ThirtyHelens

Professional Ogress

I draw pictures and write stories about boys who are girls and girls who are bros.

minors DNI, NSFW, 18+ etc etc


love
@love

I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone knows the feeling of losing someone during the past two years. I don't wanna get too personal here, but it's certainly something that was weighing heavily on my mind while writing The Fate of Another World. Nothing in this game is based on anyone I know—well, other than Sam's character voice, which is very transparently just my own—but having a game set during the end of the world felt like a very appropriate way to get into the core of some raw feelings that are otherwise difficult.

Which leads us to Jo. Yesterday I made a post about the mechanics of the recurring fight with her, as a miniboss with complicated lightning powers who gets more powerful with each encounter. I know nobody in the world likes "actually, the final adversary didn't really die! now he's back! and scarier!" as a plot hook, or at least, I sure don't, but I hope that the part about the Machine Devil coming back in the form of possessing Jo that stands out the most isn't the Machine Devil part, it's Jo herself. In a way, this chapter about Emily and Prince Sam being haunted is really Jo's story, with the party brought in to bear witness and to do what they do best—end stable cycles.

An exciting thing to me about writing a fantasy RPG has been that I can write about real feelings in an abstract way that cuts down to the core of what it's like to experience that feeling, rather than getting bogged down in the concrete details. In the third act of the main game, Sam is forced to confront a physical manifestation of all her self-doubts, in the form of a non-transitioning version of herself that she thinks is far more attractive than she is, has none of her anxieties or any of the things she thinks are broken about her. This is nonsense, of course, and the objective third party player knows it. But also nobody wants to see a piece of media where someone shrugs and goes "yeah, actually, that thought is stupid, so I'm going to reject it" with no further drama. In an RPG, a harmful idea can be a thing with 8000HP that you can get the satisfaction of killing. Which is certainly how talking yourself out of something that terrible feels.

Here is another awful but real feeling: you feel guilty about having not done enough for someone who loved you before they died, you chastise yourself for it every time you think about that, and soon enough, you've managed to transform someone who loved you into someone that only causes you pain, through zero fault of their own. For Emily, Jo isn't just the conduit of the Machine Devil; she's a representation of that awful feeling, quite literally haunting her. And of course, there's only one thing you can do with a feeling like that: kill it!

(Please pretend this doesn't have a placeholder for the actual equipment icon. We're still working on it!)

As a heroic adventure, the base game of Get in the Car, Loser! is very focused on being rowdy, determined, and just in the fight against evil. I've got zero interest in humanizing evil, of course—I think there's enough of that out there already—but I wanted to get more into the complexity of what it means when support structures collapse, what sorts of places people try to find comfort and stability in during that absence. This story might be a tragedy, but it's still a heroic one, and our biggest goal here is not to be a bummer, but to show the triumph of heroism over the most emotionally honest adversary we can provide to overcome. Over the span of six battles and three new item stories—which I think are personally my new absolute favourites that I've written—you'll get to learn more about who Jo was, how she got here... and why it's time for Emily to bury her with love once and for all.

You can learn more about The Fate of Another World on Steam and Itch, and please, add it to your wishlist if you think it sounds cool! And feel free to ask any questions in the comments below!


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in reply to @love's post:

I was going to ask a question about the repeating boss but I saw what you said about how focusing on our guilt about how we might feel that we did not do enough for the deceased and had to thank you.

I lost someone only in August of this year and this is exactly the guilt I had been feeling. I was their carer as well and so I was with them through their whole illness. Despite trying as hard as we could to have as good a time as possible in the last few years now that they have passed I find myself only dwelling on when I let them down or worse when they let me down.

To have someone put such similar feelings even into the words in your post was wonderful enough but to think of seeing this in a peace of art I was already looking forward to is genuinely transforming.

Thank you so much for making me feel less alone in this grief that can feel so isolating.

It's really tough and I'm sorry you're going through that. For what it's worth, it became easier with time for me to ground myself in thinking about how someone I cared about me would actually want me to think about them. I don't think I'm at a point where this game is going to provide any helpful insights, but at the very least, it was helpful for me to write something about those feelings that gave me a little bit of distance to see how wrong they are. It's hard to talk about—which is why I think I can only really get into it in the art itself, with a comfortable layer of metaphorical abstraction in the way—but you are definitely not alone.

Thank you very much for this response. I'll definitely try to remember that going forward.

Don't worry I am not expecting the story you are sending out to solve my problems but I am very glad to hear that this gave you a clear perspective on your own feelings.