I love the world for it’s beauty, but a lot more I hate it for it’s cruelty and inevitability. I don’t see a place for myself in it, and only reason why I am still alive – is the stories, full of wonderful worlds to explore and interesting characters to meet. I even believe that ability to appreciate any form of art is what defines humans as a species. I tried many of them, and found out that each has it’s own kind of beauty, but only video games are able to combine all of them in one place (if needed), while also doing something that no other medium can do – letting you be a part of the story, set foot into new worlds and experience evens as if you were there.
More than 20 years ago, when I played my first games, I saw their potential, and my own worlds were born, slowly growing by the time when I tried to find my place in this life. I failed terribly in everything I tried, because for some reason by brain refuses to do even things that’s the most basic for other humans – like counting or remembering, my memories are very selective – I often cannot remember a name of the person I met a hour ago, or what I was doing a week ago, but I always remember my stories, up to the every single small detail. That was not the only my difference from the other humans, and since the whole outside world was like an alien space to me, I spent the last 13 years rarely leaving my house, but instead exploring every single fictional world I came across, while also polishing my own stories into perfection. By that time I already knew that I wanted not only to play games – but also to make them, to share my own stories and worlds, the emotions I felt with the others, while also giving them a unique gameplay experiences that they will never forget. I wanted to be a game writer, and, at least partially – a game designer.
But how could I become one, if I had no special education, fancy diploma or anything else that’s valued in the game dev world, and also live in thrid-world country where only few groups develop the games? Since I was dedicating all the time in my life to a books, movies, and video games – I experienced more than most humans who have any other activities in their lives. I know what games do bad, I know what they do good, I know when they copy each other, I know every little trick developers do to make their creations exciting for those who will play them. What is even more important - I developed a taste for the stories that were told in those games, and that taste evolved over the years, allowing me to easily spot all the obvious flaws in the plots made by other people (and, sadly, there is a lot of them), while in the same time it let me perfect my own plots, shape them into something as perfect as my powers allowed.
I know that I should not value my own work – it can be a biased opinion. But at the same time I am a person who is a total stranger to all form of lies, including flattery, and can openly admit that I am an absolute garbage in every single task that not involves game writing. Writing stories and creating concepts is the only thing that I not only enjoy doing – but also enjoy the end results, and, giving my high standards regarding the games and their stories – if my own plots look better in my eyes than many of existing ones (not instantly, of course, but after months and years of work over them) despite having any element of surprise (since I wrote it all myself) – then, perhaps, they are truly superior. Also there is a certain rules I always follow when creating:
1) My most important and valued rule – "All questions must be answered, unless there will be a sequel". That’s something that bothers me a lot in the stories of other people – they create a mystery, build the suspense around it, and then… just end the story without telling anything. What was the fog’s origins in Stephen King’s "Mist"? How exactly did Ciri stopped the White Frost in "Witcher 3"? Those are only the few out countless questions that were left unanswered in various types of stories, and though that does not automatically make them a bad stories – it still leaves a bitter aftertaste because you were expecting a revelation but got nothing, and that’s why I don’t ever let that be a thing in my plot. If I ask player a question – there must be a clever answer to it. If there is a mystery – there also must be an exciting solution to it. I never consider my story finished if I cannot satisfy player’s curiosity and answer all the questions he might ask about my universe.
2) "Gameplay must be a part of the story, or at least linked to it as close as possible". Of course it’s easier to just separate game on cutscenes and gameplay, so you will play the game and sometimes watch the movie, but the video games is all about immersion, they allow dozens of ways to link stories and gameplay together, so player should just sit and do nothing only when it’s completely necessary for narrative purposes, otherwise he should always be involved, to feel like he is a part of this world. And if separation sometimes necessary (due to technical limitations, for example) – I use carefully crafted pacing, delivering new content in a way that once player starting to get bored from certain activity – he gets to do something else instead. You can see an example of the latter in my rpg "Project Fire". In short – I don’t just write a story, I write a story that will exactly fit the video game format and gain the maximum advantage off that. Of course since people have different tastes for amounts of action and storytelling in game I cannot satisfy everyone, but I try to make it balanced, so even those who like different pacing will maybe at least not get bored.
3) "There is no such answer as "It’s magic" in my stories". That’s a general thing than means "there should be no unreasonable bullshit", be it a person who suddenly acting out of character because story demands it, or the presence of unreasonable deus ex machina. Every event of the story is a logical consequence of previous events, there is no puppeteer behind the strings – so you can expect stories to be wild and sometimes really unpredictable, but always logical, just as the real life is.
