march 23, 2026

entering the final week of the jam. a lot has been achieved already, but there's still more to do, as always.

today I actually didn't work on NNW (Not Nev's World) at all, and instead spent the day working on a different project: a website for a client. it felt good to make progress on something else entirely, and I'm sure it'll help with dev speed in the near future. i wanted to take a moment to write my thoughts about NNW so far.

at this point, I'm not even sure about actually submitting NNW to the jam, which is a weird realisation. I've weighed up the pros and cons... I think the main reason is that I don't want the concept or core idea of the game to be seen by others and potentially copied. That sounds really paranoid, but after showing this game to a few people, everyone really enjoys the game and they also seem to struggle to think of other games that are similar. one that keeps coming up is Plague Inc., but it's also so different from that title in many ways too. if I'm sitting on a unique concept, I really can't afford to squabble the opportunity that comes with that!

what would I even gain from submitting it to the jam? some nonchalant comments from other like-minded devs. a public record of my submission on my itch profile... what else? the jam doesn't even have any 'winner' title or ranking system. there will apparently be a "curated House Horror bundle" at the end of the jam, which you have to submit to separately, and inclusion is not guaranteed.

the jam details describe going all out on 18+ explicit horror as well, and NNW doesn't really go hard on that aspect, so it almost feels like it won't fit in well with the other submissions, and makes being included in the "curated" bundle more unlikely.

I originally intended to continue development after the jam, since I knew that I wouldn't get everything done in time, so that's fine with me. Right now it feels like there's maybe another month or two's worth of work left before it's really ready to be sort of shipped properly, and I've been thinking that jumping in at the deep end by selling it on Steam would be the right way to go...

maybe it'll be a while longer than that even, I'll do some other projects at the same time, and I could end up releasing NNW around Halloween this year...

once Nev is out the bag, there's no stopping him

written by rubinbizarre