Alex's Journey to the Grave

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• Announcements·15 Sept 2026Official

  Act 2 Playtest + Move Your Everything!!

  Hello everyone, Duhop here! Since the last devlog, my remaining few weeks of July and almost all of August were dedicated to one, singular task; making Act 2 look amazing. I'm happy to say that a full round of visual polish is now finished, and that playtesting for Act 2 has officially begun! If you're interested in participating, head over to our Discord and check out #playtesting for instructions on how to join :D Now, for today's topic 😎 Move Your Everything!! If you're a long-time reader, you might remember another devlog about visual scripting from last October titled Move Your Sprites!. I thought I was cooking at the time, but some of what I've learned over the last month or so has pretty much completely eclipsed the methods I was using back then. You can go back and take a look a look at that previous devlog for the basics, but herein lies some of the biggest lessons I've learned and improvements I've made since then, and why finishing the scripting for Act 2 took me so much longer than I expected 😅 Let's start with the flashy stuff, shall we? Think cinematically. Move the camera, not just the sprites! When I originally started on the visual scripting for Act 2, I wasn't even calling it that. At the time, it was just "sprite scripting" to me. But now, my third eye has been opened! Instead of focusing solely on the visuals sprites in a scene, you get a far better end result if you try to think about the visual direction of the scene as a whole. After all, how can you make something truly cinematic if you don't think about the camera?! Case in point, here's a direct comparison of how Jenna's initial introduction looked before and after my most recent round of visual scripting for Act 2: Before: https://i.imgur.com/en3hD6q.mp4 After: https://i.imgur.com/AVv5pvQ.mp4 Big difference, right? Which version do you like better? I chose the latter, obviously, and much of my recent visual polish work went toward more creative experimentation with similar background and c...
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• Announcements·15 Jul 2026Official

  The Boy Is Back in Town

  Hi all, Duhop here! My July started off with a trip for a lovely family wedding, which of course just had to leave me sick for another whole week afterward -_- In sharp contrast to that, however, I'm just now starting to realize that June might genuinely be the best month we've ever had in development of Alex's Journey to the Grave. So here's what we got done: I wrote almost the entirety of Act 3. If you're curious, the previous devlog was actually about my experience re-editing Act 2, and finally finding peace with it. Coming into the start of June, I had just finished that, and I decided to delay the visual scripting work needed to polish it for release so I could continue writing while the iron was hot. At the time, Act 3 was a patchwork of a few disconnected scenes I'd sort of just plugged away at over the past couple years(!). There were huge gaps, and I needed to do a lot of writing to fill them in. Did I do that? Fuck no! Obviously, I just completely restructured and wrote/rewrote nearly the entire thing in one go instead. How long have I been working on this game again...? My trip interrupted me before I could finish the final two scenes, but I'm currently making short work of them. I'm finally at a point where I can tell just how much my writing practice has paid off, and I'm feeling great about it. We worked on the most complicated CG in the game. You might recognize this one from an extremely early sketch I used for a devlog in... *checks notes* oh god... May of 2025, when we first laid it out so our background artists could start working on the background for it. After a whole lot of other character art in the mean time, we've finally gotten around to that part. Here's how it's looking now: Yes, the boy is back in town! This is, in fact, the first time we've made proper art of male Alex since Fall of 2024 (😭). We'll be seeing a whole lot more of him from now on though, since this means our art progress has reached the turning point in Act 3 where the pla...
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• Announcements·2 Jun 2026Official

