Hello, World
What if you could hold a memory?
Let’s get introductions out of the way. My name is Brent Anderson. This is an indie dev blog from a solo dev doing this part time. In my day job, and career as a whole, I have been solving problems (often with software) for over twenty years.
My roots, however, are in games, starting with PC & educational game development. Some of my earliest memories are sketching game ideas when I was bored.
While I’m glad to pay the bills with a typical software development job, I’ve long wanted to make something meaningful. Whereas most of my professional work has been about useful products (“We fix
Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe.
~ Christopher Alexander, “The Timeless Way of Building”
Where I started
The first “seed crystal” of an idea for a story started to develop during the peak of COVID. That summer, I was introduced to the idea of Zettelkasten, or “slip box” note taking. What started as an effort to keep a journal rapidly turned into a process for collecting and organizing my thinking on everything. Programming concepts, recipes, philosophy, business, you name it.
Having this body of notes build up in front of me turned into an idea set in more of a fantasy world:
What if you could hold a memory?
I could see pretty clearly a workshop, magic, a crystal formed from memories, and an explosion-induced amnesia formed around this idea as a sort of setting.
From there, I’ve iterated and riffed on story ideas, written short stories and mythology to try and flesh out aspects of the world & setting, and changed the format a few times. Should this be a book? Interactive fiction? A puzzle platformer?
Having riffed on drafts and iterated on prototypes, it’s about time to start working on developing something playable.
Where we are going
Broadly, I have three goals:
1. Build in public
I believe that building in public will make for a better game. Writing requires clarity and precision. My own notes over years of development have been helpful, but sharing things makes it more real. It also invites feedback, which may help knock the rough corners off and ensure that whatever I build moves a little more to the center of that diagram.
2. Ship something fun
I want people to enjoy the finished product and the journey getting there. I plan on doing this by shipping early and often, and focusing on what makes the finished product an emotional experience, one that sparks joy for people as they play. It’s going to be authentic, honest, and real. No ads or gimmicks, no “dark patterns” to trick you into a subscription, it’s not about trying to sell the most copies (even though I hope it finds some audience of people who find it meaningful).
One of the reasons I’m using Buttondown to share my first thoughts on this is because I find it to be pretty authentic: it’s just the words. I’ve even disabled link tracking. If you want to share your own thoughts after each post, I’m a real human on the other side of an email address.
For now, much of the “fun” will be published here: learnings about animation, decisions I’m making about pixel versus vector art, my rationale for choosing the genre of game involved, character studies, you name it.
Eventually, I hope to make the game accessible online and, once fully finished, on all the usual marketplaces.
3. Make it meaningful
There are plenty of games and stories out there that are designed around an addictive core loop. The professional term for this is to have high “engagement”.
In reality, A/B testing your way to optimize “engagement” is a terrible way to create something meaningful. That’s not what this project is about.
While it may be overly ambitious, my intent is to craft something new. I’ve been inspired by games as art for years, and I hope to contribute to that same well of culture.
Games like GRIS, Braid, Tunic, or Monument Valley that carry with them more than game mechanics or nice art. I believe that the best games actually encapsulate that “living world” I mentioned before, and that there is a nucleus to imbuing our projects with such life. I’m hoping to share the journey of trying to capture that essence in a new work.
Let’s make something great
The goal for this newsletter is to publish something once a week about what I’m thinking & doing towards this project. I’m starting by putting game design ideas down and the motivations for it, and from there we’ll get into sharing screenshots of the process as I iterate through “finding the fun” and then building it into a game I find meaningful. I hope you find it meaningful too.