❀ My Heart, Your Home
1/19/2023
Meowdy! I have something exciting to talk about today!! :-)
Very recently (as of 1/13/2023) I started playing with the idea of a very self indulgent game. Just for fun, because you know, why not? That and making a game has always lingered in the back of my mind. I've wanted to make a game since I was like... 8 I think, at the very least. Wow. 10 years! You would think I would have actually done something about this by now but as it turns out I SUCK at coding anything other than html and I cannot for the life of me formulate game mechanics, let alone have I been able to workshop a tangible, feasible idea for a game to begin with more than just vaguely kind of fantasizing about it sometimes. I also am abysmal at trying to make completed, chronological stories without help.
Most of my dabbling with making games has lead to dead ends. Or, well, all of it really. Otherwise I would have something playable to show for. Previously my most successful attempt was a game called Pitch; a surreal AU focusing on Mel and Beau's daughter. I had about 8 minutes of gameplay before I ultimately dropped the project due to just... losing ideas and motivation altogether. Honeslty it's my own fault, because I never really went out of my way to make a working, long-term plan of how I was going to do it, or even what the story was.
I still really like the idea though. I don't imagine I'll be revisiting it any time soon, if at all, but I like what I had going :-) It was fun to explore Gale's character while I was messing with it. I had the idea bouncing around for about a year I think before I had to drop it. I was still working at my local froyo shop at the time too so I didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to it anyhow between work and decompressing and spending time with my family and friends. Working minimum wage truly does suck.
I was feeling pretty ucky one evening and somehow my thoughts derailed into, hey, to make myself feel better, what if I indulged all my time and effort into a tiny, totally self indulgent game? I've consistently been able to finish tiny stories (although I don't share my writing with anyone) and videos before using OHAU's characters, so what if I tried applying that to a game? I've always wanted to actually sit down and make a game. It could be fun and it would be a good way to spend my time cooling down from working on OHAU's main story. To prevent burnout, or something. Because oh boy am I scared of burnout. The idea for this game practically wrote itself by the time I started committing to it and I am very surprised that it's going as well as it's been.
I don't want to get into the details too much in the case that I do manage to finish it, but this is sort of the same case of an AU, like Pitch, except... infinitely further removed than that. It has bogus to do with OHAU's legitimate story and world. Other than the 3 primary characters being based on my main 3 little guys it's over-evolved into its own thing. And even then, they're less direct manifestations of the characters and leaning more towards derivative versions of them. The reason I'm talking about it on this blog is that, well, it was going to be more like Pitch in regards to a direct AU. But then improvision kind of got out of hand the more that I tried to make everything work, haha.
But I also want to say that it's a good start for if I ever intend to make a direct game for OHAU in the future! It's such a huge project at this point that it's very unlikely I'll ever have the time or motivation to dedicate to a full-fledged game on it, as the written website is much less resource-intensive of an option, but on the off chance that I do. I will have experience for it! And I'll have an idea of my workflow; what my style of game could be. It's turning into something something more of a visual novel than anything else, because I don't know how to make game mechanics but I do know how to write, and honestly I'm very comfortable with it. It's fun! I like where it's headed!
The more specific idea for the game is something similar to what I was going to do with ENDOCARDIAL, except much more vague; more up to interpretation, and with a twist of a concept that I ADORE that I haven't fully really sat down and explored till now. I've played with it maybe one time that I can remember, when I was 13 or 14 I believe. Little baby Burns days. That's being as vague as I can about it I'm sorry but I love it so much and I'm so excited to share it when I finish, because it's not something I see experimented with very much if at all! I'll talk specifically about what I mean when I finish the game :-) No need to worry about never knowing.
At the mo I have finished the skeleton for the first half of the game (1 out of 3) and I'm planning to go back over and start filling it out and updating placeholder art before I move on to the next half. I tried to keep the scope of the story as small as I feasibly could so that I wouldn't burn out trying to work through every stage the same way I tend to with the full process of framebyframe animation (the workflow I've set up for myself is similar,) but it will definitely take me a while considering I have to make so much art and assets for it. When I finish the first half I'm considering turning it into a demo and uploading it to itch.io if I can figure that out but I'm not totally sure... It won't be THAT small of a game but it's still just the latter 2/3rds left if I do that. I dunno. Maybe it would be a good way to gague how I should go about proceeding with its development and how folks might respond to it down the line. I've never made nor published a game before so how I should go about this is something I'm just barely figuring out.
Less in relation to the game itself, it feels so strange to actually be committing to something like this. For real. And to have it as a feasible goal in my mind; to know that I very well could complete it. I've never finished something of mine to where I can completely convey and share a story of my own. Or, well, I have, but really only small projects I've shared among my close friends, and the time I was consistently doing things like that was a very very long time ago. I've never shared one of my personal stories with the world before, and especially not in a way like this. I've never been able to finish a full-fledged book (let alone a series of them) nor have I really sat down and completed a story before, beginning to end. It feels weird! It feels weird to have the completed plot outline finished and available for me to go back and reference. It feels weird to be able to materialize it into something I can play and watch. And it feels even weirder that I have plans to share it openly, and that it's wholly my idea.
Most of all it feels so strange to be actually learning to do something like this later into my life. I know I'm basically a baby still, especially being the youngest in my family, but I've been drawing and writing and animating and modeling for years. For like, the majority of my life. This is a totally new field of artistic expression that I'm really starting to explore. And the fact that I could share it with you? And it would be real? That feels so strange to me. Maybe because it's just something I've only ever thought about for so long. It's never really been tangible to me whenever I have messed with it in the past. I think it's also just... incredibly significant to me, that I could do something like this at last. I've always fantasized about putting something out there, since I was very little. I'm not doing this with the reception in mind, I'm just goofing off honestly, this game is entirely self-indulgent, but that's the strange thing about it. It's all my idea, for me to goof off with, but in a way that I could share it with you. Like I could talk to you, and tell you about it, indirectly through it.
I don't mean to wax poetic too much on my silly archival website. But this IS a place where I am archiving my progress, and I do think that this is part of it, since OHAU is my be all end all of artistic expression (and this project IS, technically, still derivative of it.) These are totally new feelings to me. I've never been this close to something like this. So maybe I want to talk about it. I haven't totally gotten to express how I've started to feel these past few days because I've tried to be much less vocal about it than how I usually am about my projects, albeit I'm not very vocal about them to begin with. I'm thinking about saving my conceptual work for it so I can compile an art book together, or something like that. Maybe I'll make another extension of my website to showcase it. I dunno! I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Overall, I am excited! It's definitely happening and I'm terrified! I am praying to God up in Heaven that I don't shoot myself in the foot somehow and completely drop this entire thing.
- Kyu; that is the name of the game ! My Heart, Your Home :-)
