Hi. I'm Lili, also known as evelili, or eve-lili, or evil-lili, or "the person who wrote that critically acclaimed horse girl fanfiction The Twilight Effect". Take your pick. But please: don't call me Eve.

Now, unfortunately for everyone, I am a writer before I am an artist. Yapping runs in my blood. Character limits and restrictive formatting options have historically protected you from my unfiltered ramblings on other platforms, but here?

This is my house. You're free to leave at any time.

What to expect from this blog

Project retrospectives, creative updates, tutorials if I learn things that I think other people should learn too, and devlogs.

Oh, yeah. Devlogs. I've vagueposted about it before, but to finally put it into public words: I am making a video game called End of Elysium.

My silence on the matter was part preference, part necessity, and part I-don't-have-the-time. For context, I've spent the last four years juggling, in some particular order:

...all on top of working on EoE.

"Lili," I hear you ask, "what the hell?"

Look, I promise I don't hate myself. I just think there is something uniquely wrong with me, in that I fully believe I am capable of doing anything I put my mind to. So, if I want to do a master's degree, or publish a paper, or make a video game, I just do it. The only limitation I have is time.

By the way, do you want to know how much time I was losing to social media?

A tangent on time

I was not a standard user. I did not use "recommended" or "trending" feeds at all. I would only read posts from newest to oldest until I hit posts I'd already read, and then close the app. I was already spending far less time on social media than my peers.

I was losing at least four hours every single day.

But it was just an hour or so on the train to work. It was just half an hour over lunch. It was just 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there, replying to a comment here, and reblogging a post there. And a few hours to catch up with things before bed? That's normal! Everyone does it!

Do you know how much you can do in four hours?

Do you know how many days your year gains simply by taking back the time that's rightfully yours?

(60 and change, if you care. I now have two more months of time in my years than my past self—1460 more hours to spend as I wish.)

You don't realize how exhausting it is until you're out of it. And sure, I miss the good parts of it. I miss sharing the things I make. I miss sharing other people's creations. I miss what social media used to be so, so badly. I wish things hadn't changed. But as things stand, the cons outweigh the pros. I'm much happier limiting my time on the internet to direct messages, voice calls, and the depths of Unity's terribly structured forums.

Yeah. Unity. I'll take those condolences now, please and thanks.

Game development takes time (and also sucks)

I'm a solo dev with an invisible asterisk next to it, in that I have many kind friends who have playtested and given feedback and even helped me with research and references and solutions to my suffering, but at the end of the day everything in EoE so far has been made with my own two hands.

(With a second invisible asterisk about game engines, asset packs, creative software, blah blah blah. That's what credits are for.)

Of the past four years, I'd say EoE has spent two on the back burner and two on the front burner. The first version of its prologue took about 48 hours, all the way back in April 2022. But, after a few months working on it more off than on, I restarted development in February 2024 because of little reasons like "tech debt" and "personal growth".

Then, after many prototypes and playtests and rewrites of the same damn story over and over again, the prologue was in a stable state with placeholder assets in March 2025. I only just wrapped the final version of the prologue July 2026.

In other words: it took me 1 year to go from 0% to 95%. It took me 1.5 years to go from 95% to 100%.

Granted, a lot of that effort was an investment into the game's future. If, hypothetically, I spent weeks agonizing over the 8 incredibly detailed backgrounds used in the prologue, I now get to reuse those backgrounds for the rest of the game. It's the same with the character sprites, and the music, and the sound effects, and the UI, and wow it's starting to sound like making the prologue of a game is about as much work as making the actual game. Who knew!

But yeah. The prologue's wrapped, somehow. No, you can't play it yet. It's too risky to share a small part of a story-based game that, based on how long the prologue took, won't be ready for release until 2032 at the earliest. That's both from a marketing standpoint and from a narrative one. Trust me on this.

However, I'm optimistic that things will start to move more quickly once I get all the systems I need in place. I've probably spent more time this past year fighting Unity than actually writing code. But my art workflows are pretty much set, my project management board is slightly less insane, I've begrudgingly accepted that transparent pixels still take up uncompressed space, Unity only crashes my whole computer from the main menu instead of from every scene, and now that the demo's done I never have to lose my mind about audio in WebGL ever again!

Surprisingly, the biggest hurdle is going to be the story.

For comparison: The Twilight Effect is 112k words. 30k of those words are in the epilogue, which, while it is magnificent and absolutely my favourite part of the story, is technically not part of the primary narrative. But even if you exclude the epilogue (which I don't), it is still the best and longest story I've ever written. My current magnum opus, if you will.

The outline for the rest of End of Elysium—excluding the prologue—is 150k words.

In bullet points.

It's a very, very good outline. It will be the best and longest story I will write. My future magnum opus, if you will.

I just need a little more time to write it.