Hi all! It's officially been ONE YEAR since That Which Faith Demands launched and I graduated from college. Absolutely fucking wild to me. I can't overstate how influential the project has been to my practice as a designer, storyteller, and member of the game dev community. Thanks so much to everyone who's played it, reviewed it, left a kind word or a thoughtful message. You mean the world to me.

To celebrate and commemorate a year post-launch, I'm doing a few things:

• Publishing a multi-part postmortem on the making of the game, from pitch to prototype to final build. These posts will be in the form of essays, but they'll be accompanied by tutorials, screenshots, and perhaps even prototypes of the early versions of the game!
• Releasing never-before-seen planning documents, notes, diagrams, and flowcharts that were made in the making-of
• Permanently lowering the price of the game to $5

And, alongside each blog post I release in the series, the inimitable Austin M. will be releasing a new track inspired by the game and the world of That Which Faith Demands, eventually forming an EP of 7 new tracks! Their first release can be listened to here: https://austinmwav.bandcamp.com/track/heaven

Lastly, attached to this post is a 52-page PDF featuring scanned notes, diagrams, and essentially the entire paper trail of my process. In case you haven't purchased TWFD, the PDF is available for free download here.

SALVAGE // INTRODUCTION

This is the introduction to SALVAGE, a multi-part devlog (devblog?) series documenting the creation of my thesis game That Which Faith Demands.  The series is currently estimated to be approximately 7 parts long, dedicated to individual facets of the creation process organized both chronologically and by discipline. I’m planning to go over the initial prototyping process, narrative design, characters and worldbuilding, as well as technical aspects of the game like implementation and audio-visual components. 

Ideally, each part will be published on the 14th of that month.

PROJECT ORIGIN

That Which Faith Demands was originally conceived as a pitch for an application to be mentored by Talespinners. The mentorship was meant to be an introductory project for aspiring game writers & narrative designers, meant to provide a chance to develop their own project while receiving feedback and guidance from working industry professionals. In August 2020, I prepared a 1 page document outlining my idea:

written august 2020, last updated 08/11/20

I worked in ink at the end of my Narrative Design course in the Spring 2020 semester. While learning it on my own ultimately resulted in me downsizing my prototype, I was amazed at how flexible it was and how it was ideal for more complex narrative possibilities, especially in Unity. Throughout undergrad, narrative systems were occasionally present but not really the focus of our projects. I wanted to be able to learn ink and explore what it can really do.

Fall of 2020 was the beginning of my senior year at MICA; I was planning on working on this in parallel to my senior thesis. At the time, my senior thesis project was planned to be something different– a collaboration across majors with my friend and roommate. Our timelines didn’t match up, as we were in separate departments, so I eventually floated the idea of having this project– which as of then was still waiting for a response– be my thesis, ideally resulting in me having the combined mentorship of both the Talespinners mentors and my department faculty. 

Unfortunately, I wasn’t accepted by the Talespinners mentorship. It was crushing, but I liked the pitch I came up with too much to abandon it. So I held tight to it and decided to follow through.

The project itself was inspired by my summer of mecha. I got really into playing TTRPGs online with my friends, particularly Beam Saber by Austin Ramsay. I also was watching Gundam and Eureka 7 with friends, which all congealed into an excitement and fixation on mecha content in both creating and consuming. 

However: as a rising senior in game design, I was very conscious of the role of my thesis. It wasn’t going to be my magnum opus, but it was going to embody what I love about games and what I want to get hired for. In the case of my mecha fixation, this resulted in my pitch: a narrative driven game about mecha, but not combat driven. I was aware of my technical limitations from the get go, and wanted to explore the genre from the perspective of its aftermath.

Of course, at the time of pitching this project to my professors and peers, I was significantly less…uh…cognizant…of what I wanted the project to be.

Here are some of the slides of the presentation I made early in the semester:

This presentation was made in September of 2020. Looking at this project retrospectively, it’s easy to pinpoint what I focused on at the time and what my learning outcome was. But the majority of my time developing it was a haze where I was vaguely person-shaped and held together by duct tape and spite. If I had been completely unsupervised and left to my own devices, I can’t say that I would have finished the project or brought it anywhere near its current state. Thankfully, the thesis class was built to prevent that.

The next part of SALVAGE will discuss the initial prototyping process and my early iterations of the game’s system. If anyone has any questions regarding the process that you’d like to see answered, feel free to let me know! Til next time.