I’ll tell you guys a secret, I’m kind of bad at this. I’ve missed a couple of weeks. I think this might actually be week 5. It’s fine, I’ll get more consistent over time, I think - it took me a couple of weeks to get a computer set up, and another week after that to get it into a usable state for me. Incidentally, many thanks to my partner for her help with all of that, she’s been doing some really cool computer stuff lately - I wonder if she will write her own internet posts about it some day?
So, last week(ish) I said I would write about the kind of game I want to make. Fair warning, this is going to be really weird and meandering, so feel free to skip to the end (or anywhere else).
I think everyone is an artist in their own way. Everyone has something they want to express, right? Thoughts and ideas and emotions they want to share with others. Not everyone does that, and not everyone does it in a way that people would classically define as art, but the spirit of the artist, the desire to share and apply comprehension to others, that counts for something.
Personally, I interact with a few different forms of art. I play piano, and when I’m feeling confident I sing a little, but I need to work on my voice a lot more before I can do that for a crowd, and… honestly, I don’t really express myself through those. Music, for me, is about the experience of creating something in collaboration, and sharing that experience with others, and the thrill of performance - but I just follow the leads of others, I don’t really add too much of myself to it. I do a bit of visual art, although I’m still pretty new and inexperienced, and I enjoy expressing my ideas that way, and I’ve been getting into… I guess here I would call it dance? It used to be artistic skating, now it’s something else, but the core of what it means to me is the same, expression through movement and physical prowess and a chance to feel elegant.
Mostly, though, I’m a writer. I find that text comes most naturally as a way to convey my imagination unto the world, and sometimes people even tell me I am good at it, although I find it difficult to judge myself. I like to tell stories, and the kinds of stories I enjoy telling tends to shift with my own tastes and what I enjoy reading, which correlates weirdly to how I think of myself as a person.
In 2012 I was a 15 year old boy1, maybe-ace-maybe-bisexual-maybe-just-fucked-up-by-gender-dysphoria, but definitely not feeling the whole romantic attraction thing. I just didn’t get it, I had friends and I couldn’t really imagine wanting a relationship more than that with anyone. I was more interested in action movies and games and fantasy novels about magic and politics and I guess I put up with the obligatory romance subplot. So the things I wrote, and the games I made and thought about, were more in that vein. I cared about the action and the cool power fantasy of it, and that was the story I wanted to tell.
In 2017 or so I was a severely depressed 20 year old man2, although honestly using words like man or woman to describe a Uni undergrad feels kind of weird to me now. Like, 20 year olds are still kids, my dudes, who the hell let the world start putting the pressures of Adult Life on them. Anyway, I was struggling, I heard about this visual novel (a genre of game I had never played) written (a word I had never seen applied to a game before) by 4chan (a place I had never been but had been assured would call me slurs and tell me to kill myself). So I decided to try it, just to see what kind of a meme it was, and I spent a week straight playing Katawa Shoujo instead of studying for my exams, and it genuinely changed how I look at games and literature permanently. It was the first… actual romance-as-core-theme media I had read, but it wasn’t about that–KS tells the story of a relationship as a way to tell a story about a character, and that was new to me, and it tore my heart to pieces in a way I had never really felt before. And then a few months later I played Doki Doki Literature Club, and that hurt me in a similar way without even really doing the romance thing, and I just… changed. As a person. I got it, now. I understood.
DDLC had a much bigger influence on my life, actually, but that’s a story for another day.
In 2020 I was coming to terms with being a girl, actually, and then- well, we all know what happened then. I think there’s a really interesting kind of friendship you can only form with someone who you know lives in your city, but whom you’ve never met, because they’re in quarantine for six months and so are you, but you’ll get to see them some day, and in the meantime you spend two hundred hours playing video games together. And then we got out, and I met what felt like lifelong friends for the first or second time, and somehow despite being basically aromantic I fell into a relationship kind of by accident.