  Tragedy, The Writer's Anxiety

  Unique and witty greeting from Duhop, person reading! Today, I want to talk about a fundamental question that I took far too long to ask myself, and even longer to find an answer for. What is the point of Alex's Journey to the Grave? If it's supposed to be a realistic depiction of clinical mental health issues, why do Alex and Alex have such clear and valid reasons for the anguish that they suffer? I think it would be easy to assume that the depression in the game is meant to be a depiction of the type that is clearly justified by tragedy or circumstance. Relating to it in that way is still completely valid and intended, but that's not actually the primary goal. Alex's Journey to The Grave is an exaggerated reflection of my own mental health struggles as a teen, and those mental health struggles were not clearly "justified" by anything. From the start, I've always intended to relate to those who have experienced the same. I know that depression without clear reason can be a strong catalyst for self-hatred, and I believe that seeing characters depressed only when they have a good reason for it has the potential to amplify that further. So then why did I write about abuse? Why did I write about betrayal and rejection? Why did I write about illness? Why did I write about tragedy? Why did I write about tragedy? ... Why else would anyone care? How else would I make compelling the hidden psychology behind their so very internal afflictions? Two broken people fall in love, and slowly help each other piece their minds back together through supportive actions, deep conversations, and lots of self-reflection (or fail in the process). Yes, all of that does happen within the story of Alex's Journey to the Grave. But what if that was it? What if every single conflict in the story came up and was resolved through internal thoughts and conversations? Maybe there is some way to make that interesting, but I don't think it'd ever be even close to as compelling as the real thing has g...
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• Announcements·6 Apr 2026Official

  No Editor? (No) Problem!

  Hello all! Duhop here, back again with a devlog for March. This month, me and the team have been hard at work on artwork, visual scripting, asset planning, and editing for Alex's Journey to the Grave. Not all of the work has been for Act 2 specifically (we're quite ahead on background art, excitedly!), but we're still grinding hard to catch up and get it playtest-ready soon! (Game devs often say the last 20% of polish takes 80% of the effort, and right now I'm definitely feeling that 😅) Most recently for myself, I've been spending my time on a deep-dive editing pass for Act 2. I know player feedback could prompt further, possibly large-scale changes, but there were just too many points in the script I still had personal unresolved issues with. Anyway, there's a lot I have to say about the process, so let me get right into it. Editing Is Writing As a preface; I don't actually know exactly where the technical definitions of writer and editor end or start, and I'm sure that a lot of what I refer to as "editing" is work that would typically be handed back to the writer after feedback from their editor. The line is so blurry, though, I imagine it's tough to draw clearly or consistently even in the most professional of settings. For the purposes of this devlog, my personal definition of "editing" is as follows: The process of correcting, rewording, reworking, rewriting, or making interpolated additions to existing text. Now, even with a definition that broad, you might still assume that editing is easier than writing because it's iterative, rather than original. However, that would probably stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of why editors even exist in the first place. You see, writing is not necessarily editing, but editing is, in fact, writing. And what does an editor write, exactly? Well, of course, the most difficult sections in the text; the parts the writer struggled with the most! They say nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution, but in writing, ...
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• Announcements·14 Mar 2026Official

  Goblin Relations

  Greetings all persons, the writings of Duhop are hither! February was a dreary, unpleasant month to live in my city, and mostly uneventful when it came to the development of Alex's Journey to the Grave as well. My own efforts consisted almost entirely of a grind to finish the editing and scripting needed to proceed with our upcoming rounds of playtesting, while a great deal of our art progress (and the posting of this devlog) was thrown into disarray by frustrating worldly circumstance after frustrating worldly circumstance. Despite the predictably nasty weather, however, one event this past month made me seriously reconsider my stance on the RNG I've endured to wind up living in Winnipeg. I've talked about the Winnipeg Game Collective and their yearly Winnipeg Game Jam in a previous devlog already, but to recap; WGC is a volunteer-run community group that aims to united both the casual and professional game dev community in Winnipeg, and PegJam is a friendly 3-day long event that brings them all together for the simple purpose of creating some cool-ass games. Last year, I joined an existing group, and helped work on a cute little 2D action game called Zlorp Life. It was fun, but with my contributions limited to design, writing, and lore in such a gameplay-focused genre, I never really felt like I was truly in my element. As far as I could tell, though, nobody else had ever worked with Ren'Py or even made a VN for PegJam at any point before. The entire time I was participating in the jam last year, I was thinking about it. Even so, when this year's PegJam came around, I wasn't even sure if I had it in me to participate. The options I gave myself were either to not participate at all, or to go all out and try my best to create a visual-novel-producing dream team for the jam ahead of time. Now introducing Pistachio Pink-Slip! A short visual novel where you play as the big boss grilling a certain trouble-making goblin girl about her various office antics. Suffice to sa...
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