SPIRIT Devlog 1: So I'm making a game

So I'm making a game. Or, just as accurately, I'm learning how to make a game. I recently fell in love with Disco Elysium and its deep, branching storyline, and as a geography student, I've found uni life gives me so much inspiration for stories, satire, and topics to cover in general, so that's where I started off: A slice-of-life Disco Elysium-style game about a chaotic main character with 'skills' that speak to them inside their head. My goal is that SPIRIT will be funny, satirical, and poignant, with a branching storyline, optional 'side-quest' storylines like in Night in the Woods, and with its character relations and storyline evolving with your decisions, like in Disco Elysium. Expect humor, memorable scenes, and a meaningful storyline, covering important topics both related and not related to uni life. 

Now, I can't use any game engines besides the humble RPG Maker, which I used to make a GMTK Game jam game, but which I've outgrown since then, but I'm certain I'll be able to make a simple 2D point and click game in Unity. Either way, I figured I would start by writing dialogue and some basic scripting in articy:draft X, which makes it a breeze to make branching storylines and dialogue that change with your actions (in fact, ZA/UM used this tool when they wrote Disco Elysium, a veritable beast of an RPG that clocked in at 1.2 million words!). What's also super helpful about Articy is that it also allows you to 'play' your game, dialogue choices and all, within its engine, in a PowerPoint presentation-esque user interface:

Either way, after spending the better part of a year writing out scenes in Articy, I found my confidence growing that this could actually evolve into a game, and I'm also finding that the game is growing into its own thing, despite the initial heavy inspiration from from Disco Elysium, Night in the Woods, Embracelet, and NORCO. Much like in Disco and NITW, however, my protagonist definitely also has her own inner demons to wrestle with, though, and much like in Disco, it’s up to you if you want a redemption story or if you just want to run wild for a semester.

So that is where the project stands right now. At the time of writing, I've written some 17 000 words, or about 35 pages, of dialogue in Articy and I'm making progress in learning basic programming. For graphics I think I'll end up using photos I take of the beautiful real-life locations of Bergen, possibly with a filter and some animations applied to them, and I'll use Midjourney for character graphics.  More on this in dev post 3.

As a side note, for anyone else interested in dipping their toes into Unity, I recommend GMTK's  excellent Unity Tutorial for Complete Beginners, which takes you through the steps of coding Flappy Birds while teaching you the basics of Unity, all in the course of a single video. 

A quick note on AI generated content: I respect and fully understand professional artists who dislike AI generated art, but I ask for understanding that as a uni student I've got nowhere near the money I'd need to hire professional artists, and I don't have the time or skills to create my own art assets. Maybe in some rosy future where the game has been released and really taken off, and where I've also landed a full-time job, I'll be able to do a Kickstarter and hire artists, but for now, AI art is what enables me to make this game. By the way, anyone who wants a solid defence of AI generated content can watch Austin McConnell's excellent video. He says all this better than I ever could.

Either way, I'm glad work is finally underway and that SPIRIT has gotten to the point where I can start talking about it. Expect more devlogs to come.