The Seed

In as few words as possible, the game story was written to line up and echo with real events and scenarios at the worst point in my life: the loss of my mother. Like the main character, she contracted a rare cancer and the hospital and her friends failed to detect it and misdiagnosed her. I moved back from California to Michigan to be next to her side, leaving my family and business behind and nearly losing everything. I am bipolar. Losing my mother forced me into a manic state that seemed to never end. Perpetually feeling alone, destroyed and always waking with a pit in my stomach before reality hit me and told me that my seemingly endless nightmares really happened and she was gone forever.

The Fertilizer

Each night, I would lay next to my mother in hospice in her living room, couch pulled next to her bed and we'd hold hands and talk for hours in between her naps. However, those soft moments didn't come without extreme mental disruptions for me... Day after day, night after night, psychosis swallowed most of my sanity. I began free-writing (letting my mind go blank and allowing my brain to talk directly to my hand) and what came out was absolutely insane, but it was my reality. Once you play the game, you will instantly recognize and understand those moments in which I was truly breaking in the real world.

The Plant

The idea of `The Nothing` a virtual void between everyones minds was where I felt my actual mind was stuck. Somehow not alive but not dead; stuck in a in a vast purgatory where no one could hear me scream or my words. It felt like a waking sleep paralysis. This is the main context point in the story, where Dresden accidentally discovers such a place and I explain it in the story as a flaw in the NeuroLink network. When Dresden discovers `The Nothing` he finds he is not alone, someone -- or something -- is there as well, laying in wait. For a time, my inner monologue was loud and seemed to exist on it's own, independent of myself. I was aware it was psychosis, but had no capability to disconnect from it, and so that became a plight for our player character as well. I tied the game and this etherial world together granting Dresden the ability to step into the minds of anyone connected at will through `The Nothing` as a connective signularity. This would give Dresden the ability to control/read the minds of anyone in the world.

The Fruit

In 2017, two years after she died, I was absolutely dehumanized and destroyed as a person. I needed a way to take my mind off the persistence of loss and as Unreal Engine and resources became widely available, I followed my lifelong dream of wanting to make video games. I am a polyglot systems architect by trade, so the jump wasn't insurmountable, but still steep. The plan was never to make a serious game, I was just burning time and trying to overcome the loss of my mother. Eventually, I realized I might have something tangible with my writings and, so, over the next 7 years I worked tirelessly on this game, rewriting it a total of 6 times and along the way, hiring 3d modelers, actors, riggers, mocap actors, anyone I needed to bring my vision to reality.

Today, this chapter is coming to a close and I can share my work with the world.

This journey, this script, reliving that event hundreds of times a day definitely helped me become stronger and overcome something that destroyed my life.

I feel like I have written and built something special from the ashes and this is my way to provide something to the world in which I can also show what wonderful woman my mother was and the impact she will forever have on me.

I hope you join me on this journey.

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