Building a Personal Valhalla

Because we all deserve nice things. Yes, even you.

I knew that whatever I had to do in my life, whatever I wanted be when I grew up, it'd have to be adjacent to games. The reason for this is simple: when I was little, I wanted to make games, so I explored what that was like as a kid- doodles on paper with markers, inspired by things seen on a screen with an NES or a C64 hooked up to it. I got older, started experimenting with art, programming (that was a short distance to learn I what I already did, that I sucked at math), principles of design. I wanted to learn how to better collaborate with others, because I was the sort of dork that sent in letters asking how to break in, and people gave me actually good advice that people still don't seem to understand: that games can be made by as few as one person, but are more often made by many, so be a team player.

So I went into The Industry, feeling I was more prepared than most. I was, but The Industry is awful, and so got clotheslined anyway.

But I never lost the want to create, and when you know how a thing is done, even the theoretical act of craft can be therapy. It, in fact, can especially be therapy, because if you do a thing for the sake of enjoyment, and then don't actually follow through on the hard part- actually making it real -you've skipped out on the actual stressful part of the process.

It also adds to your personal idea pile, which is one of those things you want to have as a dev. Not so you can be an Idea Guy for others, god forbid, just so you get in the practice of developing ideas and spinning them into systems, and also, so you have systems ready to go, waiting under the counter like a TV chef.

Never don't design a game, even if you don't actually intend to see it through as a product. Just, you know, don't let them take precedent over your real work.

Which is why I'm here. I am, at least to my bastard perfectionist brain, here to put a game called BASIC and its Otherlore setting in your hand, and that remains the plan. Just that stuff in life has given me cause to want to retreat and regroup from my current status quo, including what I was doing to keep my mind working. I shifted focus, because where I was focused reminded me too much of factors in life that were causing me to sink into my illness, rather than out of it.

So I spent some time in A Strange Wilderness.

The Impetus

The current state of Destiny 2, a game in an ongoing series that seemed to its most bought-in playerbase to be hitting its stride, is one that's sort of without precedent. Namely, they're seeing what can only be described as a mutiny, over a game that appears to be little more than a flashy facade over a big hollow space. And in that hollow space, is microtransaction-purchased lootboxes, containing stuff that the first game had. Stuff they took from you when you made the jump from 1 to 2. 

People are not happy, just like they aren't happy with the fact that despite developer Bungie's repeated assurances that "we are listening," they aren't. Their latest update, literally titled the Go Fast update, meant to increase movement speed and decrease time to kill, keeps sprint speed the same and... doesn't really do much to decrease TTK either. It's the sort of space where even the most dense right wing gamer dickhead can form a cogent thought and effectively bludgeon Bungie with it, because they've left themselves just that open, on every point they should have been improving upon.

And like hell if I'm not the sort of person to look at this mess and see it as something other than a chance to say "I bet I could do better."

In doing so, I realized that I was basically describing the shape of a personal Valhalla. Which in all honesty, I think that's why a lot of people actually play videogames- because they wish fighting actually was fun, and that it had no real consequence. 

The World

Realities collided and were unmade, what parts that survived the initial event spinning apart and collapsing in the aftermath. There was nothing we could do, because this occurred at a level beyond our reckoning, even now. What we do know is that from a cosmic convergence, fusion occurred. From that fusing of realities, one remains now: the New Nature. The titular Strange Wilderness

The New Nature is a place of looser physical tolerances, and wider margins. Hard limits are less so here, and more about what's within reason, rather than physics. But what's more alarming is the forests here are cities, or at least some of them are. The leaves are solar panels, and the creepers that grow on them are wiring, and the's gutters and pipes growing naturally in them. It's because they're places literally made for us. There's a few places like that, in fact. Made for us.

But this isn't a utopia, it's natural order reasserting itself. These are habitats for us, just another species of life that populates a reality that seems tuned to keep us in check. Mother makes her presence known. She allows us what we need to be our best selves. She disallows us from getting too comfortable and slipping. 

And there are other competitors in this wilderness, too, with their own forces backing them, different from the other animals of the New Nature. Some are twisted debris, ghosts of those lost in the convergence, lost in the unknown and kicking at the fabric of reality. Some are reflections of our older, worse selves, similarly twisted, and similarly trying to assert themselves in this New Nature. They let us know what they want, and it's us, the new Tribe of People, gone so they can dictate the shape of a new history.

To them, we say: welcome to natural selection. Bring it on.

The Concept

For right now, I've been building A Strange Wilderness in mind as a free to play game, modeled off of Warframe. Because of course, I'd want to try to do something in the style of Digital Extremes, they're the people to watch for how to do this sort of thing. As for the specifics from the doc, here's the bullet point list of the sort of framework I've been developing for the thing.

• A loot-based FPS action roleplaying game. Because, of course, this whole thing started out wanting to blueprint a better Destiny than Destiny 2 has turned out to be, working from a list of dev mistakes and unanswered player requests.
• More detailed character class gameplay- five classes instead of three, where the experience is more built toward making choices regarding skill and equipment, then locking them in on a mission, rather than constantly tweaking and rejiggering, because if you're not optimized, you're dead. The classes are the Apex, the tanker that specializes in not only taking hits, but making others pay for the damage; the Courser, a berserker that charges into a pack by pouncing on the weakest target, then working their way up the chain; the Raptor, a precision shooter that is equally accurate on their feet as they are in the air; the Stalker, one that blends in, prowls and then affects terror in their prey by emerging in ambush and tearing the nearest one apart; and the Venom, attuned to the New Nature's arcane rhythms, capable of making poison, flesh and fire from seemingly nothing.
• Post-capitalist reward and resource systems. Because money is for chumps, and Mother hates it.
• Lite-MMO mechanics that combine a more in-depth social aspect, with more co-op based small squad gameplay. In other words, a place to explore that thing I've been hinting at my fascination with: comfortable and safe online social spaces for actual friends to meet and play, rather than companies to turn into their own weird hybrid of matchmaking and social media.
• A chance to look at free to play mechanics and economy, because honestly, doing it right and honestly interests me, and I've never really looked in depth at that sort of stuff.

Today for me was a pulse check, showing folks that I'm still here and still trying to do my thing. I want to give you all BASIC and Otherlore like it says on the page, but I also need to take time away when my brain breaks down from time to time. Because it does that. What I do when I take that time? I at least can show you, and hope you find it interesting. 

More to come from A Strange Wilderness soon.