Motivation

It seems that many very meaningful, well polished and interesting games start out not by avoiding what you feel in your day to day, but instead merging those feelings into the game.

Nowdays there is a small subculture of making games about “depression” and related issues, but this seems to be just people copying the superficiality of this idea. It’s about expressing the all (well, we can’t express all, so most) the feelings someone has, a mildly successfull try at expressing the plurality of what it means to be human, cut to small, manageable, subsets.

Idea

I am someone who moves around a lot, I have changed homes, cities and states many times, and most of the time it does not greatly impact my friendships, because I tend to not have much contact anyway.

But even so, it does impact me. Each of those changes moves fast and creates behind it a intense vacumm in time. This empty time, which is empty not because I have nothing to do, but because suddenly the future becomes not something clear, but a multitude of different paths, with what seems only me to guide it somewhere.

I guess what I am talking about is the feeling of starting over, which is powerful enough to have been show many times in books, movies and even old stories.

But I have this weird unique take on it, where my personal life is not impacted that much in reality because I am mostly an introvert, but with a quite flexible confort zone (which seems to be rare among introverts).

Art Style

When I was scrolling through twitter earlier, thinking about how to convey this feeling, I saw a black and white inked artstyle that would be an interesting break from my usual pixelart style, since I finally feel that my high-res digital art skills are up to the standard I want to have in anything I make.

That said, this is where my fears creep in…

Fears

For some time I have felt that I do not have the ability to complete most of my game ideas by myself, which is probably a pretty accurate statement: my artistic side pushes my development side to the limit to create the most seamless possible experience for every single piece of content I make, and this takes a lot of time.

This would not be a huge issue if I mostly copied the game design from somewhere else (a la: “a metroidvania”, “a shooter”). But I sincerely hate doing this. For most of my games I like to think about each design decision deeply, but I can’t quite seem to close the game loop with this approach, and this makes the development move slower and slower, until everything halts in a huge mental breakdown.

I have tried offloading coding and art, but never had much luck with partners (except one, but she later lost a lot of interest in developing games) and with art, there is always the issue of wanting to change the design to suit artistic tastes instead of the other way around.

All in all this will probably never take off, but here it is: another idea to my infinite well of ideas.