Behind the Scenes - An Overview of Little Burned Maiden's Development

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At the beginning, back in January of 2020--back when we were thinking, "Oh man, that coronavirus thing in China, it's like the Swine Flu! Hope it doesn't get too bad!"--I was realizing something: I had never made a game on my own. Certainly, I had made a number of games for school (All of which are free to download and play from my website) but I did not own those games. They belonged to my school. DigiPen Institute of Technology copyrights all of my productions--to protect them with their lawyers and also to keep teams from fighting over their IP. In the past, I had certainly tried to make games in my free time and had a handful of prototypes fragmenting away on my computer, but nothing I had finished. All artists did art in their spare time. As a writer, I write in my spare time. How hard could it possibly be to make a game in my spare time?

As silly as this sounds, my primary goal was to make a product I could sell. While that screams "sellout", I think the try desire was to prove myself as a game developer--to make something of sellable quality and to have convincing enough marketing that people would buy my game. I wanted to prove I could make something desirable enough that people who did not know me would pay money to possess it. Surely, if I did that, it would prove I was a "real game designer" or something. Obviously, that is not exactly how it works. But I just wanted concrete proof and external validation. So, I started working on Little Burned Maiden.

I plan everything in weeks. The first six weeks, I established the basic combat system, the basic art style, and the basic dialogue system (which continues to have major bugs to this very day). The world has been long established in both my head and in the form of serialized email-fiction that I email to my friends, so that didn't need much creative energy. It was all about functionality. I made it so you could walk around, walk between buildings, and hit objects and people. I figured, if I could make a game where you hit people and talk to people... well, that was about 50% of what all good, real games were. I made it my goal. So I kept going. Around this time, there was an unexpected snowstorm up where I lived and I had extra time to work one. I expanded the script to feature a few dozen characters and made sure the scrappy AI code was nice and piecemeal to work for all of them.

Then, quarantine happened. I was one of the lucky ones who had a stable living condition and lots of free time. I spent that free time hacking away at the code, writing up the dialogue, doing the art, and implementing Freesound.org copyright (0) sounds. It was legitimately really hard. I am awful at coding--ask any of the people who even heard about the code. (Until someone came along and changed it, the dialogue was ENTIRELY if/then statements. There are about five foreach loops that run every frame. I know these things are bad but I don't know different ways to do it. And for anyone who doesn't know what I'm on about, this basically translate to "Coding Bad".) I spent weeks making the bosses work. They're still not very fun. I spent weeks trying to hunt down the dialogue bugs. Profession solo devs laughed with their pre-coded dialogue systems they bought from the Unity asset store.

Often, I laid awake at night, wondering if I would ever be "good enough". I spent a LOT of time thinking about how this game was a waste of time. A waste of energy. And how it would eventually be a waste of people's money. You see, this game was NEVER very good. There was never a point in which I felt it was "worth" the price tag I wanted to put on it. It is not polished in the way that games should be to make money. It's all very amateur. And to make matters worse, I was a junior in college. Why wasn't I good enough yet?

The design choices make sense in a hypothetical assassin life sim, but in this one, they're no good. Why do I have the awkward schedule and jumping around NPCs? The town isn't big enough that you can't just walk around and run into everyone, not to mention that their schedules are basically impossible to follow (Heck, I don't know them all...). Why is there so much talking and world-building in this shitty bullet hell? The people who are here for the talking are annoyed when random NPCs attack them and the people here for the bullet shell are disappointed when they have no idea why they're doing anything. I told myself it was just a scrappy world and I tried to make the characters as well-rounded as possible but with their randomized dialogue order, it's nearly impossible to give them coherent plot lines--players only learn more through the joy of discovery. This makes no sense. I should have just coded boolean-access to create real, branching dialogue. Why is the furniture push-able? Destructible? "Cuteness" is the answer, and a very lacking one. Why do you need to eat once per day if I NEVER IMPLEMENTED THE PERMA-DEATH MECHANIC?

I want so badly to be able to live wherever I want and make money off of my games. Like all the YouTubers I see and admire and like my older friends, who are literally doing that. But I'm not a good enough game developer that I can do that... yet.

This sounds like I'm just being down on myself--and obviously, I am--but in actuality, I came to realization that it doesn't really matter if I don't think I'm good enough. What matters is that I do something. Who cares if this doesn't sell well? It's my first professional game and I have another year in college. This is also the longest game I've ever made. What matters is that I learn from it. Everything is practice. I am just practicing to be a real game developer. I am practicing to be an Instagram influencer. I am practicing, practicing, practicing... and as long as I'm learning and as long as I'll do better, it doesn't matter how well I do it right now. Eventually, maybe I will be "good enough". But I won't get there by being a ball of frozen anxiety and doing nothing. I will only get there by pushing ahead--to have enough faith in myself that I will figure it out.

So, I kept pushing forward. I asked for everyone I could to help me along the way. Some people were "meh" on the whole idea. I had a couple of really important people tell me how stupid and pointless this all was (and I agreed with them but I kept doing it anyway). But some people thought my ideas were inspiring and worth pursuing. Matt Muth gave me advice on the introduction. Bridget Smith used her writing and sociology knowledge every week to give me feedback on the story and how its people were portrayed. People I had never met before became fascinated with the story and these little quirky characters--seeing through the rough exterior to the world I loved beneath. Some people just liked the llama. Everyone had advice for how to make the game better--heck, *I* had advice for how to make the game better. So much of it was left unused because I didn't know how to even begin to implement it. Some of it was left unused because I wanted to get my hands off of the product instead of refining it forever.

It was around March that I decided I wanted to release it in August. I wanted it out of my hands. I wanted the beginning of my Senior year--the last year of my school--to have as much of my attention as possible, so it needed to be done. I want to play games and I want to avoid Senioritis and I want to hang out with my college friends (you know, as much as you can with Covid-19) and I don't want to be so worried about this game. Now, August is here. The game is pretty bad. I imagine, if I had more time, I could do more--In fact, I know I could. Maybe I could get the rest of the mini-games into this "life sim". Maybe I could get the design loops to actually make sense. But as my professor Jeremy Holcomb always says, "The best answer is to make more games." I am inclined to agree. It's the "throw more pots" effect. (You know, the study where one class of students tried to make one perfect pot and the other class made a pot a week. And the pot-a-week class made better pots...) So. In August, while I will continue to do whatever bug fixing I can manage and maybe I will port it to Steam or Android, I will be "done" with Little Burned Maiden.

Little Burned Maiden is wildly imperfect and while I won't stand behind all of my decisions--I won't go and claim they were all brilliant and I'm just a misunderstood genius--I will stand behind the game and say, "I am proud that I completed this." It doesn't matter if Little Burned Maiden is imperfect because it's just practice. And when my next game comes out, it'll just be practice for the next. Just as everything in life should be.

Very little in life is so very unforgiving that you only get one shot--You can always learn and move on from your mistakes. There is no need to hate yourself for having not done something before. I hope you find a little of that lesson in Little Burned Maiden itself, even if it's just through the simple cycle of fighting enemies and overcoming them.