A few weeks ago I started considering turning one of my several semi-abandoned project, which I’ve had hanging around for years, into a videogame. Why? Let’s start from the beginning.
In the past, I have enjoyed drawing and writing. I self-published quite a few zines, and my favourite medium for a long while were comics/sequential art. But over the past few years, I really struggled finding the motivation or the confidence to sit down and turn two interesting stories I had in mind - one set in the Renaissance, the other in the Wild West - into comic books or short novels. I blamed life events such as working full time, family duties etc. but when the Covid-19 pandemic gave me plenty of spare time to work on my personal projects, I tried but still didn’t manage to get back into it.
When I thought about changing medium a few weeks ago, it wasn’t the first time I considered videogames: encouraged by this video by Lars Martinson and his game Dr. Darley and the Case of the Deboned Children, I had already decided some months ago to turn my dead Renaissance comic into a visual novel. That would have allowed me to produce a fraction of the artworks and to deliver a product that was more interactive that it was originally intended to be! Then I realised, why not doing the same with the other project? What frustrated me about my western story was that it was somehow lacking depth as a comic or short novel, but then it may work just fine as the plot for a first person shooter.
And this is how I started my journey! The next step was: which software shall I use to create my first FPS game? This is what I am going to talk about in the next post.