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What Desire: Haitoku no Rasen Showed Me About Storytelling, Game Design, and Myself
Content Warning: Contains spoilers if you haven’t played this game, I’d highly recommend at least one playthrough first which you can do for free via The Asenheim Project. Or just go full speed ahead, it’s up to you.
And while the screenshots and videos within are relatively tame and wouldn’t raise eyebrows if you’re reading this at work, there’s still going to be some sex talk so you might want to sit this one out if that makes you uncomfortable and you were hoping for more strictly Gamasutra type fare.
If you’re a game developer, especially an indie developer, you can end up seeing your own work in a vacuum by default. We think in terms of asset creation, flowcharts and dialog spreadsheets, finding the right talent and resources to help us bring it all to fruition, then sales figures and marketing strategy, and if people are talking about the game and daaaaamn it’s a lot.
We not only have to step outside of that vacuum, we also have to remember what made us want to make games in the first place. Because we’re looking at our own work, we over-analyze it to death. Is this line of dialog contrived, what’s going to land me this scathing review in Kotaku, are players going to be too disinterested in this part, that hair is three pixels off — sometimes we just have a hard time striking a balance between insurmountable perfectionism and getting shit done. We deliberate until the engine gets at least three updates, knowing someone isn’t going to like some design decision or another.
But when we make time to play games, be they new to us or revisiting inspiration of the past, we see the sum of all the assets, testing, notebooks full of doodles and plot ideas, beta testing, and assuming your game was made after 2010 — the inundating social media posts.
