//Happy April Fools, I Guess

Hi. I'm Nexo, and this site is finally live.

It is currently 4am. I have not slept. This is fine.

The date is April 2nd, which means yesterday was April Fools' Day, which means launching something sincere a day after the one day of the year where literally nothing is allowed to be sincere is peak scheduling. I counted, and this is about the third time I've "launched" something only to immediately abandon it, so the smart money is probably on this also becoming a decaying tab I stop checking in two weeks. But I genuinely think this time is different, partly because the stakes are higher now, and partly because I stayed up until 4am to write a blog post about it, which at minimum shows a completely irrational level of commitment.

Anyway. Here's the thing.

▸What This Site Actually Is

At the simplest level, this is a personal hub for my projects.

The anchor project is nu-Eden — a game I've been designing, building, scrapping, redesigning, and arguing with myself about for the better part of five or six years, depending on what you count as "starting." But the site isn't only the game. It's everything the game ate on the way to not existing yet: the worldbuilding, the interface language, the design system, the language experiments, the mechanical documentation, the prototype shell, the development logs, and the adjacent projects that grew out of the same obsession and became real things in their own right.

Right now that includes:

• ▪The Codex — an in-world database covering characters, weapons, locations, factions, systems, lore, and the full bestiary. It's being built out incrementally. Not complete, and won't be for a while.
• ▪The GDD — the Game Design Document, which covers story, systems, world design, mechanics, technical architecture, and production rationale. Several sections exist. Several are stubs. The intent is for this to become a functional design reference, not just a pitch deck.
• ▪The Pitch — the cleaned-up version of the above, for people who want the high-level read without committing to the full thing.
• ▪Ruko — a statically-typed, compiled programming language I designed as part of the game's internal world. It has a grammar spec, a syntax reference, code examples, and a working theme highlighter. I may or may not finish implementing it. The design itself is mostly done.
• ▪The nu-Engine — documentation for the custom engine context that lives behind the prototype. This is mostly in progress and will surface when the docs are less embarrassing.
• ▪The Edenian Language — a constructed language built for the nu-Eden universe. Has a phonology, a writing system, and is currently going through major revisions. Currently being developed as a submission for a conlang competition I probably won't place in, but whatever.
• ▪The Gallery — concept art, visual references, UI mockups, design direction. Exists. Needs populating.
• ▪This devlog — where I write things like this, at 4am, instead of sleeping.

The goal is for all of this to eventually slot together into a coherent body of work that a person can actually navigate without needing me to personally explain what they're looking at. It's not there yet. But this is the first time it lives somewhere public instead of rotting across three hard drives and eleven partially-synced cloud folders.

▸The Part Where I Explain Why This Took So Long

I'll be honest. This should have existed two years ago.

The reason it didn't is embarrassing but pretty simple: I spent a long time trying to take a path that seemed more respectable, failed at it in very specific and public ways, and then had to figure out what the fallback was.

The original plan, inasmuch as I had one, was computer science. That was the path that made sense on paper. I was decent with code in high school, I could build things, and everyone I knew who wanted to make games took CS first and figured out the game part later. My parents were on board with it. It checked the boxes for a "real career." Engineering was adjacent enough that I thought if I absorbed enough technical knowledge I could eventually bridge into game design from a position of credibility. Or at minimum not get laughed out of rooms.

What I didn't fully account for was that I would sit down in an engineering calculus lecture on week two, look at a differential equation, and have the visceral physical experience of my brain simply refusing to do the thing. I failed engineering calculus. Then I took it again. Failed engineering calculus again. Then I failed classical mechanics, which is apparently what happens to you after you fail engineering calculus twice, because the universe has a sense of comedic timing. Then the university, having been patient enough, put me on a forced leave of absence while politely suggesting I reconsider my life choices.

So I did that. Left. Took the leave. The usual.

I don't actually regret it anymore. I did for a while. There's a specific kind of grief that comes from failing hard at something you were never meant to be good at but tried anyway because it seemed like the safer choice, and I sat with that grief for longer than I'd like to admit. But it forced the question I'd been avoiding: if I'm not going to survive in this lane, what is the actual lane?

The game project survived every attempt I made to shelve it. Filed it as "not a real career path." Returned to it. Filed it again. Returned again. Wrote 400 pages of lore. Filed it again. Wrote 200 more pages. Left them in a folder. Kept returning.

Eventually I ran out of convincing reasons to keep ignoring it.

