Conquest - Making Off

 In my mother language, we have a saying "A necessidade aguça o engenho" which very roughly translates to "Necessity is the mother of invention".

And this very concept was what created the short story I published a couple of days ago.

As I have said, one of the multiple projects that I started related to Anduria was a game. Now, I have to say that I know close to nothing about how to program a game so I opt to use RPG Maker to create my game instead of trying to create a platform from scratch. 

This particular challenge that I created was more for me to experience the pains of creating a game than to properly expand Anduria as I was curious about it and wanted to try it out for myself. And let me tell you, it is not easy. Not world-ending-hard, but not easy, especially for a first try. There were lots of stuff that I had to learn and I'm still learning every time that I jump on that particular project.

I will eventually post something dedicated to the making off of the game itself but one of the struggles I faced was what should the game be about. 

I know what I don't like, and I didn't want those things on my game, like forced limits to where a player can go and I normally dislike the concept of a group of strangers having to band together to save the world. So from the very start, I needed to have some characters that knew themself from the beginning and a place that could be explored with natural boundaries. Also, to a lesser level, I wanted to try to do something on the parts of Anduria that I hadn't worked on yet. 

I opted to use one of the islands of the Broken Isles. Almost none of them even have a name yet, so I could have a small setting the player could explore with artificial barriers. The main characters I used are not very relevant right now, but another struggle I faced was the game's antagonist.

Now, the game itself will not be very long, as I don't have the ability or willpower to create an engaging long game, but even so, I knew that I needed an antagonist of some sort. And then it rang on my head, that Karrinstorn is invading those same islands in the timeline of the main story I'm writing. Assuming that the game is happening temporarily close to the main story, Karrinstorn would be a good antagonist. And I start working on one.

Now, RPG Maker has a built-in function to create characters, but it is not as powerful as I would like. Even so, I manage to create someone that would look very different from the main characters while still appearing as being from the same reality.

This is what I was able to create:

And so, a pale warrior cladded in red was born. He hadn't a name back then but as soon as I created him a little part of my brain started to work on him. Suddenly I knew that his name was Karon, and he was one of the high-end generals of the Karrinstornian army. And then he had this group of three soldiers that worked directly under him and had some type of friendship other than just being soldiers. I also knew that he would have a twisted sense of justice and duty that would drive him to protect lives if those lives were not in the way his orders. He would also be extraordinarily loyal to the Empire. And, and, and.

And I had created a new character. Every little idea I had would lead me to something else and eventually, he was his own character. 

Unfortunately, I am a master procrastinator, and as soon as this character was born on my mind my brain was like "Hey, let's just drop everything and write about this guy instead".

Now, I must say, this is as it always happens. I have an idea, start developing it and by the time it is strong enough to use in the story it has created something else and I end up focusing on that other thing. This has the unfortunate side effect that I end up with very little actually done outside of my imagination.

Not this time. This time I tried something else. I allowed myself to write about this new cool character, but I decided that I would do just a short story, and I forced myself to finish it on one go. I would not stop writing it until I had reached an endpoint that I was happy about.

The short story took about two hours to write and I'm kinda happy with it. There were somethings that I wanted to add that I couldn't, and the ending is a bit open-ended but from the feedback I got it was clear enough. 

This is it. I had to remove from my system the need to write about this character and the story Conquest was the result. And It worked. 

I was able to focus on the game again without having that temptation to go work on something else which was a strange new feeling for me, so I might end using this trick more often as I work on other stuff, we will see.

This was it, just a little insight into the origins and cause of the short story.

Love you all <3