Postmortem

It’s been nearly a year since I finished this game, and the post-mortem has been sitting half-finished on my computer for most of that time. I was extremely burnt-out after a month (plus the time it took to record the narration) of surprise game development, and needed some time to recover.

I’d nearly finished this document when Paradox (the owners of the World of Darkness IP) announced their Unbound project, expanding the license for fan-games beyond the limits of the game jam I made this for. This made me hesitate – did I want to hold off on publishing my original plans, and instead just re-make the game as I originally envisioned? After seeing that someone else had made an IFDB entry for my game before me, a task I had intended to do immediately after finishing the game, I decided that I was unlikely to create such a remake in anything like a timely manner, so I should just post this now.

**Spoilers**

Inspiration and Themes

This is a story I’ve been wanting to write for a long time.

Ever since I found out about the Tzimisce and their signature discipline of Fleshcrafting, I’ve been both fascinated and frustrated. There are so many possible applications for such a power, but the only depictions of the Tzimisce I saw were the ones where they just turn people into horrible furniture.

So I decided to create one that would use their power for good.

A character formed over the course of several years. A transhumanist who dreams of a better future, where people can make their own choices about their biology. Being transgender followed naturally as an extension of this. She’d be a plastic surgeon, someone with the skills necessary to put her ideals into practice; her sister, a tattoo artist, to further the theme of body modification on a more mundane and socially acceptable level.

Details accumulated. At some point, I got to thinking about the symbolism of dragons, which the Tzimisce bear as their crest. In Western mythologies, dragons are traditionally seen as monsters to be slain; hoarding treasure, burning cottages, kidnapping maidens. The Eastern view of dragons is somewhat different; still very powerful and territorial creatures you wouldn’t want to cross, but not overtly malevolent. Their function as guardians of lakes and rivers slotted neatly into the Tzimisce’s curse of being “tied to the land.”

What I tried to do with Mikoto was to fit the definitions and themes of the Tzimisce, but to interpret them very differently. Guardian rather than tyrant; choice-based transhumanism rather than eugenics.

Her sire, Vasile, is the incarnation of this traditional view of the Tzimisce that Mikoto rails against, and their conflict the physical embodiment of that dichotomy. He is everything about the Tzimisce she rejects, and everything about them she fears she could become.

This Game Jam gave me an opportunity to finally do something with all these ideas.

Game Mechanics

Of course, the game I originally planned was a lot more ambitious than what I ended up with –  I had to scope down quite a lot in the interests of time.

Originally, I’d planned to model the game mechanics off of another World of Darkness game: Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest. I imagined a system where you would have to manage your Hunger, Willpower, Humanity, and Suspicion, which would sometimes force you to make difficult decisions to survive.

Keep your Hunger low, or else you might be tempted to kill someone for blood  –  or spend a point of Willpower to resist. Feed on people ethically to keep your Hunger in check and your Humanity high, but this might also draw unwanted Suspicion.

Every night you would be given a limited number of things you could do, and would have to choose carefully to balance your resources while furthering your goals. Activities I sketched out included: finding blood, treating patients, acquiring cadavers for experiments, and making allies among other vampires.

By the end of the game there were to be a number of endings determined on what your stats were – in the end, only two made it. Guardian Dragon was originally planned to be the ending for high Humanity and having recruited a sufficient number of allies; A Dragon in Her Castle would be unlocked with low Humanity, but high Willpower.

(Oh, and if the fight leading up to the Guardian Dragon ending seems abruptly cut off, that’s because it is. I was on the final night before the deadline and extremely tired, so I ended up writing a rather anticlimactic end.)

Scrapped endings include:

Sword of Caine, where you attempted the final confrontation with low Willpower, and fall under the sway of your sire once more, rejoining the Sabbat.

Doctor on Call, intended to be a default ending if you lack any other outstanding qualifications, where you appeal to Nines Rodriguez and the Anarchs for assistance. This one was cut fairly early, because it would have required a lot of groundwork to be laid if I didn’t want it to come entirely out of left field for most players. (The mention of “Miss V” in the beginning refers to Velvet Velour, who was going to be the contact point for arranging a meeting with the Anarchs. In the end, I decided against bringing in any canonical characters.)

And other endings where you either ran away, or were killed. In fact, early on, the Sabbat showing up at all was going to be the result of high Suspicion, until I realized that it made much more sense thematically for it to be inevitable, so it could serve as the climax to the story.

Of course, all these plans were wildly overambitious for the amount of time (and game development experience) I had available.

Ultimately, I ended up with a mostly linear game, with just a hint of branching to show what might happen, were the protagonist to choose differently.

Deleted Scenes

Here are a couple of scenes I actually got around to writing, but removed for reasons of pacing:

You look in the mirror, and remember your old self, your flawed face. How you hated that face. It's not that it was ugly. But it was... wrong. You remember your mother calling you "my handsome boy." And it hurt, in a way you didn't understand.  

This scene would have made it more explicit that Mikoto is trans, but I just couldn’t find anywhere in the story where it fit. I even toyed with ideas like striking through misgendering comments, and putting a bit of static over the audio.

You get up and begin to pace as you explain. "Take organ transplants, for example. A good start, but with so many flaws. You need a viable donor organ — which are in short supply — and even when you have one, the recipient still needs to spend the rest of their life taking immuno-suppressants."

