In the past few days, I finished putting together the milestone and achievement system, and then moved straight into writing the achievement tasks that go with it. By a rough estimate, there will probably be around a hundred or so of them in total.
Milestones in a blog's life
With the story elements already in the game, along with the many stats and attributes tied to it, there is actually quite a lot that can be turned into achievement milestones. It feels similar to real blogging: whenever you reach some small breakthrough, there is always that little spark of excitement.
Some experiences are shared by almost every blog, while others are completely personal. Some pass by lightly and disappear like they were carried off by the wind, while others stay vivid for years.
Even now, I still remember the time when a blog I had written in Django developed a vulnerability and the entire server disk ended up filled with obscene gambling ads. What made it worse was that I did not notice it for quite a long time. I also remember very clearly how hard it was to rewrite and restructure the blog program. In the age of AI, people may never really feel that particular kind of suffering anymore—the kind that came from writing code with no assistance at all.
Those memories are exactly the sort of thing that makes a milestone system feel meaningful in this game. A blog does not need grand, world-shaking events to leave a mark. Sometimes the memorable moments are technical disasters, long rewrites, or tiny victories that only the person behind the site truly understands.
Thinking about the main storyline
For the last few days, I have also been constantly turning the game's main plot over in my head, but nothing especially fresh has emerged. A normal person's blog life feels more like a quiet stream, flowing steadily toward the vast sea of the internet, without much dramatic turbulence along the way.
Maybe an ordinary life is like that too. Still, everyone has their own brief moments of brilliance, even if they pass quickly.
A winding, exciting story is genuinely hard to create. Literary writing is not my strongest skill, after all. I may end up leaning on AI for help, although AI can be underwhelming sometimes as well.
Keeping the project moving
After each update, I find myself needing to encourage myself a little, mostly because I worry that one day I might give up on making this game. At the moment, though, development is already past the halfway point, and I do not currently feel like abandoning it. Of course, I hope that thought never really takes hold.
So for now, the work continues: the achievement framework is in place, the task writing is underway, and the game keeps moving forward bit by bit.