4) "There must be a meaning or the emotion behind every story". Majority of my stories have lots of metaphors with the real world for those, who want to see them and think about them. One of the main art purposes in my opinion is obsering certain things from a different perspective, enhancing the world view of the player. But also art was originally created to entertain others, so not every story should bear the message – sometimes just being a fun and emotional adventure is good enough, depending on the type of the game you playing. The only thing that stories certainly should NOT be – it’s a "gameplay justifiers", the game should always revolve around the story, and not the opposite, even if it’s not a story-driven game, or you won’t have fun from something that was forcefully put on top of gameplay (you probably won’t even remember that kind of a stories).
This is what (in my opinion) makes me a good writer, who have the possibility to make the games with a stories that will take place along with the best of the best. But only this is even closely not enough to become a game writer… You know a figure of speech "Jack of all trades, master of none "? Once I was thinking that not doing anything very well is a bad thing. Now I wish I could do anything at all except the only thing I can do well, but unable to do it.
I always knew that it does not matter how good your stories or gameplay concepts are, if you cannot bring them to life, so I tried to learn various ways to do that. In painting I realized that I can’t draw a straight line without special tools, and that I simply cannot even imagine a shape and form of an object that I tried to reproduce on the paper. In 3d modelling I faced similar difficulties. In programming I quickly realized that my brain (that can’t even count well) are uncapable of memorizing even half of the code, and constantly struggles with understanding of it’s meaning – any precise things was always beyond my capabilities, and, what is more important – I never felt any interest to what I was doing. I think that I did the biggest progress in mapping – starting from custom maps for Tenchu 2, then – maps for HOMM, Warcraft, Counter-strike. But still despite all the experience I got – I never moved further than a beginner, my level designs always lacked an artistic touch, it was all functionality, but zero beauty. I can imagine something, but all the tools fail me when I try to bring it to life.
This is how my hopes about making games on my own died, and I started searching for a mod teams to join – but at that time there was only few of them, either I was unlucky, or it was a usual thing, but they always felt apart without ever finishing the mods. In the same time I started writing to the various game developers, offering to show them my work for free – but never got any response from any of them. I think that my poor knowledge of English has something to do with that – no matter how hard I tried, I only learned the most basic ways of communication as stuck there for many years now, so even when I try to speak with people in English on the forums, for example, I often getting comments like "Your grammar is horrendous and I could barely even make out the points you were trying to make" (so everyone who is suffering right now when reading this text – please forgive me for that), and of course I cannot operate a literature, poetic version of English that’s needed to make the text enjoyable to read. Even to release my first game, "Project Fire" to English audience I had to find a translator who agreed to help me with that. That’s something unacceptable for writer who wants to work for the English-speaking dev team… The only possible solution would be me writing on Russian, and then someone else would translate it in English (so they would get a free Russian translation as well), but I doubt that many developers are eager to go trough something like that. Of course it would be great to join any of the Russian-speaking development groups, but there is so few of them, and I think that I already tried all the options with almost no effect.
There is also another nuance – I used the worlds created by someone else only once, when I wrote the spin-off for the Resident Evil series, all the rest of my stories have unique universes because I usually don’t like to dig deep into someone else’s work because I am not sure that I can remember all the rules, events, etc. well enough, and also enjoying full creativity, when me is the only one who is responsible for quality of lore – this approach sparks a creativity inside me and gives me a lot of inspiration in my work, allowing to shape my universes just as I want to see them.
But that should not be a problem, because once people will read the stories and realize how much superior they are to the most other stories created for video games, right… right? Not exacly. It appears that making someone from gamedev company leaders to read your concept is an impossible task. It sounds pretty easy, yeah "just ask them to share 10-20 minutes for you, they aren’t losing anything if they do, correct? ", but in reality it’s like screaming into the void. All of those people have zero internet presence, probably the only guy I managed to email directly was Gabe Newell, but now I am not even sure that it was his email all along, and there is a high chance that he didn’t even read it. The rest are the ghosts, at the very best they have a twitter account, but they block private messages, and what you can say in few words that twitter allows you to use? "Please give me your email, I have an awesome story for you? " – like that will ever work out (but I still tired because I am not very smart). The only thing left is writing directly to their companies instead, explaining the situation and offering them to read any of your concepts without any strings attached, but… even here I hit the rock. For more than 10 years I was sending those emails over, and over, and over again, but the best results I even gained was two initial answers, after what companies went silent. But then some people from the industry finally explained me why this may happen… Let’s look for example at the Epic Games FAQ, there we can find this:
Quote
"I have a great game idea or a great idea for Epic. Can we discuss it?