"Enter the ghost heart: a pig's heart, emptied of all its original blood and cells, just leaving a —" you search for layman's terms, "biological scaffolding; the shape and structure of a heart. Then, you inject it with human stem cells, and you can essentially turn it into a human heart, with the DNA of the cell donor. Theoretically, of course; I don't believe any have been actually transplanted yet."  

I liked this section both because it’s scientifically fascinating, and also provides a good parallel to vampirism itself, similar to the mention of horizontal gene transfer. They serve to show Mikoto’s drive to improve people’s health, and her attempts to understand her own condition through medical science.

Supporting Cast

The only characters I’d conceived even an inkling of before starting the project were Mikoto, Julie, and Vasile; everyone else was created specifically for the Game Jam. Here is some of the backstory work for them that I didn’t get the chance to explore in-game.

Rico: The general theme of the vampire allies was the downtrodden, those who’ve been pushed to the edges of society, so I considered making him a Ravnos, the clan of wanderers; however, I decided a Thin-Blood Alchemist fit better as the drug-supplier. I also liked the duality in having a very goth vampire with a bright personality and the ability to walk in sunlight.

A young man from a very conservative Catholic family, whose father threw him out for being gay when he was 18. Eventually he fell into the company of a Lasombra, who took him as a lover. One day he found out that in the years of his absence, his mother had died of illness; a hereditary illness, in fact. He begged his vampire lover to Embrace him so he would not suffer the same fate –  the Lasombra obliged, only to reject him when Rico turned into a Thin-Blood. A disappointment twice-over, he began to dedicate himself to helping people get the medical supplies they need.

Despite the hardships in his past, he always tries to remain upbeat and positive. Sometimes he reminds Mikoto of her sister.

Mathias: Once, he was an ordinary reporter with a knack for uncovering secrets. Then, when he was Embraced by a Malkavian, everything changed. He became plagued by visions of an apocalypse that happened years ago, but no-one else seemed to remember. Was it an alternate timeline? Had reality been re-written by some cosmic force? Was it just his own brain gaslighting him?

The theories and doubts gnawed at him constantly, leaving him an emotional wreck. Unable to uphold the Masquerade, he left polite society and found solace in the company of other vagrants.

Mathias is the character with the most amount of clear external influences: Simone Rigadeau from Welcome to Night Vale, Fenchurch from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the World of Darkness’s Time of Judgement, a later-retconned metaplot event that was supposed to serve as the end to both the world and the games.

Christine: Born to a family with ties to the film industry: her father, a director, and her mother, an actress whose career began to fail as she grew older.

Watching her mother's popularity wane along with her looks, young Christine learned that no one will love or respect you once your beauty fades – a lesson hammered home when her father left for a younger woman.

Her mother still retained enough contacts to get her daughter a start in the music industry – but her rise to stardom was interrupted by a Nosferatu stalker who decided to Embrace her as punishment for rejecting him. Full of internalized misogyny and self-loathing, she slunk underground and began plying her technological skills instead, hiding her face from the world.

Her character was initially inspired by The Phantom of the Opera, and developed from there.

An early idea involved her betraying Mikoto, having grown resentful of being the facilitator for services that would restore what she wants most, but that won’t work on her due to the Nosferatu curse.

Melissa: One of my greatest disappointments with this game is that I don’t feel I managed to impart Melissa with very much personality, either in my own mind or the text. She mostly just exists as a cipher for Mikoto’s own issues.

Julie: I also regret that I didn’t have the opportunity to show much of Julie’s interactions with her sister. In some ways, she is a contrast to Mikoto; vibrant and alive, compared to her sister’s reserved stiffness – yet they both have a great deal of compassion.

She is the person Mikoto loves most in the world, and the feeling is mutual. She never stopped looking for her missing sister, but regretted having to put her deadname on missing person posters, as she was the only one Mikoto ever came out to. Unfortunately, her grief made her easy to lure into a trap once Vasile found out about her.

Vasile: A villainous foil to Mikoto, he’s somewhat deliberately stereotypical, existing to demonstrate what she isn’t. His attention was first drawn to her by her opinions on transhumanism – but these he failed to fully understand. He wishes to re-create himself as the perfect organism, and bestow this gift upon others as a lord might give a token to a favored vassal. Mikoto, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in such a thing as a “perfect organism”; instead, she would give to all people the choice to become whatever they wish.

Apollo: Clan Toreador. Not much character detail here, to be honest, his most notable trait is… owning swords so they can be taken from him. He’s the respectable face of the pack when they need to deal with mortals who would be horrified by everyone else’s appearance; thus, he was the one to lure Julie into captivity.

Jackal: Clan Gangrel. A rather tragic figure, actually. She’s a shovelhead: initiated into the Sabbat in a particularly brutal manner as a disposable shock troop, and has only survived this long through luck and tenacity. She’s kept permanently on the verge of frenzy, the Gangrel curse clouding her mind with animalistic simplicity.

*****

Overall, I learned a lot from this project. I’d like to come back and create an expanded version of the game someday, but that’s a long way off. I’ll need a lot more experience to do it justice.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing, and hope that any of it is coherent enough that I see fit to publish it.