it. It's free, it's on Windows, and all I ask is that you play it the way you'd play anything else and send me that report when I ask for it. If that sounds like you, leave a comment on the game's itch.io page, or find me on Bluesky. I can't take everyone, but I'll answer everyone.
It's a strange thing, working this hard on a game for most of a year and then deliberately not making more of it. But this is the point I was working toward the whole time, even before I knew it: a game that's finished enough to find out whether it works. Now I get to find out.
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