We are unable to accept outside submissions of any kind. Please do not send us ideas, stories, artwork, game levels, music, etc. We are legally unable to review them. "
I was told that most other companies are bond by exacly same thing – to never read any ideas of the strangers for some legal issues (I assume it might by a copywrite problems or something like that?). This creates another barrier – probably all my letters went to trash before anyone even read them, because support staff that receives them are told to do so, and I don’t even have a chance to say that I am ready to sign up anything that needs to be signed up to bypass this legal issues.
So here I am, spent a huge part of my life on trying to speak with any competent developer who makes a story-based games for at least 10-20 minutes, but failing to do even such a simple task. I don’t understand why humans make life so unnecessary hard with their rules – but this will be one of thousands things that I don’t understand about humans, and it makes me sad. I feel like I felt into the hole in the middle of the street, but no matter how loud I scream – people pass by without noticing, and I am destined to stay in this hole for the rest of my life, despite others being so close to me.
You are maybe thinking "game development is crazy expensive now, you can’t ask for someone just to trust you with so much funding" – but, if you do, you are wrong. I have exactly one game that will probably cost a lot – it’s a military shooter, that’s about as big as any other good linear single-player shooter out there (without open world), but also it has one of my bests stories ever, so it will be worth every cent put into it’s development. The rest of my ideas can be implemented almost by anyone – starting from medium-sized teams around 50 people, and ending on teams with less than 10 members. Of course, the more professional developers will be, and the bigger team – the better will be the end result, but making basic versions of my games should be pretty cheap.
I tried to make games on my own again – that’s how I get familiar with RPG Maker, but soon I realized that it’s limited initial resource base is not enough to make something impressive (if your only skill is writing), but, probably, for once in my life I was really lucky – I met a great artist who shared with me a lot of things regarding this engine, and also was responsible for all the other tasks in my game – he found the needed mods and installed needed scripts, coded various mechanics like stealth and lockpicking, and, most importantly – drew a lot of custom art for the game, replacing the absolute majority of standard graphics and animations, and even made a cutscenes – all that made game look very good compared to the majority of other RMVX games. Only because of his invaluable help I was able to release my first game in Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526430/Project_Fire/
Of course it was still a small indie rpg, we didn’t even had enough power to complete it because all technical job was on the shoulders of my partner, so in 5 years of making we managed to complete only 3-hour prologue to the main story, with only one city and several side quests, and even then we had to cut hard the ending and many other details. Also, since it was one of the many f2p games in Steam and it had zero promotion – not many people found out about it, but…
In the end it got 68% positive rewievs. Most of the negative ones was about bugs, typos or features we could not control (like adding a sound settings to the game), and not a single person were left disappointed with a story, even more – one of the players writes that the story was the only reason why they finished the game! And this was only a prologue to the main story, with half of the characters missing, without any huge mysteries and stuff like that, aimed mostly to make player familiar with the universe, lore and some of the core characters. I think that if nobody have even a smallest complaints about the story – that is a clear sign that the quality of that story went just I expected, despite it’s limited size. But hey, you don’t have to believe me – the game is free, so you can just check it out by yourself, and then tell me how do you feel about it, please!
Sadly, my partner could not work with me any longer – he was too busy in real life, so I started adding this game as example of my work to the letters I wrote for various developers, thinking that maybe they will want to help me with a full version of this game, or it will be interesting enough to convince them to finally read one of my stories, but… nothing changed - years passed, and i still got no replies. Then, consumed by insane boredom I used Rpg Maker once more, but now, without the help of my partner I could not do much (you can see that from terribly minimalistic design), and ended up making an ultra-short visual novel with a plot that I made up in 10 minutes before starting doing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/8zv2sz/just_finished_making_a_minivisual_novel_its/
Still, some people liked it, so at least I didn’t worked for nothing. Especially considering that this time I didn’t found a translator and made the English version myself, that certainly made experience worse for someone (or not, I am not sure – dialogues there were not very complicated).
