Aesthetic Thoughts and Meta-Fiction

[GideonWilhelm]

Let me tell you a story.

Imagine, it's christmas morning, 2001.  Your parents just got a brand new Windows XP machine, and your dad splurged on one of those Voodoo2 3D accelerators your friends keep going on about.  Your mom also picked up a game for it.  It's this weird Japanese RPG that your mom says is apparently supposed to be just like Wizardry.  And it came in a FAT jewel case.  Like, you've played Final Fantasy 9, you know anything on four discs has to be awesome, and this thing comes on, like, six.

It's a daydream I had, spurred on by fiddling with the graphics in Godot.  There's an entire era of gaming we left behind (and for good reason) where texture filtering was the hot new craze, and everything everywhere was all blurry textures on sharp geometry.  It's a late 90s/early 2000s PC gaming kinda look.  Like I said, there's a good reason we left it behind, but I'm enchanted by it.  I mean, why wouldn't I be?  That's back when I was around 10 years old, I had nothing to worry about, games were this fascinating new frontier.

At work, I've been daydreaming this metafiction about a Japanese development studio that started work on a new PC dungeon crawler with 3D graphics in this new era of 3D accelerators, after grid based dungeon crawlers started falling out of vogue.  But it's the game they wanted to make, and they poured their hearts and souls into it, and left themselves with almost nothing left for marketing.  They barely recouped their losses, and the studio was no more.

It's because I want to make something that feels like a piece of lost media.  That term has a lot of horror implications, but that's really not what I'm going for.  Just a game that never truly saw the light of day the way it wanted to, that someone found at a garage sale, thought was interesting, and had it translated.  I really wanna share screenshots with this post, but it'll have to wait until... I have graphics.  I was just so excited and really wanted to share this idea.  Imagining the game being made by some studio formed in 1996 or something feels like such a wonderful creative outlet on multiple channels.

[Warthog]

Are you aware of UFO 50? The meta-fiction of the game is very similar to your premise. UFO Soft was a video game company with its own hardware that was ahead of its time and well received, but came to be forgotten until some people came upon their old software in storage and ported it to modern hardware. The 'preservation team' of course actually being the developers of the fifty faux-retro games in the collection. If you haven't already I suggest looking into it for reference.

[GideonWilhelm]

That's going on the wishlist, it looks so cool!  Love that it even has a dungeon crawler in it!

Honestly I've been thinking of this metafiction as a way to sort of manifest my creative mind, I guess?  Like if I hit a wall... what would some Japanese guys in 1996-2000 do?  Plus, I think working on developing the fictional story of this game's creation helps energize me if I don't feel up to doing any work on the game just yet.  I'm drawing a lot of inspiration from Majuular's recounting of the story of FromSoftware and its founder, Naotoshi Zin, as well as the development of King's Field and its scenario writer, Shinichiro Nishida.  For some reason, I just find the story of King's Field's development so enchanting.