2025-07-07 Originaly posted on Mastodon
There is a famous ancient saying: "If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together." As it happens, it is probably made up. Even if it was real, I don't think it is necessarily true, especially in the context of game development.
I have been making games since my teenage years. Most of those projects were solitary efforts, and they ended nowhere. Some of them were a team effort, and, you guessed it, they ended nowhere, too. Perhaps it is my luck, or maybe it is a trait of my character. It seems that any team that I assemble for any project longer than a couple of weeks ends up falling apart. And this includes projects where I'd hire professionals, too, so maybe I am a bad boss, after all. Still, there's nothing that screams "the project is over" as much as your lead artist starting to avoid you. :D
To avoid such situations, I decided to tackle a whole (small-ish) project on my own. A month ago, I started to think I was ready to start a new game project. Originally, I wanted to make a full version of "Tech&Blood", but that would take years of work. I need to be realistic about my abilities.
I've been handling writing, coding and music for my previous games, and I have some expertise in these areas. But I want to make a game I can be proud of, all by myself, so I am trying to improve my art skills in parallel with the development. This means the project scope must be small.
What kind of project will it be?
With all the meat in "YuruCamp", "Mono", and "ZatsuTabi", I've been yearning for a vegan cooking story. But a vegan cooking story in a "cute girls doing cute stuff" style would be disingenuous. You can't just ignore all the ethical stuff and pretend it's not there, right? So I thought, and thought, and realised: how about a show where you cook vegan food to heal your soul in a world as broken as ours?
And so, I'm writing a script for "Cooking For My Revolutionary Friend", typing so fast the keys of my typewriter get stuck.