Development history

I'm Fern, and I've been building Bring Me Hope by myself for about seven years now: every sprite, every song, every line of writing and code, all of it in GameMaker.

I started it in mid-2019 under the name Bring Me Purpose and entered it into the Decade Jam, which bills itself as the world's first ten-year-long game jam. It runs from 2019 to 2029, and there's a countdown to that deadline still ticking away over on my site. So yes, I gave myself ten years to make one game. I'm aware of how that sounds.

What follows is the story of how it's come together so far, year by year. Fair warning: it's mostly a story about scope, about emotion, and about a lil artist fella (me) who keeps biting off far more than he can chew and then, somehow, chewing it anyway.

Where things stand (mid-2026): ~7 years in, 2,000-plus commits, one very tired developer doing every single job, and a finish line waiting for me in 2029.

Origins (2019 to 2020)

I started Bring Me Purpose in mid-2019 because I wanted to make a game that expressed every single emotion I'd felt over the past 28 years of my life. That was the whole pitch, honestly. The decade-long jam gave that feeling somewhere to live: a finish line far enough away that I could actually try to build something big.

The first stretch was rough. I began my transition in 2020, which was an enormous and necessary and completely exhausting thing to go through, and development limped along unevenly while the rest of my life rearranged itself. It found firmer ground the year after.

2021: Building the skeleton

In early 2021 I moved the project into the repo it still lives in today, and renamed it along the way. This was the year of unglamorous plumbing: inventory, menus, the interface, resolution handling. None of it is the kind of thing you put in a trailer, but it's the skeleton everything since has hung off of, so I'll take it.

2022: It starts to look like itself

2022 is when the game finally started to look like itself. I built the Sea City tilesets, redrew all of Alium's animations (Alium being our protagonist), and designed the Frosted Caves with a hidden boss tucked inside. April was, no exaggeration, the most productive month of my life. It lined up with me moving toward living and working on my own terms. I also caught COVID earlier that year, which knocked me flat for a while, but the momentum somehow survived it.

Then September handed me my first proper marquee boss: Guppo, a cursed knight. He showed up alongside new bloom and motion-blur shaders and a little hitbox-debugging tool I built mostly to keep myself sane. My devlog that month landed on a line I've come back to ever since: creative work on large projects is a marathon, not a sprint. The commit history agrees with me; mid-2022 slows right down as a day job started eating my hours. Underneath all of it sat a belief I still hold onto: converting emotions into an experience is a skill, and you have to practice it regularly.

2023: Systems, story, and streaming

2023 was the year I turned a pile of pretty scenes into something with actual structure. Early on I tore up the lighting (moving from additive to normal blending with tone mapping and a touch of over-exposure) and wrote myself a set of visual-hierarchy rules so the world would read clearly at a glance instead of turning into soup.

By spring I'd rebuilt the old cutscene code into a real quest framework of conditions and actions, and I finally sat down and formalized the story (which up to that point had mostly lived inside my head) in Obsidian. This is also the moment I could no longer pretend the scope was reasonable; my May devlog was titled, with great feeling, A Story About A Game That's Too Big All Of The Time.

The back half of the year was a lot at once: a big Frosted Caves expansion (level-gated, four mini-bosses, unique items), the elemental interaction system that still runs fire, ice, and oil today, an experimental parry, and a redesigned main menu. It's also the year I started streaming nearly every day. I'd just been through a lot of personal change, and streaming gave my days a shape and, to my genuine surprise, a small, kind community. Turns out people really do enjoy a warm, welcoming place to hang out. Who knew.

2024: The little things

The biggest change of 2024 wasn't flashy, it was structural: I scrapped the twelve-slot backpack and rebuilt the inventory as the body-part equipment system the game uses now, so that every item could feel special instead of the whole thing becoming chaos pretty quickly. I also recomposed nearly the entire soundtrack. After that came the Lush Caverns and a mini-boss, bridge physics, rim lighting, softer lighting across the board, and the Froglive NPC. A year of polish, basically, which is exactly why I called that December's devlog The Little Things.

2025: The most productive year

By both my own account and the cold, hard commit count, 2025 was the best year yet. I finished Sea Cave City (the first complete hub town in the game) after roughly two years of work, packed with three dungeons, a boss, around ten NPCs, and quests. From there I turned to Sand City and Act 2, added a fishing system (because of course I did), and gave the opening a new splash screen and cutscenes. I also pushed myself onto YouTube, which does not come naturally to me. The devlog title puts it better than I can here: every year I fall more in love with this game, and I like to think that it shows.

An intermission: Gum Squad (late 2025 to early 2026)

Around the new year, Bring Me Hope went quiet for about three months while I wandered off and made an entirely different game: Gum Squad, a multiplayer shooter, on a deliberate three-month deadline. The deadline was the whole point. I'd given myself a year, then two, then ten, so for once I wanted to change the rules and find out whether I could actually finish something on a hard clock. It was equal parts experiment and training montage for the marathon waiting back home.

2026: Back at it, with force

Bring Me Hope came roaring back in spring 2026, and April turned into the single most active month in the whole project's history. Combat picked up grappling and throwing, the Crystal Subway got a full visual overhaul, and a long run of new items (with proper per-item tracking) fleshed out the loot. The game's still in active early-access development, still aiming to be a 20-to-40-hour adventure, and still ticking along on its decade-long clock.

The story so far

Seven-ish years in, a few things have never really changed: a permanent tug-of-war between how much I want to make and my need to actually finish it, a stubborn conviction that craft (light, sound, animation, feel) is where emotion actually lives, and a willingness to build the whole thing out in the open where anyone can watch. The Decade Jam ends in 2029. I'm well on my way, and these days the little rat in the mirror is a much happier one than the one who started back in 2019.

Want the long version? The full devlogs live at fernmakesgames.com.