Why are we here? Why start another indie video game company in the already crowded space of 2018? Do we have something special to say? Probably not. Not really anyway. How do you say something new in a world where written thought goes back thousands of years? The fame? The money? No. While we would like to eventually support ourselves and our families through game development, we are not allowing day dreams of releasing on Steam to a million in sales and immediately ordering a Bugatti (or more realistically, ordering a Neo Geo or a money-is-no-object gaming PC, given the proclivities of this group).
So … why?
There are a few reasons.
RavenFist Studio is currently a group of three developers. We were friends first, which is a familiar story in the indie dev space. All three of us are (present tense) working dead end jobs. This is not to say that the jobs are bad, but they are dead end. The three of us have capped out. There are no promotions in our futures because the only way left to go takes us places that do not interested us. The only thing we have to look forward to is the yearly cost of living raise (which is poorly named) and retirement. This seems unacceptable when considering that a person spends 36% of their lives at work.
We are three people who divide, in a way that seems like destiny, our talents along the lines of game development. One of us is the coder. One of us is the artist. One of us is the storyteller. Sure, we all share responsibilities, but like Voltron, we are each our own lion before coming together to make the whole.
The idea of making a game came up in our group several times before we started making a game. Like any good improv group, we are excellent at “yes, anding” each other. This causes most of our conversations to begin in the sensible and end in the inexplicable. Like the time that we decided to start a low-carb pizza bowl business, which quickly became a food truck, which then turned into a donut truck, which then turned into a food boat, followed by a donut boat selling anchor-shaped donuts for $5 a piece to the drunk people on the lake on any given Saturday during the summer months. Is it a brilliant business proposition? Yes, but we walked away from it because we never act on our crazy ideas, we only come up with them. Making a game was much the same way, except it came up multiple times in conversation and we dared ask a single question: “How long would it take?” Research followed, and a figure was reached: Four years. We all agreed it was too much and we changed the subject. Probably to something like wondering why Pop Tarts don’t come in lunch flavors.
The next day, one of us returned, having talked to his wife. Her thought about all this game silliness was that four years was going to pass anyway, the only thing that changes is if you have a game at the end of it. Interesting thought.
Another reason that we are here is that we love video games. I am old enough to have experienced nearly the entire history of video gaming. There is no other art form in the world where you can make such a claim. No one who witnessed the first movie is still alive but people who witnessed the first video game are. I find that fascinating. My own history begins with the Atari 2600, really comes into being with the arcade and the NES and goes on from there. There is one very specific moment that defines my love of video games. I was twelve years old. For months I would go to school, come home, pop in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and play until I had to go to bed. I remember this so vividly. I would turn the volume on my TV all the way down (heresy, I know, given the score to that game) and put in a mix tape that I had made by recording songs off the radio. How archaic. My mix tape consisted of “Steam” by Peter Gabriel, “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and “Sweet Dreams (are Made of These)” by the Eurythmics. Why? I don’t know. I liked all those songs; still do. But they don’t really go together, and I never added any more songs to that tape because I couldn’t figure out what would come next. I would play Zelda and listen to that tape until Sweet Dreams ended. I would pause Zelda, rewind, hit play, and un-pause. This was my life when I was twelve. There were no cares. There was no stress. There were no worries about what was going to be for dinner. There were no kids with their teacher meetings. There was no job the next day. It was a moment in my life where I just existed separate from all other influences. And every day of my life I try to get back there.
Out of RavenFist’s staff, I am the most adamant collector of retro video games. Every time I pay way too much money for a game complete in box, it’s because I’m chasing the feelings of that twelve year old boy. I always jokingly tell people that my self-image is of me when I was twelve, except it’s not a joke. In many ways I feel like I never left that moment in time. Every time I play a game, I’m back to that moment, listening to that same bizarre mix tape, not having a care in the world.
Eventually you’ll read more stories of why we love video games; more of my own and more of the other members of RavenFist, but that’s sufficient for now, and that’s another reason that we are here.
So, what do we bring to the game space? As crowded as it is, we bring more indie games. We bring a game that we’re working on right now called Rebuild. We like it. We think you will to. We have an ever-growing idea board of future games. Currently there are twenty solid ideas that could very easily be the next game we make after Rebuild. Hopefully, what we bring to the game space is more signal than noise. At the very least we bring our personalities, our honesty, and our integrity. Those things count for a lot with us.
Because we do not desire fame and do desire to keep our privacy, currently we are not divulging names on this blog. Instead we will be known as…
The Storyteller…
The Artist …
The Coder.
I, the Storyteller, we be the dominant voice here, our sole online presence. Occasionally you will hear from everyone in different capacities, but if the speaker is not identified, you can point any ire you have at the words to me. We want to keep it this way because it feels like the best idea for right now. It may not always be so, and we’ll constantly reevaluate. But this is how it is for now, which is fine with me because it has a distinct Breakfast Club feel to it.
From this blog, you can expect the sharing of thoughts, history, anecdotes. You can expect information about what it is like to form a game development company from the beginning. I’m sure you can expect some grandiose statements of brilliance that turn out in hindsight to be terrible mistakes. You can expect more information about Rebuild; mechanics, concept art, game assets, plot descriptions. We intend to share all of these. We hope that people find it interesting and entertaining, but even if we have no readers we will have a recorded history of this moment in the lives of three friends when they dared to make something better of themselves and to share a little bit of their imaginations with the world.
Sincerely,
The coder, the artist, and the storyteller.
