Like others have said I really like the idea of this post. Keeping to the original format - because I like that idea too.
Who am I?
Where to start? What feels like 100 years ago I wanted to be a professional developer. Life had other ideas in mind for me though - let’s call it more interest in girls and partying than in studying and time passed by in the way it often does. Years later I thought about getting into games journalism - after all I can write and I like playing games, what better way to get paid to do two things I enjoy? Then I remembered what I found out when I thought about being a professional tester. When its your job it stops being something you do for fun - to get away from your job. So all that fell by the way side and I got on with living my life.
In the intervening years, I dabbled with making various mods, skin packs, even a few 3D models for various games - back in the days when character models had just slightly more geometric complexity than a Minecraft character. But game development and technology quickly out stripped my meagre artistic abilities. And whilst I enjoyed sketching and digital manipulation it was never anything I had a real talent for - no real “feel” for it. It wasn’t art - it didn’t have soul. It didn’t have feeling. Just lines on a page. Not like writing. That, I most definitely have a feel for. Whether or not my writing is any good your mileage may vary on. But I can feel it - it’s got soul, I get that tingle in my finger tips when I have a story, an idea that I want to put into words.
Fast forward (quite a few) years and COVID happened. I was bored and looking for something different to pass the time. I can’t remember what happened first - but for the sake of moving things along let’s say I stumbled across Weight Gaming. I don’t remember the first games I found and played here. But some of the earliest that made a lasting impact on me were @Owlkaline’s Insatiable Hearts @Weirdobeardo89’s Goddess of Gluttony and @tiggertoo’s The Weighting Game.
Around the same time, I stumbled on stuffer.ai. And somewhere between playing several wonderful indie fetish games here (and several more not so wonderful but not without their charms) and mucking around with image generation the seed of an idea was born when I realised the images I was doing just for fun on stuffer.ai could be turned into characters for a game.
Now, I know what some of you will say, boo, AI bad etc. That particular topic has been done to death and I’m sick of it. I had an idea for a game, I had a way to get visual assets for the game (as a bone to the anti-AI crowd I’m using that term instead of art). But then I hit my first major problem. I’m not a programmer. Was always terrible at it. Then I discovered Twine used HTML and CSS and I thought - oh! I can do HTML. Especially since most of it is done by Twine itself.
So I followed the tutorials. Made my first “game”. It was literally the tutorial - then modified it a little bit beyond what the tutorials gave me. Awesome, I thought, let’s get cracking. So Weightcraft Chronicles Genesis was born. And died. Whilst I had an idea, I didn’t have a plan. At all. It was far too ambitious a project for my first foray into game development. It had ridiculous feature creep and had an absolutely insane number of variations for every single scene. And ultimately, I stopped enjoying reading walls and walls of text after a long day at work - I’ve since stopped playing text adventures. I just can’t maintain focus on long blocks of text for that long any more - even reading books engages my parasympathetic nervous system and I’m off to the land of nod before long. Probably down to years of only sleeping about 5 hours a night.
Anyway, I digress. I took a bit of time off and decided I’d try again, this time using Ren’py. It seemed a much better fit for me being a very visually orientated person. Shorter blocks of text, a more immersive visual environment. This time - I did a plan! And this became Weightcraft Chronicles - New Dawn. And I worked on that for about a year before burn out started setting in. Again there were too many systems, and while I had done a plan I hadn’t thought it all the way through and it ended up feeling directionless and hollow. I was spending more time fiddling with economies and XP and making combat work than I was on writing story.
Around the time I stopped working on it, I lost my grandfather. I nearly walked away from this community and making games entirely at that point I was in such a bad place mentally. But eventually the itch to make something came back. Thanks in part to while I was taking time off I kept writing - this time songs. That really helped me through what was going on in my life and continues to do so.
Why Use AI?
I feel like there’s something here I should touch on. You might have seen some of it in my posts around the place, you might have gleaned some of this from the above. I’m not a professional developer. I don’t want (anymore) to be a professional developer. I do this for fun, for a hobby. I put a lot of work into creating the visual assets I use. Arguably, there is more soul, more creative effort in the images I create, alter and tweak with AI generation and digital image editors than anything that I could do with a pencil and a sheet of paper.
But at the very core of why I use it is that I am learning. I didn’t get into this with any real knowledge of what I was doing. I’m still learning. I’m making this game as a passion project, and for fun. I’m making it myself because I want to understand the game design and creation process end to end. And of course, there’s the finances and “life happens” angles to consider too. Finances speak for themselves. But if I’m doing this by myself - if I’m too busy to work on it, no one is relying on me. If I’m ready to release a demo - but one crucial piece is missing, I’m not relying on someone else. I learn, develop and create at my pace.
What I’m Working On Now
This is running longer than I anticipated and I’m running out of time. So, to cut this short, what I’m working on now is Weightcraft Chronicles - New Dawn (version 2) - this time with a much more developed plan, a tighter narrative structure and refined focus on telling stories without getting bogged down in XP, economy and combat mechanics. If you want to know more, take a gander at the page for it here: Weightcraft Chronicles - New Dawn
I’m also working, as a side project, on writing songs and about to release my second album.