The Mysteries of Raziel

Posted on October 19th, 2014

I am still working on Raziel. It’s just that over the last month or so, my life has been quite something. First, there was meeting my long-distance boyfriend in person for the first time — and the mad scramble in the days prior to make my apartment properly presentable. (He was with me for a week and yes, it was quite lovely. He also introduced me to Doctor Who, which explains my Twitter lately.) When he left, I missed him terribly. I also had to look for a new job, which I somehow got fairly quickly. I started work last week. So basically, lots of stuff going on. Good stuff mostly, but certainly stuff that takes time and adjustment.

But back to Raziel.

The biggest challenge of making this game isn’t (yet) anything technical. It’s having So Many Ideas and so much planning to do, definitely more planning than I’ve ever had to do before. The snags I run into are things like locations and story details and exact battle mechanics and figuring out how to use those mechanics to help tell the story, especially when I’m not totally sure of all the story yet, especially the parts that happen between the beginning and the ending. Which is basically “most of it”. Then, on top of that, I have kind of a perfectionist streak. I want this game to be as cool as what I see in my head and I’m prone to tripping myself up with fears that it won’t.

The thing with Raziel is that unlike every single other game I’ve made before, there isn’t just one story. It’s a bunch of little stories combining into a whole. So instead of figuring out how to tell one story, I have to build a bunch of them and tie them all together in a way that best represents the whole. And I have to plan locations, themes, visuals, etc. to do all that instead of just words and a few pictures.

And until I have all that stuff planned out with some degree of certainty, it’s going to be rather difficult to set up much else.

I know deep down I’m up to it; I’m going to make it work. But when there’s so much you can do, it can be a bit overwhelming to figure out what you should do.