fighting the faight

For this to not be totally random in case someone clicks on my blog, here a short explanation of the ‘fandom’ this blog is about: fAIght. fAIght is a game I’m making. Or actually, currently I am writing the story. It will be an open-world RPG-like game about decisions and consequences, love and hate, bla bla bla, or just killing robots. It’s up to you really. 

I have 3 characters I have written a backstory for. So, I wrote an impactful quote for every one of them. I would like to share the backstory of Echo & the quote I thought of for them.

Now my characters have no reason to fight if they weren't hurt in some way. Echo is part of the Silicon Scoundrels. They lost everything to Evolai, the company behind the AI they are fighting, and they blame themselves for causing the AI to be the way it is now. How come?

Evolai needed to change the AI's ethical code, and started a competition to find ways to do so effectively. The Silicon Scoundrels participated. Their research got altered to better fit what Evolai needed, and Evolai published it under the names of the Scoundrels. The Scoundrels lost their PhDs for faulty research, and the base of their ideas was used to revolutionise the AI.

The Silicon Scoundrels stood together for years, trying to get back their dignity. When the ice-age happened, they joined the Resistance. They ran many missions with them, usually in their little group of four. One time, they needed to do a dangerous infiltration mission at the AI on the island. The Resistance decided that Echo and Nina, one of the Resistance agents, would run the mission rather than the Scoundrels. The mission went wrong, and Echo was left on the brink of death and with many scars to commemorate the fact. The Scoundrels left the Resistance. Echo was massively impacted by this event, and struggles with accepting what happened throughout the game, massively straining the relationship they have with the Scoundrels.

After being pleasantly surprised by how my drawing skills have improved since drawing university, especially keeping in mind I did not practise with humans specifically, I decided to give story boarding a try.

For another course I made a part of a story board which came out nice. It used stick figures.

For the game, I wanted to story board without stick figures, because I wanted to be able to recognise the characters I drew in 6 months. This went wrong. There was too much going on, and I gave up.

Instead, I made a video yesterday. It was a scene with 4 people in two shots. I first recorded myself trice for the first shot. Then I made the second shot. I started of with some cringe, but once I started acting the characters that went away. I think it cost me 45 minutes to shoot and edit the video, which is pretty decent. I am not proud of the video, but it was good enough.

Fellow drawers: "That looks so good! Good job! What is it for? What is their story?"

I am making this game for a school project, and my supervisor suggested putting on good music and just writing (I am currently writing out the story). Then I spend a 8 hour bus ride sorting through my master list of songs and categorizing them based on characters, character concepts and groups in the game.

So now I default to putting on one of those lists, and previous time this worked (previous time I was writing backstory to the character whose music I was listening to). Now I've gone through all my lists, barely listening to one of the songs, clicking 'enhance', scrolling through that, maybe add a song and go to the next list.