#indie games dev

Mazzie was working on this game's script for over a year before she brought me on to help iron out some designs, and has slowly built up our little seven person team over that year, including an accessibility-forward UX/UI artist. She's been funding this entire project out of pocket with her life savings, so that all six of the people working with her on this game are getting paid on their terms, because paying her artists was and is her top priority.

I also need you to know that all six of us, separately, without planning to, contributed extra work to fit as much as we could into that budget, because all six of us, mostly strangers to each other, were So Excited to be working on this game.

I know I'm biased toward Mazzie's writing, because Mazzie is my friend and I've done other projects I've loved with her, and I love her storytelling sensibilities. But since joining onto this I've watched six other people -- four of whom I didn't know prior to this project -- immediately fall in love with the pitch and pour their whole heart into this game.

From our incredible Sprite Artist, Denaseey (https://x.com/denaseey) who is in SUCH high demand and made room for us anyway, to our amazing composer Mark (www.markalanknappjr.com) who got our pitch and just!! DONATED our trailer music pro-bono just to be a part of it (he is signed on and being paid for the whole OST, and he's grEAT), to our UX/UI artist Jenn (https://www.jenniferbertaggia.eu/) who came to our rescue at the 11th hour and made so many gorgeous assets and coached us on accessibility options, one by one we all came in and had the same reaction. We saw this game laid out and fell in love with it, and I have every belief that anyone here who enjoys my work will fall in love with it too.

So bear with me while I spam our ads, because I am SO excited about introducing you all to these characters, and this fun spooky Whodunnit.

I WILL be making fanart of these folks and I happily encourage anyone who feels so inclined to do the same and tag @redclovercasefiles (It WILL get reblogged and I promise the whole crew will scream and cry and throw up rainbows about it). Idk why my friends are all so good at making OCs but.............Goddamn. My time (as a fanartist) has come (again).

Anyway I know things are tight all around and there's a lot going on and backing a video game kickstarter is kind of small potatoes backburner-at-best stuff, but we'd love to make this game as absolutely awesome as we can. This has been a genuine dream project with a small team full of amazing, wonderful people, and I hope you'll give it a look and back us, or consider boosting us if you can!

Thanks for reading all this here's a sketch I did of Jules and Scooby Doo to hype up our crew chat

Doft, development of far travel, is a fictional organisation looking to traverse space and time in order to exploit alien lands of their resources after the planet runs dry of its own.

The organisation enlists a team of desperate, unqualified monster-individuals and keeps them housed in their lab out in the middle of nowhere. Managed by the goody two shoes, lab-made Connor and co-led by his rebellious zombie brother Slacks, everyone will have to prove their worth keeping around or find themselves replaced by the actually qualified.

I'm a hobbyist games developer not professionally taught in any capacity beyond A-Levels, and one of the biggest hurdles to me actually getting stuck in was feeling as though I didn't “know” enough. I felt, as many do, that I had to be an expert at coding, art, animation and so forth. This was, until I realised, there are actually plenty of resources, tutorials, books, YouTube videos, blogs, and much more besides all dedicated to discussing games, the culture around games, design and development processes and much more besides. I firmly believe that restricting yourself to learning exclusively about video games and nothing else, no other media -be it print or film-, is restrictive and reductive to both the medium and yourself. Plenty of hobbyist/independent developers, such as myself, have used these sources to aid our learning, and frankly, I don't see there being any shame in it in any capacity. If the information is out there, use it. Create with abandon.

Of course, in my other series I talk about how playing games can help too but it is much more than just “playing” games, in the same way I was taught way back when to always be 'reading' [ie, analysing] films as I watched them. As always, I'd say take this advice with a pinch of salt- I'm no professional, I do this in my spare time at an average-ish level. But, this is just a collection of personal resources that have helped me. Later on in the series, I'll be laying out how I've planned, conceptualised, designed and made games I've worked on in all stages. Again, purely anecdotal – I'm no expert.

One of the first places I'd suggest any prospective dev would look to for practice and inspiration would be the modding community. There are plenty of games out there which provide modding tools with them, and these can be a good place to go and practice level design, gameplay concepts, and just messing with basic code structures. GMOD, Half Life, Bethesda Games, even DOOM wads can be great places to begin; you can get a feel for yourself for things that work, how to fit things together organically, even using full conversion mods to take asset creation out of the equation to focus upon writing for a small time. This is where I started, though none of those mods came out, it became a great place for me to practice and eventually, grow confident with concepts.

