TchagataGames

Part 1: Of Screen and Memoirs

Somewhere between the year 2009 and 2010The decision behind our choice of the shoot’em up genre as a first game design experience was, surprisingly, carefully thought. First and foremost, there was Konni, our chief of code, apostle of the program. Konni was extremely precise when it came to telling what a self-taught guy like him was capable of. When we took the decision of making a game we, meaning me (Tafia) and Gosh, knew exactly how far our mad ravings could realistically take us. It appears as something pretty obvious but I think that the actual technological limitations and constraints should always take a central role in the pre-production process of an indie/dôjin game.

And, of course, there was our love for the genre. There is something unforgiving, ancient and demanding about the shoot’em up genre that always attracted us to it. Playing the great games of the NEC PC Engine to the recent Cave Bullet Hells, we would feel at the same time a wind of nostalgia (link with the movie intended) and the burns of mathematical precision in patterns and rhythm. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s an on-rail genre easier to script (meaning to write the experience of the player) for a first try.

I guess what we really wanted to do, starting this project, was to prove to ourselves that we could achieve this challenge. None of us was trained in video game design or programming. But, coffee (and most likely beer) was flowing in our veins and led us to express the need of understanding the medium we have been playing for a long time by a process of reconstruction through creation. Yes, we were (and we are) pretentious in our hopes!

And, pretentious we also were in our first visual imagining of the game. As a teacher (soon to be El Doctor) in Mediterranean religion and myth studies, Gosh suggested we explore the idea of using the old Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh (a heavily fragmented story) and giving it a fresh, meaningmodern, touch. Being a fan of Roger Zelazny’s impressive reimagining of world mythologies, I was pretty enthused by the idea. The travel structure of the epic would easily be broken into different stages and the various confrontations into bosses. Thus, “Nandeyanen!?” would first be known to us as the “Gilgamesh Project”.