2022-02-08 12:57: Why I Began Making this Game
Hello,
Quoll1 is a game that found its spark during the earlier part of the Covid-19 Pandemic that we are still suffering through. The Git repository was created on March 4, 20202, back when I was concerned about the immediate future for a few reasons. My plans for 2020 had been obliterated, both due to the lockdown, as well as the then-certain eventual failure of Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic Party primary, which had become my major political thrust.
I was on my balcony3 smoking, and in my concern, I began asking myself: "what is the most self-indulgent project I could work on?" I eventually decided that a game about my life story as well as introducing the lore behind my fursonas would be a good one. If there was a chance I could die from Covid or from the continued rise of American Fascism bolstered by what I assumed was Trump's certain re-election over Biden, then I should at least get my story out. And unable to leave my apartment to play TTRPGs with friends, or stream Pokemon, it felt a good replacement for those projects. Why with a bit of focus and the saving of not having to drive into work, I could totally have something ready in a few months when the pandemic passed!
Obviously, a lot of my predictions about 2020 ended up wrong, and considering I am writing this in 2022, my estimates for how long it would take me to get something I felt comfortable sharing were way too optimistic (but such is the curse of a programmer). However, I do still have something, and I do want to continue to tell this story over the next likely few years it will take to tell it for a few reasons.
I have been enamored with writing since I was a bookish boy4 hiding inside from the pollen and bullies filling his head with all sorts of trivia, stories of action and adventure, and just people ranting about video games I'd never play. Whenever I would find myself uninterested in the movie my parents would be watching and not really excited to play any video game, a book would be opened. I think there may be previous stories I've written, but I think the first one that really stuck with me was written in elementary school. It was a very simple first-person narrative about "me" finding an odd book in an attic that slowly turned me into a dinosaur5 and finding a way to first hide the changes, and then reverse the changes6. I'm sure we can totally delve into the trans "egginess" of such a story7, but this highlights one of the pain points of writing for me. I wrote to make up for my loneliness and feelings of social rejection from my peers and as such, highly focused on myself or a very thinly veiled stand-in.
This generally continued as I wrote more and more, and by the time I was a college student, I found my continued focus on myself as a character a sort of authorial narcissism, a flaw that needed to be excised. Writing about people who were not like me often resulted in a strong sense of jealousy for my own characters that fed well into the fog of self-loathing and dysphoria I lived my life as a man under. It also frustrated me because unlike many of the other people I knew in my life to be good storytellers, my stories that I could share were rarely about personal experience, but what I had read about others'. In my case, I saw my own story as incredibly uninteresting. I still do, honestly, I have lived a relatively privileged and quiet life compared to many others I know.
I have no major bad ex stories, no major familial conflicts, no sudden thrusts into the public sector. There are a few tales of hardship, but between my well-paid career as a programmer and the support of my family, nothing lasting. I might be able to pull a character arc out of it, but as a plot, it's threadbare. Any character development came because I was sad and lost in my thoughts. And yet, despite this barebones plot, I feel compelled to explain myself.
Hence, why back in 2020, having just taken my initial steps of transition into womanhood, a self-indulgent story felt like a great idea. Let me tell my story and be done with it, and free to step away from me. Let me force my lore about my fursonas on everyone, and then I can go make characters that aren't just me in fur. As such, this is a highly autobiographical game, but told through a funhouse mirror of a fantastic version of our own world, my own story split between two different versions of me. And though transition has brought greater and greater peace with my real-life body and self, I still think it's a story worth telling. And I hope you find it one worth listening too.
Thank you for reading this, and I will surely wax poetic more about my intentions here in the future.
Your Not-so-humble Dev,
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I want to make this clear: "Quoll" is a code-name that I am temporarily using for this game so I do not get bogged down in coming up with cool title or overly attached to one. I do have a tentative title for this series of games, but that will come later when I actually release a game in the series, likely this "zeroth" one that serves as an introduction.↩
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I'm keeping this repository private as I am working on it, but I very much intend to release it under an open-source license. The idea that someone may play a game of mine and then be interested in making their own and have the freedom to examine and remix my own is highly appealing. Too often we are just left to passively consume art and other media, when I feel that it should also drive us to create our own art and media.↩
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Yes, is the same as it is in the game, I don't intend to hide that Ada and Malia's apartment is highly based on my current one, just as their stories are highly based on my own story, as I am about to write in this dev diary.↩
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My pronouns are now she/her and I am a woman, but childhood me thought of himself as a boy, and while adult me may have realized that didn't fit me, I do still think childhood me must be understood as a boy. To try to force him into some expected trans narrative of always having been a girl doesn't fit my experience of having grown up as him, so I don't. At best, "she" was a tomboy who thought "he" had lucked out into being a boy and was glad.↩
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I want to say I was turning into a velociraptor, which is interesting because this was well before Jurassic Park catapulted that particular species into my fancy. Maybe a T-Rex?↩
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It turns out the cure was milk, a plot point that was stolen straight from Ernest Scared Stupid.↩
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Like, I had almost certainly taken my first sex Ed class and had been taught the vague outlines of puberty, but it was not at all in effect in my body yet, if I recall correctly.↩