That’s not a story for another day, because it’s not solely my story to tell, but it turns out being in a relationship with someone often leads to romantic attraction, and that was a fun time. Around the same time, people were getting me into some very new media for me; if I ever write about the media that I think most strongly changed me as a person, it will be a list of mostly games, and then a book called This is How You Lose the Time War. Go read it, it’s super pretentious and also an incredibly beautiful love story. In 2021 I started taking hormone therapy, and that’s a fucking trip in its own right. You know when you have a really bad cold and you can’t taste much, then you recover and everything just has flavour again? Imagine that, but for your emotions, and that’s what taking estrogen and cyproterone does to you. I would genuinely recommend it to cis men if it wasn’t for all of the undesirable (for them) side effects.
A/N: MY partner says I am a coward for not making that an actual recommendation, so now it is one. I think everyone should spend at least a little time considering their gender, and separately I think all of you AMAB people should try taking HRT for a few months, see if you can get a taste of the shrimp emotions - you get a bit of sensory warning before you start growing tits, so it’s not even that much of a risk.
And now it’s late 2022 and I have changed again. Last year was a whirlwind, this year has been harder in some ways but also calmer. I’m still a writer, but the stories I want to tell are about people, not things, not places or events or magical powers. I want to write tragedies and love stories and found families and heartbreak and healing. And I want to make a game about it.
A while ago I said that FTL isn’t the game I want to make, and it isn’t. FTL is a game about the crew of a ship as a body and their fight against the enemy, but the crew members aren’t characters so much as resources to use. And that makes sense, because there’s no continuity, and it’s difficult to build characters when the crew on the next run are just different people.
Unfortunately, it's a little difficult to tell stories about characters when you don't have those. Fortunately, there are other roguelite games that manage to work more into their character development, often by building their game cycle of try-fail-try-again into the setting itself. So that's one requirement in my head for how to frame this game.
I think this is a game about exploring, among other things, so I want that to be important. Part of the fun of this game is in picking your own destination, and your own route to get there. And the natural way to do that in space, in my mind, is to have like… a constellation of stars? A graph of nodes that you can move between, and some force pushing you to get to the other end. I don't think they actually are stars, I think the node map is a smaller scale than that. And I want to have something rushing you, nipping on your tail if you meander too much, stopping you from breaking game balance with too much grinding. And that puts a couple more requirements into the setting.
And then I think about the tone of this game, and like… I want it to be warm, and not quite cozy, but… nice. Positive. This isn’t a game about people running from a wartorn wasteland, this is about people making friends and exploring a vast universe and having a home to come back to at the end. The home is important.
And I was struggling to reconcile those things for a while, but then I remembered a couple of months ago, when my Uni book club read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And I thought… about the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. And I guess the rest of an idea kind of fell together from that?
So now I think Starwing is about a little handful of people who find themselves stuck on a space station that drifts back and forward through time around a single really big apocalyptic event, and others come here from other times to witness the end of the universe (or at least a small part of it). But the ones who come from this time are trapped; they can leave, but when the station drifts back to the start of whatever happens, they end up at the station again. So the game is about those people, and their attempts to maybe stop whatever is destroying their galaxy, or maybe figure out a way to leave the time loop they’re stuck in, or maybe just go out over and over again to see all of the things that space has to offer in its last moments. Which… is a little dark, maybe, but I think that’s okay probably? There’s allowed to be a little dissonance between game tone and “the story when you actually think about it”, right?
So anyway, that’s what the game looks like, in my head at least. We’ll see how that changes when I get more into the details of designing and building things?
Some of the people I am working around have been doing this little weekly accountability thing, where we set ourselves tasks for the week every Wednesday and then have to demonstrate those tasks being completed next week. Since I am meant to be doing one of these each week, I figure that’s a good thing to mention?
So, last week my tasks were to install Windows on my PC (unfortunately the previous, very messed up flavour of Arch Linux was a bit much for me), and to get the movement system I wrote about last time working. Which - I did! Yay!
My task for next week is to add - two things to shoot, and two things to shoot them at.
It is now Friday, and I am working on that, and it has involved completely restructuring my mental model of how ships are assembled.
This is going poorly.
