Again, Again

Alright people, let’s do this one last time. My name is Emma, I was bitten by a radioactive Godot enthusiast, and for the last 9 months or so I’ve been the one and only Towerpoint Programmer Prime.

Hmm, does that joke date this article horribly? Well, I guess it’s not the first time, I don’t think.

So… hi! I’m Emma, I’m Programmer Prime at Towerpoint. I make games with Sean, our Creative Director, and a team of wonderful artists I will be posting so much more about in future. Back near the start of our current project I was writing weekly-ish blog posts about it, but then we started working kind of quickly and frantically for a while and I dropped off. Now we have a website, and I get to share my posts with the world actively! So let’s have another go at this, shall we?

The Last Four Months or So

Four months ago, we started refocusing our work to get a product demo together. I didn’t really have big weekly things to write about any more. But! We got the demo done in time.

Then we trashed everything we’d done and started again. And somewhere along the way we decided it was called Anvilheart, a name which… at the time I was vaguely “that’s a good placeholder but still work in progress”, but honestly it’s been growing on me, which is cool.

Turns out, we put a bunch of focus into the wrong areas. If it helps, that I can say this now naturally means that the replacement system we are developing since is better, right? Or at least, I think it is. We’ve been shifting away from physical requirements like hardness and towards a more abstract approach centred around making something that fits its owner spiritually. This abstraction gives us a lot more room to do weird and interesting things with the game mechanics, which (we hope) will allow us to build interesting and engaging gameplay. 

We’ve also been putting a lot of thought into the story and characters of the game, and how to make them interesting and engaging too. Anvilheart has always been pretty story-first, which is a constant source of blaring alarms in my head because guess what! Neither Sean nor I, or anyone currently at Towerpoint to my knowledge, are professional fiction writers. And dear lord is that a skill to be learned, but we’re working on it.

Right now we are in kind of a weird spot; waves of brainstorming and prototyping have left us with a lot of disconnected parts of things, a few scenes of dialogue with no way to play through them in game, a handful of little minigame-units to try out how a particular game mechanic felt or flesh out a part of the crafting process, a time progression and event handling system with no events to fill it. Over the next few weeks, we’re set to start trying to stick some of them together into a cohesive game demo again (hopefully with more real gameplay this time!).

An Introduction to the Big, Wide World

Personally, I’ve most recently been working on dialogue systems again (don’t worry, I can feel the chains of déjà vu wrapping around me as I type this).  I’ve also been building the site you’re probably reading this on, and… apparently I’ve signed up to be our main marketing person?

This is crazy to me.

Firstly, because I was never a particularly sociable or outgoing person for most of my life; I can easily imagine a conversation with my eighteen year old self in which she is a little surprised to learn she’s a girl, quite pleased to learn she ends up making games, and doesn’t believe me when I mention taking on something like that voluntarily. Secondly, because I’m still not used to this kind of responsibility, and it kind of feels like I shouldn’t be allowed to have it because of that? I can barely claim ownership and responsibility over things I know well, let alone something like this. It feels like at some moment Sean is going to step in and say that actually, this was a funny joke but he can handle it, but… I try to fight that feeling, because I don’t think he would actually do that. I think he was serious about giving me the opportunity to take this on. I know I was serious about asking for it.

Unfortunately, I still don’t really know how to do marketing. But this is where I start learning, right? And at the very least, I think I have an idea of where to start, or more precisely where I start. 

For a few years I was a somewhat-active Reddit moderator–conceptually I still am, but it’s been a long time since I earned the title, and after they shut down the third party app I used, I don’t think I’ll be around Reddit much any more. In the time I was active, I learned that the most effective tool I had to get through to people was to be a normal human being; to speak plainly, to be earnest and genuine, and sometimes to bare my soul shamelessly just to prove that it was there. No one wants carefully crafted essays, formal and soulless. Those don’t help. Talking about the fears for random users that kept me up all night, the panic behind mistakes and the honest motivations behind choices that people disagreed with, that was what anyone actually cared about. Unfortunately that’s also emotionally draining as hell, and it almost caused me to quit a few times.

When I started writing my blog posts late last year, they were about a different game that I was working on by myself. The point of the game was to display my competence with the Unity game engine; the point of the blog posts was to share my progress with others, and to serve as a kind of advertisement of my own soul. I had just come out of a job that didn’t really fit me well as a person, and I figured since I was trying to get into a creative industry and I was trying to sell myself as an artist as well as a programmer, I should just be really up front about myself and let other people figure out the rest. I wasn’t presenting Emma the mindless programmer, I was presenting Emma the human, with programming but also with concepts, stories, humour, trauma, ideas in her mind and words on her fingertips and passion in her heart. So I put that into my blog posts, about the game and sometimes about other things too, and people liked that, apparently. So I continued.

Which I guess is my starting point, right? Be me, out there, sharing our game, and hope that that’s interesting enough to draw people’s attention. I guess in time I’ll probably work out other ways to go about things, other ways to try to gather interest in Anvilheart, but right now I just have to use what I’ve got. Only now we have a website, and I can post these on our Twitter as well, and… it feels different, even just to write. Bold, uncaring honesty is a lot harder when it feels like you’re standing in front of a microphone, but I can’t let that stop me.

So! I’m Emma, I’m trans, and I like to make video games. It’s been my hobby since high school, and now it’s my job! I’ll be aiming to update this blog every Wednesday, writing about programming and design, game development in Godot, the trials of creative expression, writing and 2D art, and probably some of my own personal struggles as well. I hope you all enjoy it :)