Greetings, time loopers? Loopists? Loopologists?It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me! Hello Again has had a busy 6 months, full of lots of solid progress and exciting moments. But I’m here to announce a particularly exciting moment—we’re launching a new round of public playtesting!We’ll be running this round of testing for the rest of 2025 and probably the first chunk of 2026. This playtest will only cover the first chapter of the game, which we are currently preparing for public release as the game’s demo.
I spent the last 6 months wrestling Hello Again’s first chapter into a playable state. Here’s how it went!
When summer started, I had a hard deadline to have a playable demo ready for a festival in mid-October, meaning my summer was going to be a mad scramble to get everything ready for random strangers to play it on a festival expo floor. Me and my publishing partners at Tiny Dragon Games agreed it would be a worthy investment to bring on some friends to help speed up the work.First, we brought on an engineering contractor named Simon to help overhaul the game’s dialogue system. Simon was very knowledgeable, thorough, and great at documenting his work. He helped me transform the game’s stinky, disorganized, duck-taped-together dialogue codebase into a minty-fresh, organized, welded-together codebase. He even made a handful of performance improvements across the game for funsies! Simon has now moved on to whatever is next for him, but I’m very thankful for the time and expertise that he invested in the game.Second, I asked my good friend Agnes if she would be interested in lending her immense artistic talents to Hello Again as an art contractor. I specifically wanted to level up the characters’ dialogue poses, but feared that my lack of art training might grind progress to a near-halt as I tried and failed to position the characters’ shoulders, elbows, and hands into pleasing configurations. Agnes is one of those art genius types, so she swiftly created huge swaths of dialogue portraits featuring dynamic and expressive poses, all while preserving Hello Again’s distinct art style. Below are some of my favorites:Oh, and Agnes also created new key art for the game! Check it out on the Steam page (and/or at the very top of this post)!Last but not least, the game’s composer Michael Darling continues to do incredible work! He’s not new to the project by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s still delivering musical offerings that are blowing my mind on a weekly basis.
In case you weren’t aware, writing dialogue for a narrative video game is an exceptionally difficult task—especially if you want said writing to be funny, emotionally resonant, and not a steaming pile of tonal inconsistencies.As I rallied my courage to venture forth into the writing zone, my first big challenge was figuring out my game plan for each of the game’s characters. For each individual, I had a handful of goals:
This character has believable motivations, feelings, and flaws
This character has a distinct “voice”, and their dialogue is tonally consistent
This character’s personality meshes with the puzzles and plot elements connected to them
I feel comfortable churning out tons of dialogue for this character at a quick pace
Most importantly, it’s easy to write funny dialogue for this character
Before I dove headfirst into writing mode, I had already completed a handful of writing tests. As a result, some characters already had personalities and tones which I felt confident moving forward with, such as Gus the koala and Chauncey the cat. Others were well on their way to greatness, but felt like they needed some tweaking, such as Theodore the dog and Stew the goat. Then there was Beth the sheep and Oddo the automaton, both of whom I felt completely stumped about.After months of frustrating and tiring work, I called in a good friend (who writes comedy and video games for a living) to effectively ask, “hey man, is this anything?” To my surprise (and delight), my friend was enthusiastic about everything I’d written! This gave me the confidence I needed to keep moving forward. In the time since, I’ve been overjoyed to see early playtesters respond very positively to the different characters and the strange things which come out of their mouths.Man, I could write a whole blog post about dialogue alone. Maybe I’ll do that sometime. It’s been a real journey.
In 2025 Hello Again was accepted into two in-person festivals, both slated for fall: SXSW Sydney (in Sydney, Australia) and MDEV (in Madison, Wisconsin). Both of these were showfloor-style events where random people could walk up and play a demo of the game. Shows like this don’t necessarily generate a ton of direct traction in regard to wishlists and publicity, but they’re extremely fun and help to supercharge the game’s word-of-mouth engine. In fact, some of you reading this might be folks that I chatted with at MDEV (omg hiiii)!Sean, one of Hello Again’s publishing partners at Tiny Dragon Games, bravely volunteered to man the booth at SXSW Sydney, since he was already in Australia for cool, important business reasons. I’m told that the game’s two-day visit “down under” went really well!Meanwhile, myself and composer Michael Darling hosted the booth at MDEV. It was a great event with pristine vibes. Shoutout to all the cool devs I met on the showfloor! Including my table neighbors who very generously let me borrow a power strip (wishlist their game Ivor)!
This post barely scratches the surface of all that I’ve done over the last few months. Suffice it to say, I’m very tired, more than a bit burned out, and ready for a long nap. But my love and excitement for Hello Again propels me forward! Stay tuned in the Discord for more updates big and small.Stay loopy,
Dwight :)