Diary of Morn #02 | How it all Began.

And on your grave I will swear. Swear to be the thorn in her eye, her one weakness, her mortal enemy, her death.

On this very day, the 24th of December, the first version of MIST was released. That was three years ago. Now, the game is finished. For a long time I thought that finishing MIST would leave me overjoyed and happy. Filled with energy and enthusiasm for the next project. That's also what my friends and family always seem to assume. They think I would be joyous and thrilled after having finished such a large project. But the truth is, I'm not.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't feel bad. I'm not exhausted, fed up or annoyed by my work. I'm not disappointed in MIST or want to change anything I did. But I'm not happy. MIST was a huge part of my life for the past three years and now it's gone. It brought me a lot of joy and pain. But first and foremost MIST allowed me to grow. Creatively and personally. And the truth is that towards the end of MIST's development I felt like I had outpaced the game, that my skills and experiences surpassed what I was working on every single day and that made me unsatisfied with my work. A feeling that I carried with me for a long time, all the way to the finish line and I think that it is the reason for me to not be all giddy and overjoyed, but rather more content and a little bit relieved. I had made a complete game from start to finish in which I invested everything I had at that moment. But now it was time for the next project, for the project that I've had in my heart for a long time.

Children of Morn has been in planning since 2020. It began as a side project. A tabletop RPG I came up with while playing Persona 5 with my little sister. The initial idea being to merge two videogame series together. Ace Attorney and Persona. Born was a short 20 page ruleset with the working title "Detectives". It was a fun little game, but it soon evolved into something more supernatural and the title changed to "Exorcists". That 30 page ruleset would go through many iterations, be changed completely a bunch of times and somehow ended up as the first draft for "Children of Morn". That was in 2021. By then I started to feel the beforementioned disparity between my skills and the current state of MIST and I was looking for something new. I liked the tabletop RPG "Children of Morn" so much, that I decided to explore the idea a bit further and turn it into my next game.

This is something I won't do again. Focusing on a new game made my motivation levels for MIST seriously drop low. I got them back up again, but never as high as they were originally. Which is probably just a normal thing, but working on a new project definitely didn't help. But this isn't about that, this is about how "Children of Morn" came to be. I now knew what I wanted to do. I had a setting and plenty of ideas and impressions from the tabletop RPG I had made to build a simple and well fitting gameplay base for the next game. Now it was time to actually come up with the plot to tie everything together and see if it holds up. The answer is, it didn't. 

For months I worked on the plot and world for "Children of Morn" and while things were interesting and there were enough good ideas to keep me going, something wasn't right. Whenever I pitched the new game to someone, the same thing was echoed "Interesting, but something is amiss." and it was driving me crazy that I couldn't figure it out. In comes my father. On an especially bad day I set up a Zoom call with him and that's were magic happened. I can't explain in detail what we talked about, this post is already way too long. To cut it short, it turned out that my father actually had the answers to my problems, the answer being comparative mythology studies. Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell to specifically name the ones I focused on. And after reading a bunch and listening to plenty of podcasts about myths and archetypes, ancient religions, matriarchal societies and symbolism things made sense. This might sound a bit swollen and theatrical, and it proably is. But I swear that these things really helped and I'll prove it when Children of Morn comes out. But that's for the future. What counts is the following months were things finally started to make sense. Where the Plot for Children of Morn was coming together and after a long time of this idea simmering in my head we reach the current day.

The plot for Children of Morn is complete and as good as I can make it with my current abilities. I'm content with my work on MIST and it feels really good. I'm not overjoyed, instead I feel very focused right now. I feel myself slowly sinking down into this new game and my concentration and attention all turning towards it and I'm happy to be there. To have all that experience under my belt to start a new story. Thanks to Robin, Mia, Lily and Noreia I'll now be able to introduce you to a new world, new characters and new stories. I feel calm, focused and determined to give this game all I have right now.

And with that I wish everyone happy holidays, if you celebrate them, if not, just a good new year. You'll hear from me gain in 2023 with the next post.