I've been picking away at a game about blogging in Godot, and this week the start screen and the opening cutscene finally came together. After reading a book on writing game scripts, I had a better sense of how a plot should be structured. I'd never written one before, but the main quest line at least has a rough shape now. What matters more at this point is simply pushing the overall progress forward and getting closer to something finished.
Getting the game started
For the launch sequence, I cobbled together a logo from assets I already had. Honestly, I'm fairly happy with how it turned out — good enough to use for now, and I'll swap it out once a better idea shows up.
From there it moves into some simple narrative and a short cutscene before dropping the player into the main scene. The beginning is the hard part, and I keep telling myself this opening stretch matters a lot — the last thing I want is someone launching the game and closing it thirty seconds later. So I'm trying to make that first impression hold up.
Moving the story forward
After the opening, the story and the game's progression are what carry everything. Last night I binged the Netflix series Alice in Borderland — a Japanese take on Squid Game, more or less. Finishing the first season left me with a question about my own project: where exactly do I stand in relation to it?
I realized I'm sitting in a strange spot, acting as both player and designer at the same time. That's a contradiction, and it makes it hard to stay faithful to what the game was originally meant to be. I think I need to shift more of my thinking toward the designer's chair.
I have ideas for the later chapters, but they're a mess in my head. My own experience with writing and maintaining a blog is limited, and my personal understanding of roughly twenty years of independent blogging isn't nearly enough to sustain a whole game's worth of plot. What I need are more of the typical events that come up in running and growing an independent blog — I'll have to dig those out of real blogs. AI can hand me an outline, but if the episodes in the game don't feel real, players won't buy into them. It just reads as fake.
Take the scenario of a successful blogger whose traffic climbs so high that the blog's revenue basically buys them financial freedom. I've never lived that. All I can do is make it up, and it shows the same way a poor person can't really imagine how a rich person lives.
What it actually feels like
This is my first game — the first reasonably sized independent project, anyway — and it's given me a taste of what indie developers go through. The grinding, the exhaustion, the sense of being stuck. I used to think making a game was just a matter of sketching out an idea in your head and calling it done. Only people who've actually done it know how tangled the process gets: self-doubt, second-guessing, contradiction, disappointment, frustration, feeling inadequate and helpless. It's as if you have to run through the entire spectrum of unpleasant emotions before the development process counts as complete.
I hope every indie developer out there manages to hold on to the end. Don't give up.