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Welcome to devlog 2, where I'll be talking about the setting and inspirations for the game, and also show off some artwork.

So I’m in my third year of my geography bachelor, and I’ve studied social work for one and a half years before that. It’s been four years of lectures, reading, group work, all kinds of exciting school projects, meeting and hanging out with wonderful people, parties, and of course, various personal hardships, both my own and those of my friends and classmates. Somewhere down the road of my geography studies, during a particularly gruelling group project, it dawned on me that higher education could make for a great wacky slice-of-life game setting, which could play with all kinds of character types, situations, and topics. I had played through Disco Elysium several times by then, and slowly, the idea of making an actual Disco Elysium-esque RPG set to the university I attended took form. 

Keep in mind, though, that while Spirit takes place at the University of Bergen, you won't find any of the university's students or faculty members in the game, nor is it an 'autobiography' of my time there, nor of my time at the college in Sogndal –all the game characters are made from scratch, so to speak, and I also haven't put real-life events in the game.

I wanted it to have Disco Elysium’s deep and distinct characters, branching dialogue and storyline, and ‘skills’ that talk to you in an internal monologue, and NORCO's 2D point-and-click system and maybe mind map. Also, I love games that are tied to a particular place the developers have a clear connection to, like Embracelet, NORCO, and Tchia, and so Spirit will be deeply rooted in my hometown of Bergen. A nearly thousand year-old beautiful and quaint town, with iconic mountains and fjord views, picturesque houses, a unique and distinct culture (to the point where its people will say they're not from Norway, but from Bergen), this city is almost a character in itself. Nost importantly, though, it has a big and lively student community, with people from all over the world and a wide range of facultues. Oh, and it also happens to be the rainiest city in Europe –not too many years ago we had three months straight of rainy days. However, since I also fell in love with Sogndal when I studied there, it felt fitting to make the main character come from there, as a kind of homage, if nothing else.

Above: An experiment with a photo filter.

The three main characters are Hanna, Maja, and Nora, who live together in a kollektiv, or flatshare, in downtown Bergen, and your skills, which form your inner monologue and help you overcome challenges, are Spirit, Butterfly, Heart, Reflection, and Hippocampus. I'll cover the gang and your skills in more detail in a future devlog.

As I mentioned, I’m currently using actual photos for scene backgrounds, while I use Midjourney to populate the scenes as well as for character portraits, and I’m pretty happy with the ones I have right now, even though several of the skill portraits need a bit more work. Here are some designs I've been considering  (please see the first dev log for my thoughts on the ethics of AI art generators):

Spirit.

Maja. 

Butterfly. 

Heart.

For the user interface, I drew inspiration from both NORCO and Disco Elysium. You’ll have an inventory with items, and I’m borrowing the dialogue sidebar from games like Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Disco, and NORCO. I also want the writing to be part dialogue, part narration, so things like the world around you, facial expressions, and body language will be described along with speech.

All in all, there are two major challenges right now. The first is writing out the full story I have in mind, with all the required scenes and interactions, all the while keeping it interesting and engaging. Spirit is a point-and-click RPG with few gameplay mechanics, which means the writing and story have to carry the game, and writing a slice-of-life game is essentially hard since you have to keep depictions of (mostly) ordinary everyday situations interesting and engaging! It's an exciting challenge, though, even though it's daunting, and so far I feel I'm pulling it off, and the story is also a nice mix of the whimsical and the deeply serious. The second challenge will be putting it all into Unity. Working out how to make a simple 2D point-and-click game has been manageable so far, and Articy comes with the ability to export dialogue to Unity, which is a huge time-saver. I'll keep working and learning and I'm looking forward to seeing it all start to come together. Eventually.

Beautiful.

So I'm feeling this has progressed enough that I'm sort of kinda ready to start talking about it. Introducing (working title) SPIRIT, a slice-of-life game about Hanna Sofie, a chaotic 20-year old university student in the Norwegian city of Bergen.

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 uni student (and former social work college student), I've found student 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. I can make a simple point-and-click game in Unity. That's pretty simple, right? 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, this is the tool ZA/UM used to write the 1.2 million  (!) word beast that is Disco Elysium). 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. Behold:

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 it's 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. Hopefully putting it out there will give me encouragement to keep making progress.

Devlogs 2 and 3 are already on the project page. I'll probably add devlogs here weekly or bi-weekly (starting with 2-3 and a couple more I've already written), or whenever I actually have stuff to write about. We'll see.

Working title SPIRIT

A slice-of-life game about a chaotic university student

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More posts

• SPIRIT Devlog 3: Meet the gang33 days ago
• SPIRIT Devlog 2: Inspirations and art direction

I think I would prefer if devlogs were automatically also put in this forum when you posted them. Or at least there could be a checkbox you could tick.

Alternatively (just brainstorming here), make it so that when I post a devlog, have a thread be generated here with either the full devlog or an except, and a link to the actual devlog on the project page where people can add comments and whatnot. The except would be written by the poster (have a separate textbook labeled Excerpt) or just be the first x words or whatever.

Also I like the idea of curated devlogs.

I would kind of like that, too, but at the same time I think AI is going to be so normalized over time so that it won't really matter in the long run. I'll just tag my game as having AI-generated art and if some people don't want to download it for that reason, I guess I respect them for that.

What I'm looking forward to is GPT-style functionality that would allow me to have actual, open conversations with characters in a game, rather than having to pick from pre-selected options (although that certainly has its place as well). Would be so much fun if done well.

Tried replying directly to Hughes and got an error message for some reason.

