May ‘23

I've been working on this game for almost a year at this point. Why start posting updates now?

Thanks for the question, Tim. I feel like I've been doing a pretty bad job of posting regular development updates for this project. I don't post them very often, and when I do, they're usually just images on Twitter with barely any context. I want to give some more context to things on here, as well as make a new post every week or so. Hopefully these posts will become a regular activity, and it will be a much more effective way to communicate what this process has been like for me.

Even if it isn't, I hope I at least write a few nice things for myself to look back on after the game is released.

What kind of game am I making?

It's my first actual video game. I have a few *dream game* ideas that have been cooking in my head for a while, but the scope and scale of those ideas are massive, especially for a first-time solo developer. This game, on the other hand, is much smaller and more reasonable, so I decided to make it my primary focus in order to teach myself all the skills needed to tackle larger projects in the future.

It's an attempt to recreate a live performance from back when I was in college. Instead of sitting and watching a story unfold on a stage, the audience was invited to explore five winding floors of the English building as a story played out all around them. Each member of the audience had the freedom to go wherever and follow whoever they wanted. The game will allow you, the player, to experience that same story with that same freedom.

Sure, but what kind of *game* is it?

I don't know. What kind of game are you? What kind of game is this which we all play on spaceship earth? I don't know. Sorry. There are three dimensions and it's in the first person. You can go wherever you want and follow whoever you want, but your actions have no bearing on the story. A character might occasionally drop something of interest for you to inspect, but beyond that, you are a passive observer in a persistent world.

I suppose if I had to define it using game genres, I'd call it a walking simulator. But I don't know what makes a good walking sim, and I don't care about genres. The closest thing I've played to what I'm trying to make is The Invisible Hours, and they insist that their video game isn't a video game. So what does that make my video game? I don't know and I don't care :)

The story is a combination of a handful of plays we studied across two semesters of theatre history. Not just us in the cast, but pretty much every undergrad in the School of Theatre, and most of the audience was made up of those same undergrads. They understood the moments and references that our actions represented even though we had hardly any dialogue, or scenery, or costumes...or, like, anything.

A lot of the things we did in that play were references to another play or carried some sort of subtext, and plenty of those decisions could be attributed to artistic choice. But just as many decisions were the result of limiting circumstances. I want to adapt the action in a way that stays true to the original performance while adding some of the magic that we couldn't achieve with the restraints we had in real life. If I do my job correctly, then whatever comes out at the end will be something that can be enjoyed by everybody, not just those of us who were there when it happened.

I hope you look forward to reading more in the future! I do too.

-Tim