genesis

The whole genesis of this blog came from my sudden desire to build a roguelike game.  Well, maybe that’s not quite right; it really started back when I first played Shadowrun on Sega Genesis (see what I did there??) and basically re-lived all of my Legend of Zelda adventures but in a bad-ass cyberpunk dystopia.

Ever since, I’ve wanted to expand that world and create a place where I could tell my own stories.  For over a decade I’ve been jotting down design notes about how I might actually build this world, but last week I was struck with inspiration for both the design of my magnum opus AND the will to start a new project that I might actually be compelled to finish.

I think I was walking around outside with my kid and reading some news from the Roguelike Celebration in SF that linked to the 7DRL website.  I saw this list of hundreds of roguelikes that had been recently developed with varying degrees of success. This got me thinking again about the level generators in Neon Chrome I had read about on a blog by fellow Finnish developers 10tons and how much fun it would be to work on tech like that.

Later that day I whipped up a 1000 word design summary describing the core facets of the world I wanted to create, how those parts would interact, and which parts would be procedurally driven.

It felt like how Katsuhiro Otomo described his process of writing the Akira film; he had been working on the Akira manga for so many years and knew the world and the characters so completely, that when he sat down to make a film version it all just came out in a single burst.  Within 2 hours he had finished outlining what would become perhaps his greatest creation.

Now, I have no pretensions that the end result of Refuge Zero can reach any level of success.  I have shipped a lot of games in my professional career, but essentially nothing independently.  This time feels different.  The fact that I’m blogging about this, I think, is a symptom of something broken deep in my subconscious that has started leaking out into the aether.