As of 2023- april 2024
Whoever reading this, thank you for your attention. That said, I'm happy to announce that I've taken more seriously the developement 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.