Hello one and all,
I don't have much in the way of introduction. My name is Kasper Adriaensen. I am 23 and I live in Belgium, which some of you may know as a speck of land next to the label floating over the North Sea on your world map. I have no official experience in the art of designing or developing (not)games, and lamentably little unofficial experience, but I like to believe I learn fast and I'll have an opinion ready on just about anything I can wrap my head around. For a long time, I've been circling this forum like a very reluctant vulture, because I know I will find people here whose opinions I share strongly, which is wonderful, but also highly inefficient when one's brain is prone to pounce on every which interesting tangent and there's other things to concentrate on. Here's why I should have joined long ago:
Some two summers ago I graduated, with a Master in Linguistics. To this day, I find language equal amounts weird and wonderful, but I realized straightaway that neither academia nor the other prototypical applications of my discipline were the thing for me. I often say I was interested in games from back in high school, but that's only half true. By and large, I was only into some games, and mostly I was into one particular game, which was
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I played it for about two weeks or so, and then it played me the following nine years. I don't think I ever really played it as a game. It never particularly interested me as such; few things do. Mechanics aren't my thing. The game world and story, however, held a certain grain of marvel in it that spoke to me. I spent an eternity in the Elder Scrolls online community, meeting many genuinely interesting people. Along the way, I started modding the game, which resulted in a number of unfinished and -in hindsight- embarrassing projects. Later and in some bigger, community-run projects, I picked up some 3D modeling, some texturing and some whatever I figured I should give a go. Every time, I found that I was in it for the feel of the scene, the ideas behind it, and especially the story it could tell.
Some two summers ago, I was debating all this and decided to send an e-mail to Tale of Tales, whose work I found interesting, because it did some things I felt the medium should still try and omitted others I felt it had tried too much already. Michaël Samyn mailed me back with some solid advice and shortly after I took up a course in “Game Design”. The quotation marks make it sound a lot more deceptive than I mean it to, but the truth is that after a year I had to conclude - a few notable exceptions notwithstanding - that I hadn't learned a great deal I didn't know yet or couldn't learn faster elsewhere. I do not blame anyone; it was a young curriculum and a very heterogeneous audience to cater to.
About one summer ago, I therefore found myself looking for alternatives, which I eventually found. Without going into details (of which there are a lot, not all in my favor), I found a way and the time to work on a game project of my own, deciding that any technical obstacles would be bridges I'd cross when I got to them. Obviously, if I was to make something on my own, I might as well do it the way I believed things should be done and I loved the idea of digital media as a storytelling device. For my first and current project, by name of
Crooked Man, I set out with the notion that I was going to make a story around which I'd build a game, instead of the other way around. If at all possible, I also longed to tell a story with more than just words, because I find that story is far too often associated with blocks of text, while it is, if you ask me, this intangible product of all of a game's aspects combined. (Whether all that succeeded as I intended it to is not entirely clear to me, but perhaps that is material for a later post.)
You can find the fruits of my labor so far on my website at
www.philistinegames.com/. Since heaven knows the above wad of text is already ridiculously long for an introductory post, I'm not going copy any of the details here. For now, thanks for letting me join the club. I'm looking forward to talking with everyone.
