THE QUESTION, MR. KENTON ANDERSON, THE QUESTION...

Nothing, really. I don't put a whole lot of thought into it because I don't have any stories to tell. For Necropolis, I had an idea for a battle system and then decided to turn it into an 8-bit and Castlevania homage since it needed graphics and a story as well.

In the past I have started creating a story from the beginning without knowing where it would go. So I guess what I started with was... the desire to create any sort of story at all, and from there I made what I thought would be a good opening scene for a random story, and from there I made what seemed to fit as the next scene, and so forth. I didn't write it with anything in mind beforehand; I just came up with everything in the same order the player/reader sees it. I don't just mean the events, but also the setting, the themes, the characters... I realize this is an extremely haphazard way of creating a cohesive narrative, and it shows. If you play these games or read these stories, they seem to switch gears pretty massively over time and not follow any sort of real theme and or contain any message. If they do, it's purely by accident.

These days I do more planning beforehand, I don't start with an opening event any more. But as for where I do start... I guess it really varies by a lot. I can think of one story where I started with the simple idea "I want to make a story that is intentionally bad and completely over the top in an X-treme 90s sort of way." Fun idea, right? It needed a main character, so I picked one that obviously fit that theme: a ridiculously badass spiky-haired sleeveless muscleman with lots of leather and sunglasses. Then I needed a conflict, and went back and forth on it a lot before deciding he should be a renegade fighting against society and government.

For Iniquity and Vindication, where I started was "I don't want to write a new story. I want to reuse Vindication's story but with the problems fixed." But I couldn't make it work. I had to change the setting from worldwide to local, from medieval to modern, replace half the protagonists, replace half the villains, completely alter the reason for the primary conflict, remove the religious themes... the problems were so numerous that it turned out to be unrecognizable afterward. So I gave up. And I was ready to start over with a new idea when something clicked, and I changed my base idea to "I want to make a modern fantasy action comedy, where a lot of the comedy comes from how outrageous the action is. And I want to incorporate some of the ideas from Vindication that worked well, because I've already done them so I know they work well." Which was really what I was using as a starting point all along; I just didn't realize it. Once I realized what I was really doing, and embraced it instead of fighting it, the entire game's story suddenly fell into place.

Truth is stranger than fiction.
In paying a lot of attention to global geopolitics, I get my inspiration from real world happenings, both real and theoretical. From there, I adapt ideologies into my characters and they tend to define their own personality from there.

My current project began swimming in my head years ago as typical "Fight da empire, yo". The old fundamentals are still there, but it takes on a larger clash of civilizations feel as it progresses.

For me there's usually some kind of trigger. There's something I want to explore and I think about how to do that. Sometimes it's a story bit. Sometimes it's a scene. Sometimes it's a prop.

So if I actually go for the games I've made. In Blue the idea was to make a game set in virtual reality. Basically the graphics of that game decided it. I had the idea of using simple boxes to represent people in a black bacground. Then later I threw in a detective story on top because I had to have somewhere there.

In Blue 2 there are certain key scenes and a mood I have in mind. I want some things to look pretty cool even though they still have that graphic style to it. In particular there is something involving ghosts which is only periferally connected to it that I'd really like to happen.

In The Assassination of Michael Gower I, apart from wanting to make another RON game, wanted the end scene. Basically all I did was because I wanted to kill off the main character. I really like killing off characters. Or well I don't do it a lot myself but I really like it when it happens. Of course I also wanted the success of the game to be a failure and whatnot. But it all started with a death.

In Jousting it's just the grain of idea "man wouldn't it be fun to try to convert the jousting minigame into the computer". It's an idea of mine based a lot around the fact that converting board games mightn't be such a bad idea.


Of course these examples probably aren't too great at conveying things. But for other stories and games that never happened. I've sometimes started with the idea of good and evil and cultural differences. Or the idea that even in an evil opressive empire people will still be people. (those two are the same really)

To be honest the good and evil thing has been a bit of a theme through most of the stuff I've done. It isn't always obvious but it's always there.

In some old movies we made. We sometimes found a prop or a location and started thinking about what kind of awesome things could happen in such a location. In a way that's similar to Blue because there I thought of the setting and location and went from there.