Fair enough. I'm considering trying my hand at tracing photos of the places I'm taking photos of and seeing if I can make backgrounds that way (unless I just slap filters on the photos and call it a day), but drawing people? I think that's too high a hurdle for me, thank you. Also there's the slight issue that I want my game to actually be done at some point. So far I've written 20 000 words (or roughly 44 pages) of dialogue and narration and I've only covered a fraction of the scenes I'm planning to make. If/when the game is done, it'll probably be novel-length in terms of narration/dialogue. Then there's all the time to spend coding, testing, bug fixing, taking photos of locations, etc. Learning to draw people on top of that sounds unrealistic, to say the least.

Sure, you could say people should work around their limitations, but I'd rather my game looks good. And I mean, I'll also be sourcing my music from others, probably a combination of free and licensed works, yet I don't think anyone is going to criticize me for not trying to make my own music, you know?  To be frank, I don't understand why the moment we talk of AI, suddenly there's this expectation that creators are supposed to do everything ourselves, or gatekeep creativity by saying it has to be done a certain way, otherwise it shouldn't be done at all.

Also, see the vid by Austin that I linked to.

It can be used and abused like any tool. Personally, I wouldn't be able to make the slice-of-life RPG I'm working on right now without AI-generated art. I don't have the artistic experience to make the assets I need myself, I don't have the money to hire artists (who thus aren't missing out on work anyway), and I doubt there's free art assets that fit what I need for the game. If my game miraculously takes off, I'd love nothing more than start a Kickstarter to raise money to hire artists who could replicate the ingame art from Midjourney, but as it is, on a student budget and making a freeware game, it's a pretty big ask to hire professionals to do the art for me.

tl;dr, it's a bit black-and-white to claim AI hurts artists when I literally couldn't have made the game I've dreamt of making for a long time without the assistance of AI. Again, all AI generators are tools that can be used or abused, they're not inherently good or bad.

I really liked Austin McConnell's take after he received a lot of criticism for using AI-generated art and voices in a video he made.

Also feel it's grasping at straws to use AI-generated articles on WP as an argument against AI-generated assets in games.

Yeah, I think it's too simplistic to just have a binary "AI Generated" or "not AI Generated" toggle. There's a big difference between using AI to generate most/all of your game and just using it for help with code, the occassional feedback on writing, or for some of the art assets, for example. 

I hope not.

I can't believe articy:Draft X doesn't seem to have been mentioned here. I'm making an RPG with Disco Elysium-style branching dialogue and articy is a godsend, especially if you're writing games with open-ended, branching stories.

articy lets you write dialogue and plot timelines by means of a 'flowchart' simply called the flow, where you can also do simple scripting by attaching code to flow items, and also comes with a database to help you keep track of documents, images, music, locations, people, items, etc. (which can also be tied to modules in the flow). Best of all, you can export your project directly to Unity or Unreal.

Like any tool it can be used or abused. I'm making an RPG and I wouldn't be able to do so without AI-generated art. As you say, there's slop and lazy content, too, but just saying that AI hurts indie devs is painting with way too broad a brush, imho.

Oh my god, this is so good.

btw, if you're going to keep working on this, a good quality-of-life feature would be to allow the player to just click on an end node to start drawing a new line, rather than having to hold the mouse button down.

I never knew my untold hours in articy:draft X would prepare me for playing a puzzle game. Really nice idea!

As a geography student who loves cartography, I can't wait to try this out 😁Also, love how perfectly this fits the theme. You have to make your map to scale to succeed. Just great.

Re. controls, maybe it'd be easier if you used arrow keys + WASD (and I guess Q and E), since that's a combination people will be more used to?Great job either way, and I'm sure that if I keep playing it, the controls will be a breeze anyway.

edit, nvm, played it again and controls are fine, you just have to play it enough

Genius. This is one of those ideas that's so clever you think to yourself "why hasn't anyone thought of this before?". Presentation was really good, too. 

This deserves to be one of the top 10 games, imo. 

REALLY good! Love the idea, love the play on the theme (though not sure if it fits the theme 100%), love the presentation. I'll come back to this! Oh, and greatly appreciate that you started out with a credits screen.

Interesting idea, liked the atmosphere, reminded me for some reason of those old Windows 3.11 games.

Not sure if it fits the theme 100%, but I love the idea of a GMTK horror game. In fact this might be my first. Great show.

Nice idea, interesting that everything was so big in relation to the can

Brilliant idea for a game, satisfying gameplay, genuenely scary.

Just stumbled across this while searching the "Slice of life" category for the first time, will definitely check this out. Looking really cosy!

Aaaah, looking forward to it.

So why did you remove the download?

Neat. Left the sadistic ex trying to kill me for the cozy, yet kinda creepy rat girl. 10/10.

Genius

REALLY creative idea for a game, reminds me of those games that came with Windows 3.11. Also incredibly chill.

Would love a version 1.2 with music and sound effects :) !

I played the potato peeling game and now I'm terrified of trying any of his other titles. That was really effective.

Only complaint I have is that the limited battery doesn't really fit Freddy in my opinion. I'd reserve that limitation for the guard and come up with some other limitation for Freddy, whatever that limitation would be.

Ah, thanks, I didnt' know that.

It's more Dr. Langeskov, the Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald, a Whirlwind Heist than Beginnner's Guide to me, but I get what you're saying (if you haven't played the former, you're in for a treat. Same dev).

Wins the panda win hat of approval.

😺

Before even playing the game, can I just say that "Mystical Pigeons" is an ingenious name for a game dev team? Oh, and congrats on having Mark stream your game!

Congrats on having Mark stream your game

This is ingenious. Gave me Dr. Langeskov vibes, really, really, really loved this idea. My fave game so far of this jam.

This legend (team of legends?) actually made a whole slew of fully functional games for the game jam and then made an additional meta game out of playing them all, and they had a great idea on top of it all. Best of all, it's so relatable. Top marks well deserved.