OK, so.

I started working on Sewilla's March about two years ago after researching the project on and off for a couple of years. I'd been wanting to make a project about the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF) for many years and have finally started to carve out some serious time to get into it. I came across Sewilla Lamar's story during this time, and became truly fascinated and inspired by her courage and commitment. A couple years ago I spent about 3 months creating a narrative prototype in Unity and Ink that sketched out the first chapter of  the story I wanted to tell about her wrought return from Anacostia to LA. I'll probably dedicate another blog post at some point about the research process this game's story  has undergone, but for now I'll leave it there. 

But at the beginning of 2023, I returned to this work after having a spark of inspiration (and fully deciding to switch careers and pursue games full-time). This was, in part, because of a call for application to the Astra Fellowship for "thinky games." I knew that I wanted to redesign the project to be more game-play focused and less of a straight-forward narrative game (like the previous prototype/design). Playing Citizen Sleeper in 2022 really opened my eyes to how this could be done. But I also kept coming back to this question that I feel like I've asked myself a lot lately: "What kind of game would I want to play?" 

I feel like I'm starting to answer that question with this new prototype. I wanted to make a game that used strategy / TRPG mechanics and aesthetics, but wasn't about "fighting" or traditional RPG leveling/inventory/min-maxing. I still wanted the focus to be on story. I still wanted to explore the truly remarkable journey of Sewilla's return, but I wanted to make players actions help shape that story. I'm emphasizing actions because I want to avoid using the term choice. Choice, for me, implies a kind of story-driven mechanic that reduces a story's development into dialog branches. Instead, I want the player to consider how their actions--responses, strategies, resource management--could shape outcomes and/or directions the character take.

In early designs and writing I quickly became frustrated with branching narrative expectations and how story choices felt somewhat meaningless for character/story development and growth. So I thought what if I wrote a story that didn't have any choices, but the player could still feel a sense of agency that comes from branching narrative plots. What if the actions of the player could shape the story in meaningful ways that made the player reflect on their circumstances and have moments of critical introspection that are core to Essay Games as a studio/concept.

So that's where I am, attempting to map out these designs and create spaces, scenarios, and "boards" that challenge the player to move, dodge, and escape foes in order to shape the story.

There's a lot I want to talk about with the project, including the technical aspects of the design, and how the process of making this work is shaping how I'm playing other games and conducting my research, and I'm going to try to hold myself accountable to reporting on development (and getting through the backlog of what I've worked on) once a week. These will be a mixture of technical conversation, discussions on narrative development, and design questions I'm sorting through. 

But for now, this post can suffice as an official announcement that I'm re-launching Sewilla's March and can't wait to share more about the project soon.