February 16 2025
The more I read about estridentismo, the more I realize Anatomy Corp. is not the kind of futuristic work I had thought initially conceived. The fictional corporation was born first, and the world grew around it, but said world was based on this mexican vanguard with very different fundaments.
Unlike American futurism, etridentismo is not interested in sophisticated technology, interplanetary wars, nationalism, or the conquest of a wild future. Stridentist technologies are absurd and simple, belonging to the 1970s (cars, cable cars, radios) with such great efficiency that it is possible to reach Mars by bus. It's an incomprehensible mess of a literary movement, product of a post-revolutionary and fragmented society. Estridentismo, more than anything, focuses on the mechanization and “artistification” of a society in motion, ironically suspended on the threshold of La Generación de la Ruptura. It's uniquely Mexican, and yet, rejects patriotism and traditional values. "Muerte al cura Hidalgo".
At the very least, a minor rewrite to the game and some aesthetic changes to this webpage will be made. Alongside it, characters will no longer try to sell a brighter future to the in-universe humans and wage wars with martians, but rather coax artists and genuises to be part of the eternal movement and an altered reality.
As of January 2025
As you might have guessed, it's been slow. Different factors came into play, but most importantly my university and abroad studies. That's the main reason I didn't make my devog public: because I can't (yet) afford this to be a full-time project and I didn't want to make empty promises. I know the pace I have with this project, which is for now entirely mine, although I still thank any peepers out there who are wishing to see what comes next.
The good news is, this year I'll begin to program the game, now that it's 100% planned (locations, characters, puzzles, all that jazz). The bad news is that I'll have to get done another side project first, which hopefully won't take longer than this semester. Yesterday in my exchange university we've had a professional guest talk, and he emphasized how important it was to get things out there. That had been my rookie flaw for all this time, so you can tell how important is for me to push the pedal more than ever.
See you this summer... Work until your motherboard bleeds!
As of 2023- april 2024
Whoever reading this, thank you for your attention. That said, I'm happy to announce that I've planned the entirety of Anatomy Corp. as a point-and-click adventure game, three endings and all.
As you may know from my previous entry, the conception of Anatomy began since highschool, but these two years have helped me realize that if I don't bring this to reality, then no one will, so I'll have to stop daydreaming about robots and actually put everything to paper. I've started with a dependency chart, thanks to Grumpy Gamer's model:
And that's only after a long way of defining a genre. Anatomy was originally going to be one big game, but due to my limitations, I have decided to make several small ones instead. Still, there had been about three outlines for the story written before settling down with the one I got. Cue my semi-abandoned exel documents.
The great thing about an outline is that you can save concepts and eventually return to them, which is what I'm planning to do. There's a really nice feeling on looking back at your work and seeing how more concise you've gotten over time. My friend and I used to have some really wild ideas for the game mechanics that probably would've taken us years and years at this pace (and more so now that this has become a solo project), so I'm just glad that the point-and-click approach is what I'm sticking with for now. For now. Because nothing is sacred.
Now you might be thinking that I'm chewing one giant bubblegum and making up the story as I go, but some professional writers have shook some sense into me and so I have made a powerpoint document to keep all the timeline, scenarios, inspirations and character profiles to make sure I'm staying on the right path. If you're juggling with a big story, I think this is a pretty neat way to stay organized.
I would like to give my notebooks and sketchbooks a shoutout too for being alongside me these last few years and helping me out to lay everything down. Something I have learned is to jot down whatever thing gives you a rush of inspiration. You might need it later... or not, but at least some movement was made.
And Twine, for being technically the first prototype. Right now, I'm 2/3rd's about done into my dependency chart, so the next big step is a proper prototype. Until I have something visually good to show, I won't be oficially publishing this log. Thanks nonetheless for reading!
Background
Anatomy Corp. started when I doodled a funny secretary girl and an American robot back in highschool. I really liked the dynamic of a silly authority figure and their clueless lackey, but eventually, I also became interested in retro-futurism, robotics and old comics/cartoons like Space Ghost and Love & Rockets. This would help me set the tone down.
I initially wanted Anatomy to be a videogame. My good pal Planta helped me a lot in the attempt to bring that idea to reality with coding and some concept art (if you're nice enough, perhaps he'll wish to share it!), but not only we did not have a concise gameplay for it in mind, college was also starting to eat us alive at that point. Here are some sprites I managed to do:
However, I found potential in illustrations. I know I'm not a game developer, but I still wish to make the viewer feel like they can interact with my characters and their world, which is why I'm interested in expanding this project through a visual novel, though I just may create some comics to lay the story down first.