Devblog #1 - The Idea

One day I was hanging out with my younger brother and we were doing the usual. Talking about everything. Jobs. School. Art. Monster Prom had just come out and I was talking about how I was excited about the thought of a "multiplayer dating sim". Such a simple concept, yet so inspired when you really think about it. As a result, I happened to mention it would be funny it someone took a dating sim and turn it into a friendship simulator instead.

Now, six months later, there's a prototype demo.

How did it happen?

It happened like a lot of the stuff I create, a dumb joke never meant to go anywhere. (It's a lot like my life in that regard.) But then that joke made another joke, which made another one, which somewhere along the way became a script, which then inexplicably became something close to resembling a game.

And then it stopped being a joke.

Let me first explain, I am not a game dev. I enjoy games a great deal, I never thought I'd be making one. I was the one who played the levels in Mario Maker. I don't make games, I make stories. And this was quickly becoming a story near and dear to my heart.

It's a story about anxiety.

I didn't realize that until I finished the first draft of the script for the demo, but as a key component of the game is the stats you gain through the story segments, and the most common stat you gain is the anxiety stat, it pops up every three sentences. And it started off as just a running gag, but then I realized it kinda wasn't? Because that's what it's really like, at least for me. I analyze everything. I am nervous about everything. And I never stop thinking about what I could have done better for even the small things, like eye contact or shaking someone's hand.

More than that, I was frustrated that no else seemed to understand what that was like.

This game is my answer to that frustration.

I want to show people what, in my experience, having anxiety is like. And I want to do it in a way that's easy to swallow. This game is funny as long as you want it to be, partly because I think a lot of anxiety hides in humor (sneak son-of-a-gun) and partly because I think that laughter is one of the best bridges to understanding. One that can easily to mess up, sure. But when done well, powerful.

There's the ethos. Let's laugh about anxiety.

As for this, the dev blog. As I mentioned, this is my first crack at game development of any kind, so I thought it'd warrant jotting down the journey, if for nothing else then so that others can avoid my mistakes. I might come back to the topic of story inspiration if it's worth saying, but I mostly want to focus on how I figured out how to make the d*ng thing. Next blogs few blogs will be about writing the script, laying down the outline, and researching game engines.

'Til then, peace.