▸The Interview Part

Part of why the site exists now specifically is that I'm applying to a game design program.

I'd been circling around this for a while, but actually applying meant I needed to put together something coherent that demonstrated what I've been doing. Not just "I have a game idea." More like: here is the systems thinking, here is the worldbuilding framework, here is the interface language, here is what I've been making with my time instead of studying the things I was supposed to be studying. Here is the body of work. Here is that it's real and took time and has actual depth to it.

A pitch deck alone wasn't going to do that. The GDD was too dense for a first read. What I needed was a place that could function as a portfolio and an archive at the same time, organized well enough that someone could find what they wanted without needing a guided tour.

That's this site.

If you're reading this as part of an application review: hello. Thank you for getting this far. The rest of the site is meant to do the explaining, so please feel free to look around. The codex and GDD are the most complete sections. The prototype and gallery sections are in progress.

If you're reading this because you somehow found it on your own and have no idea who I am: welcome. I'm a person who spent too many years failing engineering to prove a point to himself and came out the other side with a game design document, a conlang, a custom programming language, and apparently a website. Make of that what you will.

▸Why I'm Not On Social Media

This site is also, partly, why I've been absent from social media for the past however-long. And also the reason why I post so little about the project in general and just post stuff I listen to on Spotify instead.

The extremely unflattering answer is that every time I tried to post about what I was working on, I ran into the problem that nothing was finished enough to show, everything required four paragraphs of context before a screenshot made sense, and the format of every platform I tried was completely hostile to the kind of work I was actually doing. I don't make content. I make a large, convoluted, interconnected game design project that is currently in its "still a mess, please stop looking directly at it" phase.

The solution I kept defaulting to was to not post at all and instead write increasingly long documents that nobody else read.

This site is more or less that instinct taken to its logical endpoint. It's a place designed for the kind of work I actually make, in a format that can handle the complexity, run at whatever depth someone wants, and not punish me for writing 8000 words about a train station in a fictional dystopian city.

Social media will probably come back when there's actually something to point at. For now, this is the thing I'm pointing at.

▸What's Actually Being Built Here

Since I mentioned the TODO list is extensive, here's an honest accounting of what's in progress and what's not:

The interactive map is the big one. The world is built around a metro system: five wards, ten lines, 208 stations across three vertical layers of the city (Cloud, Stacks, Heap), with Skylift connections between layers for select stations. The map is supposed to be interactive and navigable, with lore entries per station, dynamic overlays, and faction control indicators. The infrastructure for this is mostly in place. The content is not.

The codex is partially live. Operatives, weapons, bestiary entries, mechanics, items, and consumables all have data structures and template pages. Some are filled in. Many are stubs. The plan is to migrate everything across progressively as the GDD sections get cleaned up, rather than trying to do it all at once and shipping nothing.

The prototype section is the closest thing to a playable vertical slice, though "playable" is generous. It demonstrates the interface language, navigation system, and some of the world-space interaction. It's there. It works. It's currently not linked from the main nav conspicuously because I'm still deciding what state I want it to be in before I point people at it.

The Ruko language and Edenian language sections are the most complete things on the site in terms of documenting something fully. They're also both deeply niche and probably only interesting if you are the specific type of person who looks at a conlang grammar spec and thinks "I want to read all of this." I am that person. Maybe you are too.

I'm not going to give a timeline for any of this because the last time I gave myself a timeline for this project, I failed engineering calculus, which I maintain is unrelated but is unfortunately how time works.

▸The Cleaned-Up Version of How I Got Here

In case the above was too much:

• ▪Wanted to make games. Convinced myself CS/engineering was the sensible way in.
• ▪Failed engineering calculus. Failed it again. Failed classical mechanics.
• ▪Got put on forced leave from university.
• ▪Had too much time and too few excuses and kept working on the project anyway.
• ▪Applied to a game design program. Needed a thing to submit.
• ▪Built the thing.
• ▪It is currently 4am and that thing is this website.

▸What Comes Next

Now that the site actually exists, the goal is to keep building it out without treating every page like it has to be finished before it can be visible. The codex will grow. The GDD will get more sections filled in. The devlog will keep going. I'll write more entries like this one, probably at equally unreasonable hours.

The next devlog entry will actually be about the game itself, since this one deliberately wasn't. There's a lot to cover.

For now: this is the marker. The site is live. The work is visible. Happy April 2nd, or April Fools Plus One, or whatever this day is supposed to be.

— Nexo