I was planning to do regular devlogs.

Then I realized I had no idea what to write about.

Not because there's nothing happening. There's plenty happening. I'm building systems, writing dialogue, greyboxing levels, tuning stealth mechanics. But every time I thought about posting progress updates, I'd look at what I had and think:

"Nobody wants to see greyboxes and placeholder UI."

So I didn't post anything. For months.

That's my lack of confidence showing.

Then I watched Blade Runner again.

Blade Runner (For the Umpteenth Time)

I've seen Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 more times than I can count. They're comfort movies at this point. Background noise while I work.

But this time, the morning after watching Roy's "Tears in the Rain" scene, I woke up thinking about Nuevo Bay differently.

Not as a game setting. As a place.

What would it feel like to just... exist there? Not as the protagonist. Not as the hero. Just as some guy who lives in the city and has opinions about it.

What would that guy say about blue lanes? About augments? About the Tidewall? About corporate bailouts?

I grabbed my phone and started dictating. Yup. Dictating.

The Dictation Process

I wanted that rambling, drunk-guy-at-a-bar feel.

You know the vibe. Someone who starts a story about someone else and halfway through realizes they're actually talking about themselves. Incomplete sentences. Tangents. "Wait, where was I going with this?"

Typing doesn't give you that. Typing makes you too careful. You edit as you go.

So I used dictation.

I started thinking about someone, just an imaginary person. Someone who really loves alcohol.

Just talked. Let it be messy. Let it contradict itself. Let Mack (I'd given him a name by then) wander off-topic and circle back.

Then I cleaned it up just enough to be readable. Fixed the worst grammar. Cut the parts that went nowhere. But I kept the ramble.

The first story I finished was about Johnny's arm. The augment that stopped working mid-reach.

I posted it to a friend and they said: "This feels real."

That's when I knew I had something.

I've Never Actually Been to a Bar

Full disclosure: I've been in a bar maybe three times in my life. Never longer than ten minutes.

Not my scene. I'm not social enough for that. Crowds, noise, small talk, I suck at all of it.

So where did Mack come from?

Movies. TV. Every grizzled regular I've ever seen in media. The guy who's been at the same bar for twenty years. Who knows everyone's drink order. Who talks too much when he's three beers in.

I pulled from:

• Deckard in Blade Runner (world-weary cynicism)
• Background characters in Cowboy Bebop (spacer bar philosophy)
• The guys at Paddy's Pub in It's Always Sunny (self-aware rambling)
• Every noir voiceover ever (first-person narration with emotional distance)

Mack's not me. He's an amalgamation of every "guy at a bar" I've absorbed through osmedia.

And that helped, honestly. Because I wasn't trying to sound like myself. I was trying to sound like him.

Agent M Came Later

After I finished all ten stories, I realized they needed a frame.

Why does this document exist? Who compiled it?

I was probably still thinking about Blade Runner. Officer K investigating impossible questions. Documenting things from the outside. Getting pulled in despite being there to stay detached.

So I added a framing device: Agent M, a federal investigator sent to Nuevo Bay to file reports on the city.

They're at The Copper Still. Listening to Mack. Taking notes. Getting a little drunk themselves.

I'm not sure if Agent M will show up in the game. Maybe. Maybe not. But the framing felt right: surveillance, documentation, the system trying to catalog something it doesn't understand.

Very cyberpunk. Very Crosstalk.

What I Learned

This process taught me something important about building worlds.

Worldbuilding is way more fun when you stop treating it like documentation.

I wasn't writing lore. I was writing stories. And stories have stakes. They have parties, people, whatever it is. And those people feel things, emotions. And together you can live in that world as the reader because those people, when those people talk to you, they give you everything.

That's more interesting than a wiki.

It's also faster. I wrote ten bar stories in a day. Something like 30 minutes of actual recording, then I added about one full day of editing on top of it all.

So I stopped stressing. Stop worrying.

And guess what?

Everything felt better because of it.

What's Next

I'm still doing devlogs (like this one). But I'm keeping the worldbuilding stuff separate.

There are nine more series coming to the Explore Nuevo Bay page:

• Daisy's Runs: Paper Saint delivery logs (professional, reserved, on-time)
• The Ledger: Rook's fixer economy (transactional, terse, debts and favors)
• Lost Letters: Undeliverable mail (what people left behind)
• NetSure Incident Reports: Corporate surveillance logs (cold, bureaucratic)
• And more

Each one is a different voice. A different angle on the city.

Because Nuevo Bay isn't one story. It's a bunch of small ones, overlapping, contradicting, filling in the gaps.

That's how you build a world that feels alive.

If you want to read Mack's stories, start here: Stories from Nuevo Bay

And if you want updates when Act I launches, sign up on the homepage.

That's all for now.

- afro

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