#24: Yet Another Deep Breath
“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”
We’ve been funded!!
I Am This Castle has been funded by Arts ACT, and it’s entirely possible you already knew this, because I’ve been posting it around social media prior to posting it here. That’s super exciting, and will allow myself and my team to prototype the game for 6 months between July and December 2025! This is utterly fabulous news, but before I move on…
You can still help fund I Am This Castle!
ACT government funding is making this project possible, but like any project, there are going to be unforeseen costs and other twists and turns, and any extra money that is available to the project will permit us to make it the very best that it can be, and handle the rocking of the boat as things proceed.
Appeals to your generosity aside, here’s what comes next:
Development commencement
Script reading and workshopping has been brought forward to June (though the project begins in July) because I have to be pragmatic about team member availability. I’m extremely excited! Myself, the voice actors, my assisting game designer and my communications pro will be meeting at the end of June (only a couple of weeks away!) to work together on a read of the script as it is (draft #3) and drawing out interactive elements to test as gameplay. I’ll have more about that early in July, to share how it went.
Concept art (credit to Charles Lin)
These adorable little guys are character concept art sketches by the ultra talented Charles Lin, the concept artist on the team, and are refinements of the earlier thumbnail sketches I posted in my February blog post. These are conceptual variations of two of the characters present in the prototype, so their final concepts will be getting turned into 3D models by Bella Sibley and Daniel McKendry!
One of these character concepts has been mostly finalised, but the other is undergoing revisions as we speak - more on that next time.
Blog resumption note
It’s been about 4 months since I’ve written a blog. You may have thought that they were finished entirely. I know I did, for a bit. This blog is a celebration, but also a reflection on life, and specifically the not-writing of blogs and social media, so you can expect armchair musing, finger-tapping, and very little about videogames or technical development. I am many things, and today’s thoughts come to you from Zora the writer, not Zora the gamer, programmer, accountant, or student. It is, essentially, a journal entry. Fancy that.
Personal update: Thoughts on grief
Where should you begin when you want to explain your life to someone you haven’t spoken to in a while? It’s a good question, and for me it begins with scope. Which parts of our lives really are important? What does important mean, and whatever that threshold is, how have we arrived there? How much of life am I talking about? The last week? The last month? The last 20 years? Explaining each increment presupposes some amount of knowledge about the earlier, and at some point in our going backwards, we hit a wall in our childhood beyond which we know nothing about anything, but which was instrumental in determining the current trajectory of our lives that we call the present.
I often fall into this scope-creep, and you might have even witnessed it when talking to me in person, where I feel that in order to explain my day, I have to explain my week, and so on (honestly, it’s a wonder I get anything done). I think it’s the principal driver behind why stories with people older than ourselves rapidly descend into “Well, I think it was before your time, but it started when…” because unlike books, movies, films, plays and videogames, life doesn’t actually come in bits, and it defies attempts to ‘bitify’ it. There is no discrete start or end to much of anything in the natural world, and for many reasons we sometimes seek to elevate ourselves above nature, structuring our lives, languages, cultures, and ways of thinking in opposition to it.
We are troubled when establishing a firm definition of when life begins and ends, because the universe is one endless stream of happenings which are not beholden to words: Birth and death aren’t single things, they are descriptions of the interplay of infinite small interactions beneath our notice but above our comprehension, too numerous to count and too complex to fathom… Even attempting to describe them as things that could be counted quickly becomes impossible, yet we feel that we know them when we see them. Sometimes skips over the “how” and the “why” and gets right to the “what”. The ‘facts’. The ‘reality’ of things.
The reality of things is that 5 people I knew have died in the last 12 months. These are words I can tell you, they are sounds I could make that would bounce around and reach you if we were in the same room, but they are not experiences I can describe accurately to you. Individualism grants each of us a unique perspective, but that uniqueness deranges the explainability of our experience; Universality is what you want if you want a message to be clear - language that everybody understands would be language perfected, it would penetrate all barriers, all bias, all customs, all cultures. The further from unique experience you get, though, the less your message belongs to you at all, and the more universal it is, and the fewer unique selves will feel truly reflected in it, because the experience presupposes all other experiences going backward which contextualise it. Even if all of that could be achieved, still, this ‘perfect’ language also presumes that the purpose of language is efficiency and effectiveness, and not beauty, or tradition, or culture, or art, or love.
What to do, then? How to proceed with life in the aftermath of death as a phenomenon that defies categorisation, comprehension, knowledge? This part, at least, is shorter (for me): Continue making my art.
I will continue to use the privilege of time to build an experience that will resonate with others, even through time, language, and culture, so that others might see themselves in it, and where they do, understand that we are not so different. We are brothers, sisters, non-binary siblings, one and all.
Thanks darlings, much love to you all.
