The first instalment of Skyward Sanctuary was the German-language Haus im Himmel, created for the deadline-free week-long Week Sauce jam on Itch.io. It took not quite twenty hours to finish the 15k+ words of this kid-oriented adventure. It was my first venture into several things: a) doing a jam all by myself—for lack of programming skills, I had to limit myself, but words are always available, so I focused on the narrative and chose to create a text adventure; and b) I used Twine for the first time. While it is often cited for branching narrative and used in many text-based games, its status as a game engine is debatable, in that it has a few challenges incorporating other media etc. With my focus on the story, I chose to leave out any and all programming logic and only use links to different passages instead of asking if someone had been here or there, or has this or that in their inventory. And it worked with this particular story: the only hiccup was having to copy a small branch where players may choose to get deco from two different NPCs, and may choose both as well. To avoid going in circles, I then attached the first branch to the end of the second and the second to the end of the first branch. It was certainly not the elegant solution, but it worked, and got my game done in the given timeframe.

But I wanted to give it some polish. I believe that it's a good exercise to maximise our efforts and treat even small projects respectfully, so I aimed at releasing an English-language version, with proper logic programmed into it. The logic was easy; I didn't need much, just some conditions (did you get Julia's deco yet? Do you even have a tree to build a treehouse in?) and some alternate answers in those cases. The translation, however, had a special challenge. I wanted to write a story that sees things from a child's perspective. Not as a raucous rulebreaker, timid nerd, or any of the clichés child characters are often pressed into. Something down to earth instead, understanding the thoughts kids have and how adults seem to them. This made my main inspirations the unforgettable Moomin books, as well as books I read as a kid myself, by Christine Nöstlinger, an Austrian author born in the 1930s who wrote many short stories close to my heart, about children's views I found highly relatable despite the difference in age. Since I never met a five-syllable word I didn't like, restraining myself took some effort. I know few children to begin with, and none of them are native English speakers, so I had little idea what words and expressions they would know at an age around ten years old. But there was nothing for it, and I did the best I could to check. For the German correction, I was lucky enough to find Lea on the Discord server for my state's game dev community, who braved my many left-out commas.

Between the correction of one and creation of the other language part, I also drew and painted the two title images for both languages. There are definite perks to being an artist turned game dev. I tried streaming on Twitch, which would've been my first time there. But being a noob, I missed having to set the checkbox to record, so it was live without viewers—I had not told anyone about going live to get a grip on the anxiety about it—so it was just gone.

And then finally, release day came! As such things go, it was set on Tuesday, Nov 12, and on Monday, I finally figured out how to set up the language choice screen the way I wanted it. As long as it's done in time, right? Because of the timeline, there was near zero time for "marketing," such as a free-to-play embedded browser game can even use. This was part of my plan for a proper release though, to ease into the whole shebang of tagging, showing, gif'ing, and choosing what to show off.

And now what? Any plans for Skyward Sanctuary, Part 2? Not yet. In the adventure, I give a hint to another game I did a few weeks prior to Skyward Sanctuary, roughly placing both in the same world. I have no concrete plans for its development, but when I long for a game world where not everything is gloom and loss, I think I may find myself back here to expand the neighborhood. I'm happy about any sort of feedback or comment. Did you like the story? Did you find typos?