In a similar vein, there are a few software packages that come with assets and engines inbuilt that can be great ways to practice and develop skills such as level design, writing, and so on; software such as RPG Maker, which comes in all sorts of modules, can be surprisingly versatile. You can use it to make levels from assets known as RTP that come with the engine, use assets provided by the community, or modify pre-existing assets for your own needs. Again, this is something I practiced with a lot as its modular coding system -which comprised of a lot of drag-and-drop and clickables- helped me familiarise myself with logic systems popular within coding, as well as how to design levels to look and “feel” good. And, once you've gotten familiar with the basics you can familiarise yourself with basic tileset rules, layers, and interfaces – and, with a bit of creativity, these can become unique ways to make games. I've seen scanned-in images, photographs, hand-drawn assets all utilised with RPG Maker to make something wholly unique. Check out Middens and Mortis Ghost's OFF for two examples of unique, stylised art created with RPG Maker in two completely different styles.

For practicing code at a base level, a basic grasp of HTML is often a great place to start. Software like Twine enables you practice both story-telling,and basic code from hyperlinks and hypertext to more complex code such as branching choices or choose-your-own style adventures. You can even incorporate text, audio and macros which, again, is a higher level of code, though by no means as difficult as it can be, it can be really useful for practicing basics of these skill-sets.

The reason I suggest most of these as good starting bases is one primary reason: asset creation takes a long time. Making your first project might well be forefront in your mind but I've learned, mostly through trial and error – and a lot of error at that – is that you need to focus on specifics when teaching or learning. If you try to learn coding, asset creation, animation, all at the same time it is possible but often not manageable, or at least not in my experience. By saying to myself “I'm going to focus on HTML”, it has allowed me to properly learn and understand the fundamentals without getting distracted by art direction too. All of the software I have recommended comes with in-built assets or at its core requires no asset use at all and this is useful for zeroing in on what you need to focus upon. Maybe you're already good at level design, and through experimentation you realise this and decide to focus upon animation or character deisgn.

And, when you want to take that next step these programs also have, either through the ability to edit or bring in your own assets, ways to practice and hone your other skills in relatively streamlined ways. RPG Maker tileset functionality was important for me to learn two things: multi-frame animations, and how to correctly place tilesets. Neither is particularly complex, but if you get one bit wrong in a tileset it can throw the whole asset off, and whittling down the animations to four key frames, to communicate the essentials, was a useful skill to learn even as I expanded to larger animations.

Another piece of software that I have found invaluable was PICO-8, a virtual console that you build and execute games with and, the slightly more complex but still ultimately easy for beginners Voxatron, from the same people. Everything in that is inbuilt so you build your assets and code within the engine, then the virtual console does the rest. It allows for easy exportation and initial conceptualisation – I've heard that the first build of Celeste was built in it.

I had a question the other day over on my curiouscat and it made me realise that even though I've been putting up posts containing art and characters and so on, I haven't actually yet put up a post explaining the game proper. I tried to summarise it over there but I think a post dedicated to it, and the ideas behind it, might be better.

There's a few pieces of media – both film and games related – that have inspired me throughout the creative process and writing of this game, and as I detailed in a past post visiting the real-life locations of Pawys Mountain also proved massively inspirational.

There are a few other real-life locations that have also proved inspirational, from Carding Mill valley in Shropshire to Tintagel Castle in Kernow: the latter of which I spent countless hours siting in the grass atop the cliffs sandwiched between a blue sky and a blue sea, simply taking in the location and feeling the place inspired in me. There's no one real word for it, I cannot think, but it was a mixture of awe and comfort. I have no idea why the castle nestled atop the cliffs and mired in Arthurian legend felt so comforting to me, but something about it felt immeasurably so.

One of the games that I took inspiration from was Shadow of the Colossus which I'm sure is familiar to most people who play video games, it being something of a cult classic and that's putting it mildly. I spent countless hours simply exploring the map in that game, atop Agro. Questions spurred my exploration: “what was this place?” “what was this ruin?” “what was the function of this land” and this is something the narrative neither encourages nor explores – exploration within the game exists purely for the sake of exploration. There is no concrete answer, no text-log detailing the history of the land, you are simply left to explore myriad ruins and come up with your own answers; while the developer may have intended certain forms and functions for specific areas they do not spend time elaborating upon this. It is left entirely up to your own speculation and ideas. As you travel the land hunting down immense beasts, devouring glow-tailed lizards and uncovering every shrine, there are clues and you can follow these and be lead towards a general idea but ultimately you have to fill in the blanks.

Another game that in my opinion does this well is Dark Souls – so much of the games narrative, history and culture is shown to the player instead of told. You go to a ruined city drowned in water and come to your own conclusions as to what happened, maybe spurred on by an item description or NPC interaction but ultimately it is you who has to build up the mythos of the game and piece it together. Part of the appeal lies in simply not knowing for sure; all that exists are theories. There is no concrete evidence.

