Okay, so… this is a kind of dumb idea I had the other day and my partner encouraged me to do it. I don't know, maybe someone will find it interesting, if anyone ever finds it at all - or maybe it will just be my silent act of trying to make the internet a more interesting place.
I'm Emma, I’m trans, and I like to make video games1. It's been my hobby since high school, but since I didn't study programming at University for the first four years I was there, I never thought about it as a career, so I never grew out of the thought the way most of the programmers I mention it to did.
For the next six months I have a desk at a game dev space in Adelaide, so I'm using it to make… the Unity version of a game I've had in my head since I was like 15. Mostly this is an art project that I can put on a resume, but maybe it will be something people enjoy playing at the end? And in the meantime, this is my questionable game development blog, which I will aim to add an entry to each week.
Starwing is a game I started thinking about in my year 10 IT class, back in 2012 - we learned to use Gamemaker 7 as an introduction to… programming, I guess? Fuck if I know why it wasn’t Python or something. That was such a subject. HTML, databases (through Access), and Gamemaker. But, hey, it got me here, and it was an order of magnitude better than year 11 IT, so I can’t complain.
It’s always been a game about a little spaceship off to explore a big universe. At first it was a hack of one of the Gamemaker example games (1945, to be precise), then it was a little demo of me figuring out how to do 8 directional movement using WASD keys. I had these ideas about breaking up a huge world into smaller chunks, removing the empty space and making filling out a universe a bit more manageable. But then I hit the edge of my attention span, and my ability to use the GML visual script interface on a large scale, and I moved on to other things for a while.
It’s been about ten years since that IT class. That’s awful to think about. And over that time my understanding of games and game design evolved, and my taste in media changed, and so the shape of the game sitting in the back of my head twisted and reformed over time. I got really into roguelite games for a bit2, and that influenced it a lot; the thing about breaking up gameplay into small connected areas or chunks is common in a lot of that kind of game, I think. So now Starwing is a roguelite game about going out in your small spaceship to explore a big universe.
Unfortunately, this cleaves very closely to a particularly well known roguelite game that already exists; at least half the people I talk about the premise with mention FTL: Faster Than Light in the first sentence of their reply. Which is fine–FTL is known for a good reason, and amateurs just starting out in games or anything else are allowed to take heavy inspiration from other sources (as does everyone, really), and there are plenty of other games that make “inspired by FTL” part of their marketing strategy–but FTL isn’t the game I am interested in making. Don’t get me wrong, I love FTL as a game, and it’s definitely had an influence on the shape of Starwing in my head, but the things I want to do in a game are different to FTL in a way that simply copying it wouldn’t satisfy. Instead, I need to determine what I actually mean by “the things I want to do in a game”, then lean into that more than I usually would to compensate for the similarities and the unavoidable comparisons that will result.
I have some ideas about that, but those can wait for the future. Next week, spaceship physics?
Only the most blatant of trans stereotypes in this house, I assure you ↩
In which “roguelite” means “throw yourself into a randomly generated something over and over again and lose most of your progress when it throws you back out”, and I can’t wait to be violently cancelled for not meeting everyone’s expectations of what that word means ↩
