Ok, so bear with me.
(but if you really dont want to, TL;DR : I made a small game)
This is the story of how a doodle became my biggest passion project.
This character you see coming out of those pinkish/red circles? It’s Django, I created it when I was about 20? (that’s a long time ago). I’ve carried this little character around with me forever.
I was one day doodling, wanting to create a little guy that reminded me of my favorite childhood characters, Sam & Max, who were originally a comic, then a cartoon, and then a videogame.
These guys :
And the result looked like that:
At first I was writing small stories for this anthropomorphic creature, short comics that I never shared (I’ve been shy about my work for a long time). I kept doodling trying to understand his story.
I thought I could write comics with him as the main character, going on impossible adventures, an Adventure Time-ish vibe. But that wasn’t right, it was too static in its format.
So, I made a pixel version of him.
I had never done pixel art before (and it shows), but I really enjoyed the process, and started developping the character in his pixel world, always inspired by the old Lucas Arts point & click games which Sam & Max were a part of. After all, what initially inspired me was a video game, so it made sense that Django should be a game character who can move, explore and do things that I haven’t all predefined for him.
Then life happened and I put my exploration of Django on hold, on & off for years.
But the itch kept coming back, I had a story to tell, so I started creating a whole bunch of characters who lived in the same world as him, their background stories, and what all tied them together.
I changed Django’s appearence a little bit.
A couple of years back, during the pandemic, I took another stab at building that world, but not just in words and pixel characters but also with backgrounds, which I wasn’t used to. That was a hell lot more difficult than I had expected. So much time for such an underwhelming result.
It just didn’t express the atmosphere I wanted to create.
And once again, I felt I wasn’t good enough, or enough as a single person to work on this project, my actual job was overwhelming, and other personal events in my life made it impossible to focus on developping this game. Until…
Until 2023, where my life finally felt stable enough that I could allow myself a break and work on this project. I took a break off work during the summer 2023 and dug up all my old ideas, cleaned up the game design documents I had created a couple years back, put together what I believe to be a coherent interesting narrative for a game, with a lot of mysteries to solve and characters to talk to.
It looked like that:
I shied away from the background drawings at first but finally gave myself a kick in the butt and did it anyway, accepting that it won’t be perfect, and that’s ok.
I designed the narrative and dialogues, the gameplay, the backgrounds and characters, and ended up putting out a demo of the game that you can play test here : https://nellzero.itch.io/exit-47 .
Nelly Harvey 