From Writer to Game Developer

Have you ever had a feeling that you were some sort of alter ego of yourself living in a parallel universe? I am not talking any mental disorder. Let me explain: I used to be "just" a writer, but now - I am doing my best to be a game dev! All while staying in the wonderful Swedish countryside, surrounded by amazingly talented indie game devs from all over the world. It's like a dream (I never would have thought of) coming true.
How did I get from teaching writing in high school to becoming a part of Stugan workshop?

Happy Annitchka by the lake (the water is quite cold though)

The best kind of shopping? Workshopping!
That journey actually began last summer, when I was in Litomyšl taking part in Anomalia Story Lab with John Nevarez. I was learning to write animated movies. One (among many others) great thing about Anomalia is that there are a few labs running simultaneously in the same place. So you actually get to meet someone else than just writers! Yay! Thanks to a Concept Art Lab I met Andie, an illustrator and game artist from Madrid. We kept in touch on Facebook after the workshop ended and in the fall she asked me whether I'd be interested in helping her to script her PC game "Idearum". I was like - never done that before but I can definitely give it a go! (Also, I have a scriptwriter friend who has experience writing games so I thought - in the worst case I come to him begging for help. Didn't happen. I mean, I did ask his advice, but I wasn't begging. Not too much anyway.)

Onboard Idearum
I joined Andie's project and we had a little challenging, but great time working at the story of Idearum. I decided not to go directly to writing the script and focus on developing a treatment first. The reason for this was simple - Andie had planned the game to have two parts. Even though she only needed a script for the first part of the game, I wanted to make sure that both parts will make sense together in terms of story and its structure, regardless of who would end up writing the second part. After finishing the treatment, we moved on to the script. For me, this was a big challenge... I am not an avid gamer, and that is putting it mildly. I have played a few games in past but I wasn't caught up on the latest trends and generally, my view-point was heavily influenced by my filmmaker background. (Meaning my initial writing was backstory-heavy and not giving the player many options.) Matla joined the team as a level and game designer. She is designing puzzles for the game. Suddenly I was getting a better idea on what is realistic and what I should avoid as a writer. We established a little indie game dev studio - Tahutahu Studios - and kept meeting on Skype, chatted through Whatsapp, gave one another tasks in Asana. Gradually, the game started shaping up in our outer vision as well.

 

Team conference (how we used to meet)

Getting even more serious
It's not that we didn't take it seriously before! We have always hoped for the best while doing all in our capacity to make Idearum happen. However... when we started looking through workshops to participate in, we weren't really thinking of staying somewhere for almost two months. It was more like - here we could stay for four days, this one seems nice and happens over a weekend... Then girls discovered Stugan and we agreed on applying. By this time there were two more people aboard - Alicia, the programmer, and Maggie, the music composer. But Stugan allows maximum of three people per team. We have talked it through and it came back to the original trinity of Andie, Matla and me, mostly due to our availability. (Andie and Matla are finishing their studies and I teach in high school, which gives us the advantage of a free summer.) Applying for Stugan requires making an application video. We decided to use the fact that we are each in a different city (in my case, a country, too) to our advantage. If you are curious how the video turned out, watch it here :)

A small step for mankind, a huge step for Tahutahu Studios!

Stugan
Long story short - we made it. Here in Stugan we are currently prototyping the first levels. Our goal is to have first three levels playable by the end of the workshop in mid-August. Since we were mostly organising ourselves and the work over the internet, it feels great to be able to finally work in one office space! Also, having a discord conference with Alicia is much easier now :)
It is incredibly motivating to be sharing the workplace with other developers. If you are unsure of something, you can immediately ask for advice. People are testing each other's games, helping one another with the design or programming, encouraging one another, making jokes. We have been here for a week (arrived on 26th of June) and it already feels like a small family. Maybe not that small, since there are 24 people here from 16 different countries :) You can follow the workshop's progress on Facebook, Twitter or the official web page!

Hilltop selfie of the Tahutahu team

Stay tuned as I will post more about the game, our team and the Stugan workshop soon ;)