I’ve Created Many Games. I Made One Game.
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I read somewhere one time that it is good practice and a reflective experience to write about the projects that you complete. This article is about my latest game (as of April 2021), Peace Away.
The currently available build of the game, which I expect will be the last (barring any reveal of a host of issues I have yet to catch), is a rewrite of the story presented by the 2020 version, which ironically was coined “Final Mix”. The Final Mix version itself was a rewrite and visual overhaul of the original 1.0 release in 2019. And that instance of Peace Away was already quite derivative, being a re-tread on ideas I had explored in my first ever game, A World At Peace, in 2016.
The First Piece
Let’s stick on At Peace for a moment. Under the crunch of it being a university class final, and having to learn 3D modeling and Unreal Engine from scratch, there was no room to convey anything narratively complex. The game features zero named characters, no lore drops, and an absence of backstories. There exists a world of static meshes, with a peaceful music track playing in the background, while the player encounters vague poetic dialogue and collects enough “collectibles” to engage in the finale’s quandary:
Given the choice, would you stay in this tranquil world forever, or leave, taking the chance on the unknown?
To be honest, the principal reason I came up with that was to justify a total lack of animation in the game. It’s a peaceful world, sure, but several players, and those seeing it for the first time, described the stillness as “creepy.” I think “unsettling” is a more accurate word, but the sentiment galvanized the balance of the ending: there’s just something unnerving about a relentless lack of change.
The Only Peace
In April of 2019, I felt the most depressed I had ever been since high school. I think I was probably experiencing depression the entire year up to that point, but the previous months had held enough distractions to alleviate some of it. By now, I was a lead on a large game dev team for my senior thesis, and had contributed a lot to the art and story direction. I also had a falling out with one of the other leads, and fell greatly behind what I planned to produce for one of the main areas, which was to be my primary deliverable on the project. My friends were entrenched in their own work, and overall there was no long-term relief to count on anymore.
In April of 2019, I created the project file for Peace Away.
The idea was simple: I just really, really wanted to come back to A World At Peace. Now I had all this life experience (which I haven’t completely divulged here, but just take “fell greatly behind what I planned” from before, and imagine that applied across the board) that seemed to reaffirm the importance to stepping outside one’s comfort zone — specifically, the danger of that “creepy”, yet alluringly safe stillness. Suddenly, I was waking up every day wanting to make stuff again, and that did end up helping me somewhat salvage the rest of my thesis.
After graduating from uni in May, I worked for two months and completed Peace Away in July, right before a conference I planned to go to, as a sort of “final opportunity” to take advantage of my student status and start “networking” in the industry. The 2019 build of Peace Away featured a haphazard amount of under-cooked story ideas crammed into a 15 minute experience, and was not the level of 3D graphical fidelity I’d hoped to show off by then. But it was out there.
I greatly under-utilized going to that conference, by the way.
Peace Out
With quarantine hitting in 2020, I was suddenly presented with a wealth of indeterminate free time, and removed from my internship-level job at a visual effects studio, which I was in the middle of learning to navigate and network within. I started thinking about my collective body of work. Most of my university projects were either too rushed, too outdated, or too incomplete to represent as portfolio pieces, and Peace Away was the main draw despite my growing fear that it was not a strong enough showing either.
In an effort to hone my creative and game art practices, and to follow through on the expanded story trying to be told, I began working on remaking the game, as Peace Away Final Mix.
(Side note: Naming this new version “Final Mix” at the time seemed a cool subtitle, a cheeky reference to Kingdom Hearts, and a sarcastic nod to the amount of times I had iterated on the base narrative idea, but it turned out to be a mental nightmare writing, saying, and promoting out loud.)
Final Mix launched in June 2020. It nearly doubled the length of the original and added some pretty heavy story content, including allusions to verbal and physical abuse. I remade the soundtrack and released it on Spotify. The visuals were finally at a point that I was happy with, even though I only learned a little over half of what I wanted to.
But, man.
You know when something just feels off?
Piecing Away
Earlier this year, I went back into Peace Away, removed the “Final Mix” branding, added controller support, and revised the story, removing as much fluff and unnecessary melodrama as I thought I could, to focus primarily on the peaceful feeling of taking a break from the chaotic unknown, and why the main character might feel the need to do so. There’s a reason why I haven’t described what the narrative details of Peace Away actually are, and that’s simply because I still believe the best presentation of the idea is A World At Peace. To me, Peace Away is holistically a years-long affirmation of At Peace’s main conceit. Once you peel back all the additives, the more overt fictional world, story, lore, and characters, at the end of the day, it’s still me choosing, over and over again, the safer answer to the question:
Given the choice, would you stay in this tranquil world forever, or leave, taking the chance on the unknown?
Huh.
No, that doesn’t seem right to end on.
I think I’ve outgrown constantly building this one game and story, sure, but I actually feel like that big question is philosophically misleading. To the best of my ability, I will always have these games to play, the memories of making them, and the person(s) that I was.
When I made A World At Peace, I imagined the “correct” choice being a bittersweet leap into the future, totally casting aside the confines of the peaceful world.
But who doesn’t want to feel calm and cozy every now and then?