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

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.