After an accidentally-long, near-decade of development, my debut video game, Alcyone: The Last City, is out now on desktop as well as Android and iOS.

I've worked as a professional writer for almost a quarter of a century at this point — a shocking milestone now that I actually put it down into words — and while I have worked on things that I can categorically tell you that you've heard of if not experienced, the exploitive nature of most creative industries means that this is the first bit of intellectual property that's getting released under my own name.

Back in 2016 or so, I had a dream which became a short story that would, in turn, form the basis for the game's initial prototype once I realised that the narrative I was envisioning was bigger than just writing a book. I have remarked often that my dreams are often the basis and inspiration for many creative projects I have and I'm grateful that my weirdo brain provides them.

My dreams very regularly influence and contribute to my creative ideas, and this one involved a person living in a city that was surrounded by a dangerous nothing. As I wrote the short story I could see the glimmers of a society existing within those constraints, and I knew I wanted to write something bigger than one linear narrative alone.

My original intention was to make a game with my own idea, which wasn't beholden to a studio or auteur taking credit for things I had created, to showcase who I was as a writer — for once. When it became clear to me that my idea was bigger than "portfolio," I expanded it outward into a bigger project.

I ran a successful Kickstarter in 2017. By this point, I had already done three others for GX Australia, but I was nervous about launching a campaign just for my own project. When I hit the goal a week or so in, I assumed it was just because people knew me from GX and the project had piggybacked off that awareness. When I nearly doubled my funding objective a week and a bit later, I assumed it was because of the other names attached to my project.

The imposter syndrome does still rear its head from time to time, but by this point and with the extent of what I have been able to accomplish, I'm better at ignoring it. I'm very proud of what I have done here.

Whilst I had launched the Kickstarter with the intention of a proper release less than a year later, I'm glad that life didn't work out that way — though delayed far beyond my intention (people who know me already know the story here so I'm not going to get into it again), it's a much, much better game because of the long gestation, and it's become so much more than my original vision as a result of being able to take a lot longer than planned.

Anyway, onward to the thanks: I'm very, very grateful to many people who helped make this release possible.

First and foremost, my wonderful partners Ryan and Vlas have been tremendously instrumental in making sure the game came out. Without their advice, support, cheerleading, and patience, this day would not be here. They've both done so much for this and been so supportive and without them I doubt it would have gotten launched.

Logistically speaking, VicScreen seeing value in what I had made and providing funding for it allowed me freedom and flexibility to finish it full-time. Without that foundation it would have taken ages and ages, if ever, for the game to come out.

I have to thank Peak and Michał, tremendously talented people who lent their creativity to the world I was trying to convert from a dream I'd had into a universe I wanted others to experience. Their contributions from the very beginning helped shape this final product in materially tangible ways and I'm forever going to be awed at their ability to take half-formed concepts in my head and present it to me as art that completely fit my terrible briefs.

Carlos, Ben, and Michael took those seeds and helped me iterate it into something bigger and better than I was able to make on my own. And again kudos here to Vlas for helping pull the engine work past the finish line and Ryan to give guidance and advice as a human being whose perspective was less technical but all the more vital for his vantage point as a gamer.

I am extremely grateful to the backers who supported my weird idea at the start. Without that initial foundation it never would have gotten off the ground at all or given me the confidence to take my weird niche game through to the finish line. The positive check-ins and emails over the years, to say nothing of how many excited people saying that they've been looking forward to this for years, really makes it feel worth doing. It's a weird niche game in an existing niche genre, so people genuinely being interested in it really is a relief. The initial coverage from journalists has also been really positive, which is a relief too as this is getting comparison against "normal" mainstream games.

And, finally, I'm grateful to everyone else who played it along the way and indulged me even without knowing the other projects I have been responsible for work on, who still encouraged me to make something on my own and stayed interested and engaged all this time.

I'm almost certain I'm missing people. There's an exhaustive list of credits in the game, because as someone who has had credits weaponised against them I wanted to make sure that anyone who had a substantive role in my game's development got a shout out for it. If I haven't given one here it's not because I don't value you or your contributions — I'm just overwhelmed and 40 years old.

So, about eight years or so after I planned it, Alcyone: The Last City is out. It wouldn't be accurate to say it was in development for all of that near-decade — much of that time was occupied by the fallout of an abusive ex-boyfriend, capitalism, a pandemic, and the constant struggle to make art when art isn't appreciated. I worked on it when I could with the frequency available to me, but it's all the better for the unexpectedly long journey.

I'm glad to be able to share it with you all. I'm deeply proud of it, it's the biggest thing I have ever made and it's very personal to me. I hope you like it.

But I'm also very, very glad to be able to move on to something else now, as well. Now that this is finished, I have other ideas I want to make which I couldn't while completing Alcyone was hanging over everything else I did. "Release" is doing double-lifting in that sense — I have released it into the ether for you to all experience, and in doing so it has released me from its responsibility.

It's yours now: go have fun with it.

I've already touched on this in the past in a few places scattered across the internet (like both the Kickstarter comms page for Alcyone: The Last City, my upcoming interactive novel, as well as on my own personal social media) but recently reading this interview with Gareth Damian Martin of Citizen Sleeper/Citizen Sleeper 2 (and the excellent In Other Waters, which I was also an OG Kickstarter backer for) has gotten me thinking about this topic again.

"[I’m] thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that it’s going to fall apart. We know that there’s an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know it’s going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things."
- Gareth Damian Martin

The development cycle for Alcyone has been quite long if we're being fully accurate about it. I had a very, very rough prototype some time back in 2015, and development of the game has gone along at varying degrees of intensity in the near-decade since then. Whilst I think it's an extreme exaggeration to say I've been "developing the game for ten years" (especially since it's only been my full-time job for the last ~two), it's still been a project that's existed while my life has gone through some pretty transformative stuff.

When I first started writing Alcyone, I was in the middle of an abusive relationship even if I wouldn't realise it until some time later. But my headspace was quite dark, and what I was writing reflected that. I was not connecting with hopefulness, because I didn't feel hopeful in my day to day existence.

As my life changed (in ways predominantly good and healthy, but there definitely were upheavals) I found that I was having a much harder time connecting with the mentality I had at the start of the game's development; however, I'd now promised something to people, had financial support to deliver it, and had external expectations to meet. I was stressed that I couldn't seem to figure out how to link myself back to that despondency, and I questioned why I even wanted to.

When Alcyone became my full-time job, I found myself dealing with a lot of writer's block at first explicitly because I didn't want to write a dark, helpless, hopeless story like I had in mind when I first began the project. And I was struggling to figure out how to reconcile the game I'd pitched publicly with the sort of stories I want to be telling now.

In the end I think I've managed to find a balance that solves the conundrum, and I'm very excited for players to experience it when the game is released (just a couple of months to go!), but it was a challenge bigger than I expected and held me up creatively for a lot longer than I wanted it to. But, I think the story is better for it, and I think people will enjoy it a lot more — particularly because my heart is in it rather than it would have been before.

There's a lot to be vexed and stressed and despondent about these days; I didn't see a reason to drag all of it into my fictional sci-fi world, as well.

PS: I was a huge fan of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper — if the latter had existed earlier in the development cycle for Alcyone I would have been "heavily inspired" by it in a lot of ways. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel even if the likelihood of me having the time to play a video game over the next few months is hovering around absolute zero.