What else could I do? I could not save money to hire a team to make me a game with the 50$ month income – that’s exactly how much I get for disability pension in Ukraine, and I can’t move anywhere else, the money I get usually barely enough to get food and pay for the internet. I could search for the enthusiasts – but I am not a leader, even the opposite – I am quite asocial human, and see no way find and form the team that would work without payment, I am just not that charismatic to convince people into that.
So, the only remaining way that could lead me to my dream is closed. I needed only 10-20 minutes of the developer’s time, so they could see how good my stories actually are, and how massive could be the impact the will leave on the players – but I never found the way to get that time. Is it all I could do? Certainly not. So I kept on struggling, trying to figure out something else.
Yes, the story-driven games will always be my favorite ones, but also after finishing all the games I had interest in i still had a lot of time, and since I am a man of action, I could not spend it all on movies or books – I started playing online games and spending a lot of time in them, waiting for the next big game to come out. I played more and more of them, and eventually figured out a concept for online game: it’s not 100% original, and rather are a fusion of multiple games and genres, but it offers a gameplay that not a single other game currently has (it feels almost empty niche, and that along will attract a lot of a genre fans), it’s fast-paced, pretty simple and fun, and has the gameplay that will allow it to have a cross-play from any device, including mobile phones, that will guarantee huge audience where everyone will be able to play together. It’s very flexible in terms of adding new game modes and content, and, what is the most important for this type of games – are supposed to be very cheap in development, but has lots of options to sell cosmetic stuff that won’t affect gameplay in any means. With proper updates this game can live for many years, generating enough money to make all the single-player games I ever wanted, and it won’t have any competition at all (at least until other developers will start to make their own copies of it). This is a very low-risk, high-reward concept that should be possible to complete even with pretty small studio, and I would be eager to share it with anyone who would then give me part of the profits to fund the development of my single-player games, but… then again, how do I do that? This time, instead of only studios that might be interested in story-driven game I am free to contact any studio at all that’s interesting to make lots of money with small expenses, and those studios (at least theoretically) should be interesting in considering a very well-thought ideas of game that's made to be profitable, but… here I face same problems as before: people don’t even want to listen. Why do they dismiss a possibility to have a huge profits because they don’t want to spent 10 minutes on reading the concept – is a mystery to me.
I don’t know what to do now, when I failed to find a dev who would trust me as much to simply read any of my concepts. I still keep perfecting my stories and creating new, but now, when I know that they will never see the light of day I often just don’t have a strength to even wake up, staying in bed until half of the day passes, and dreaming about what could be. I still enjoy games, but now they also making me sad – good ones because I see that I could do just the same thing with my dreams, but especially – bad ones, that happen to have a good graphics and other well-implemented elements (that still can’t save a bad game), because I always think of what marvels I could achieve if I only had this resources at my disposal, and they just wasted them on the obviously bad and second-rate idea. I wish I could want something else, or be able to do something else in this world, like other humans. Or I wish that my mental issues were more severe, so I would be unable to see all the beauty of the worlds that will never come to be, all the characters that will never spark any emptions, all the plot twists that will never surprise anyone. The pain that I experience every day because of my disability is bad, but I would take twice more of it just to stop feeling this urge for creation that tortures me a lot more that physical pain. In this world, filled by the people with many various ambitions, is there no place at all for the people like me? Every day my subconscious tells me "nothing in this world has meaning anyway, you are only wasting your time on this attempts, just give up, and wait until your life is finally over" – and I know it’s the rational thing to do, because there is so many people in the world, and if dreams don’t come true to most of them – why should I be the exception? Maybe I am even not so good as I think I am, and things I consider primitive are the true art, so I was wrong all along, thinking that someone would want to see my worlds. Or it’s just the asocial part of me hopes that I will never get those answers anyway, so nothing will change in my life.
I have one more contingency plan, but it’s the last resort measures, and it will be something I won’t do until I am sure that I run out of options. Right now, however, I would like to ask you, fellow gamers, and (hopefully) members of the game industry – have I tried everything I could? Maybe somewhere along the way I missed an opportunity, or even several of them? Right now I am open to any suggestions, advices, or anything you can offer.
There is one more thing i wanted to add - yes, my story is long and complicated to read because of my bad english, but i made it exacly this way to answer most of the common advices i was given and questions i was asked before, so i will humbly ask to read it until the end before commenting.