What ties these two games, conceptually, together is the idea that you give the player things to discern and unpick for themselves but leave the extraneous storytelling to the player. These games both have a narrative that we follow, but within each there are hints to a larger story and world that is entirely optional to discover or unpick. You can go with the face value of the items and ruins we see, or we can read into it as much as we want. We, as players, go through a game world and discover certain ruins or items and they give us breadcrumbs that hint at a wider overarching narrative and on the whole, I think, give a much better impression of a world that would exist without your interaction that goes wholly against how many games deal with player characters [or avatars] and story interaction.

This is all the game does. It fires up the audience with speculation, theory and ideas and so as we go our experience of the game becomes a very personal tailored experience to each person playing it in a different way to a game that becomes a personal experience because of player interaction with major events within the game. Maybe what is a ruined temple to one player is a ruined home to another, is a ruined library to another, is a ruined village to another. Of course it is not often this varied as we get the general idea from a piece of environmental storytelling but sometimes stuff is vague enough that it can inspire multiple readings.

In my mind, none of these readings are incorrect either; video games have the potential to allow for multiple readings to exist, especially games with multiple endings or ambiguous visuals. And yes, whilst many cinematic experiences also do this, I feel that because of the intrinsic personal touch of a player playing and influencing the game, of putting themselves into the shoes of the character, of playing a game because more often than not they are invested on a more personal level than passively watching a narrative unfold in a film. After all you control every aspect of the game- the main character lives or dies based on your actions and this experience is unique to games: I am not saying it is more or less effective than cinema, or that cinema is not a wholly engrossing experience – it is – but, in many ways, games have the ability to become even more personal. Whether or not they cash in on this aspect is another question entirely.

Primarily it was this aspect of Dark Souls and Shadow of the Colossus that informed my design decisions within the game. Having said this several other things inspired me as I wrote. I think, too often in games a player is spurred on to complete actions because it will give them EXP or a unique-looking item and in many ways this fosters an almost entitled audience who do things in game because they expect to get something out of it. In wider gamer culture this creates problems but, this is not the time discuss that. I wanted a game where, perhaps, you did things and wandered and explored and maybe you found a character or an item but, it also might not be yours. Where the journey was its own reward, where you wanted to explore not because you would get a unique looking armour set out of it but because exploring was interesting, or you were building up a story in your head as you went on lead by visual cues and hints strewn throughout.

Finally, my last inspiration for an aspect of the game I wanted to include was the idea of small, unique experiences happening throughout. Studio Ghibli formed the basis for this idea; the small scenes in Ghibli films that exist for no reason other than to exist: the train scene in Spirited Away; the bus-stop Totoro scene in My Neighbour Totoro; the scene in Princess Mononoke where Ashitaka shares a bowl of noodles with Jiko-Bo. In some ways, yes, perhaps these scenes tell us things about the characters they concern but in many they exist just to exist. And for many they are some of the  most memorable scenes in animation. I think, perhaps because these scenes are unique experiences within a film that feel at once familiar and bizarre; this mixing of esoteric and normal. Who doesn't love the sound of rain on an umbrella? But when it is a strange totoro, it becomes something magical. We've all, likely, been on a train in our lives and there is a strange serenity to riding a train for a long while – but when the train is filled with faceless shadows? It transforms at once from something familiar and mundane into something magical.

Thus, I decided I wanted to fill my game with experiences: share a bowl of noodles with a priest; help an outcast build up his camp; deliver letters between two lovers. These are just some of the ideas and I've no idea which will or won't make it into the final game as of right now, but I spent a good long time sitting and writing, thinking of memorable cinematic and game moments that had truly hit home with me and left an impression. And, not all of them entailed the players' direct interaction – in The Witcher 3 when you listen to Calonetta's song, you are a passive participant in someone else's story; in Shadow of the Colossus if you fall asleep at a shrine Agro goes off on her own adventure for a brief moment -. So as I was writing I kept this in mind.

Having said all of that, none of that yet describes just what my game is about. Up to now, it has just been a description of inspirations and feelings and ideas I was aiming for, but I mention them because I think they're an intrinsic part to writing and experiencing my game, and an important context to add.

At its core the game is about a young woman eloping to an ancient land long thought cursed by her tribe, to run off with her lover – in doing so she leaves behind family, her past, and an entire culture. But in running she discovers a land flourishing with life and with death, a land that goes against every preconception she had going in. There are spirits, old gods, strange new animals and, yes, there are people too, as well as humanoids. There are ruins next to crumbling structures next to villages bursting out of older architecture.

Most of the game is the player exploring this new land purely for the sake of exploring; there's no real questline or objective beyond just experiencing. Go and talk to an old priest and hear his story; bring a witch her letters and perhaps learn something about her; share a drink and a fireside chat with a hunter at night. I want the overall feeling to be that the world is bigger than just you as a player, that these things and people would exist without you, that you are perhaps not the centre of this world and partaking instead in a personal story. I want the game to feel at once comforting and surreal, bizarre and familiar, like a fairytale come to life.