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This project was called "Song Bird Squad", because originally it was going to be a tactics game about controlling birds but somehow it turned into an RPG where you control one character. I knew I eventually needed a new name but never came up with one.
I worked on this game while going through some very traumatic things in my life, so much so it's hard to separate this game project from that trauma. I don't know where to start with first while explaining this...
I guess lets start with the demo and the only surviving image for this:
It's my cursed "Undertale inspired" rpg, but instead of bullet hell mechanics for defending, what if attacking was a deck builder game? The battle mechanics were almost exactly like the ones that are now in Slay the Spire But it's an RPG like Earthbound or Undertale or all the others that are inspired from the same source. Leveling up only increased the max number of points your deck could have in it, and your max HP.
Every single action in combat required you to draw that card. Want to access your inventory? I hope you draw the right card to do that. What about status effects like poison or sleep? negative cards that got added to your deck! draw a poison card and take damage, while having fewer cards in your hand!
I thought it was a fun idea and it kind of was. If I were to play around with this idea again, I would see if this combat can scale with a prototype, because I uh never tested what late game mechanics could look like...
I have exactly one game idea that I could see stealing this game's core mechanic, so who knows, maybe card RPG will happen one day...
Not good lol. Before I abandoned this project I had it looking a bit better than that gif but oh well. That's all lost to time.
It wasn't good! I didn't know how to write characters, I wanted this story to somehow be related to me working through my own childhood trauma (Why??? WHY???). This game would have had similar problems to Pirate Software's HeartBound in that, no one would understand what the game is trying to reference in the creators life and no one would have any reason to care. In a way I am very glad this game never got finished.
I'm going to tell you the stuff I was dealing with around the time of working on this game, why that gif above that shit scorpion pixel art actively hurts for me to look at.
My parents kicked me out of the house and disowned me because I am trans. This lead me to financially rely more and more on my girlfriend I had at that time. I also had an extremely hard time getting a job, but its ok, she said she can take care of things and its fine...
This back to back experience of getting disowned, losing friends over transition, and getting humiliated at job interviews lead me to develop a very bad phobia of other people. Eventually the idea of leaving the house or being seen by anyone who wasn't my GF would give me a panic attack... I just withdrew from society and became a shut-in. And my GF played into this, reinforcing my fear of the outside world while telling me, its ok, I don't need to go outside... I uh was living that Omori life as my GF got more and more abusive with the control she had over me.
Making this game at that time was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand it worked as escapism, I'm not focusing on my problems while writing code for this game. On the other hand, its what made this whole ordeal "bearable", I could believe that I was working towards something that could get me out of my self imposed hell. I spent one year, 365 days from Jan 1st 2017 till Jan 1st 2018 doing nothing but working on this project. Eventually I was working on this thing 12 hours a day 7 days a week because I had literally nothing else in life.
If I could just make this game and if it could become a success, then it would all be worth it. I'm not rotting away inside a closet, I'm a temporarily embarrassed successful artist! who will make enough money to free myself of this hell... But I started to realize that even if it was a success... I would still be trapped inside...
All this broke on the 1 year anniversary of starting this project. I realized that even though I had spend a year and had made it past the pre-production phase and was working on finished content for the game, already having 1/2 of Undertale's Ruins amount of content, this game could not be a major success. It could not free me from this cage.
I just lost all hope in the game, in life, in everything. It was the lowest point of my life.
Once this escapist fantasy of becoming a super successful gamedev while currently living the life of Sunny from Omori just broke... I had weeks of chronic depression lying in bed, a failed suicide attempt before sort of accepting that the only thing that's actually holding me inside was myself. If I can just get ok with leaving the house, with being outside again, my GF's control over me would end and I can leave.
So that's what I worked on. I did grocery runs late at night to avoid most people but still expose myself to the outside world. I went on walks and people said Hi to me. I reconnected with old friends and they helped me move out. I got a job and ended up living a more normal life while I spent several years dealing with the trauma of how that played out, what my GF did to me...
I had like 5 years of feeling compelled to do something like gamedev, to find something to fill that creative void, while also having it trigger trauma and hurt. I remember finding the project years later on an external hard drive. It just hurt so much to have a copy of, I promptly deleted the whole thing. I remember it feeling so cathartic at that time. I would like start game projects and just delete the whole thing after a month, only to start rebuilding it from scratch 2 weeks later. Maybe I was chasing after that experience of deleting SBS?
Song Bird Squad was the last coherent game project I did for a long while. If my life wasn't literally hell at that time, maybe it could have been an ok first game project. Maybe I could have felt ok enough to finish it and have something to show for you.
If that trauma wasn't tied to gamedev, maybe in the years between then and now I could have made finished games. But uh that's the path I took through life I guess. This is why I have lots of experience but no finished games. I guess the only way forward is to complete a game...