Hi everyone, it’s been a long time—over half a decade, in fact. I wanted to take a moment to talk openly about Project Reset: where it came from, why it ended up the way it did, and everything in between. I made a post like this back in 2019, but after recently taking another look at the game, I thought it was worth writing a new, more detailed retrospective.
I started developing this game when I was 13 years old. Obviously, it was my first project ever, and after playing DDLC, I wanted to make something like it and put it on Steam. I didn’t really intend for it to be as derivative as it is, but that’s how it turned out. When people pointed this out in reviews, along with other issues, I didn’t take the criticism very well. At the time, it was hard for me to accept that the game was a little too inspired and, frankly, not very good. The co-writer and I responded to a lot of reviews—sometimes poorly—and even left reviews of the game ourselves. On one review, there was a 36-comment-long argument between us and the reviewer. The only archive of this is limited to the last 10 comments, and I honestly don’t remember exactly what happened either. But looking back, it was unhinged.
At some point in that thread, the co-writer made a vague threat of a lawsuit. (He was young too, like me, and neither of us really understood how bad of a response that was.) Once that was pointed out by another reviewer and by a friend who was older and more level-headed, I made a post saying I’d removed the co-writer from the team (even though I didn’t). I also messaged him about the review he left, but told him to keep it up. That probably sounds strange, but at the time it felt like an easy out. The game was already getting negative reviews, and I was worried something might happen to the store page because things went too far. By that point, everything surrounding the game felt like it was going wrong. The composer I hired canceled. The co-writer and his friends thought it’d be funny to ban everyone from the game’s Discord server as a “joke", and I had to rebuild the entire community from scratch just three months before launch. The art kept getting delayed and barely made the deadline. It felt like one problem after another, and I didn’t need more trouble once the game was finally out. Of course, with hindsight, I know that was just another poor decision in a pile of them.
After that, I posted a few more updates including the first retrospective I mentioned earlier, but by then, I mostly found the game embarrassing. I’d come back every once in a while to read new reviews, and eventually, I decided to take it down completely so no one else could play it.
But today, I’m not embarrassed by it anymore. No, it’s not a great game. No, it’s not surrounded by the best publicity. But it’s a part of my history. It’s something I look back on as a valuable lesson in what not to do—and as a reminder that, even at 13 years old, I made something. Despite all the pitfalls, I still find it kind of admirable that I actually finished it. That’s what drives me to keep working on future projects and bigger goals.
If you’re here because you played it, thank you. If you left a review, even a negative one, thank you for taking the time. And to the people who made videos about the game, thank you as well.
- Daniel