EDIT: I completely did not look at the date and had it in my head that May only had 30 days in it. It's May 31st. Regardless, please enjoy a devlog one day early. (end of edit)

Hi everyone! I hope you had a lovely May. It’s starting to heat up a bit here, which is great because the first half of the month was freezing.

This month I wanted to talk about the process of taking inspiration from other media, and some of the insecurity that can come with that. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but if I am, that’s okay too.

So originally in my credits, I had a list of some of the influences on the game. This is something I grabbed from the TTRPG scene, where it IS very common to list the other systems & pieces of media that influenced the final product. (In TTRPGs, it also serves as a suggestion - if you want “Dishonored but it’s tabletop”, try Blades in the Dark, etc.) I eventually removed it because I was worried about inviting comparison. I definitely have a tendency to get in my head about an imaginary audience that I’ve invented, and often I am not charitable to that audience because I overestimate the difficulty of communication. One of my greatest fears is probably being misunderstood, and writing fiction is an exercise in attempting to communicate clearly to avoid being misunderstood while not being so obvious to make the audience feel talked down to, so maybe this is exposure therapy.

(And frankly, a lot of good art can also exist within misunderstanding, or reading something else into a text that wasn’t intended. That’s not the point of this, but it’s a subpoint.)

Anyways, the big influences on the Death of the Video Star are Disco Elysium, Friends at the Table’s Twilight Mirage season, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. You see what I mean about inviting comparison, right? I think the other issue with listing those influences is I don’t think they’re really that representative of the content of Video Star. Twilight Mirage and Neon Genesis Evangelion are both giant robot stories, Disco Elysium is a gritty detective story with a focus on worldbuilding and politics, none of those things are represented in Video Star. I think the scope of those media is so large, putting Video Star in their same league can feel cocky or misrepresentative. But at the same time, these things ARE big influences on Video Star! Specifically in terms of themes!

In terms of influence, Disco Elysium is the “yeah, duh” of modern narrative game creators. Every game dev who has played Disco Elysium is now living in the shadow of Disco Elysium. But mechanically, the only thing I’m grabbing from Disco Elysium is that your skills affect your dialogue & narration. THEMATICALLY (and perhaps this is a minor spoiler for Disco Elysium?), what I’m very interested in is the concept of love as a form of deification. This is also where I’d like to bring up the concept of “being in conversation with” another piece of media. Disco Elysium is about a lot of things - ideology, poverty, addiction, mental illness, etc - and “love as deification” is honestly, relatively minor among those themes. Which is fine! No piece of media can be about everything, and I prefer Disco Elysium be about the things it’s about. But I find that particular theme really interesting, and wanted to expand upon that. When I talk about being in conversation with another piece of media, I think of it like having group discussions in school - “I think what x said about y is really interesting, and I want to elaborate on that by talking about it’s connection to z”. Maybe z wasn’t in the conversation before, but it is now, and by discussing it, maybe we can get a new perspective on y. Ideally, I think you can enjoy media that’s in conversation with other pieces of media both on its own and with the context of the media influencing it. So if you played Disco Elysium, perhaps you’ll get something extra out of Video Star?  But it should absolutely stand on its own.

Twilight Mirage is maybe the hit indie darling of this list (as indie as. a very popular podcast can be lol). The way the Friends at the Table team approaches fiction is very thoughtful, and I always appreciate their willingness to talk about the reasoning behind their roleplaying choices. I think often when we talk about the process of telling stories, people have a tendency to act like the narrative has sprinted away from them. This can be what a lot of storytelling feels like - having lightning bolt moments of inspiration in the middle of writing, character voices manifesting in ways you don’t expect, etc etc. But I also worry about artists using this way of speaking about storytelling to absolve themselves of responsibility in terms of a story’s flaws or implications.* I can’t get into it without talking about spoilers, but this is definitely something on my mind as I write Video Star’s final scenes.

Also: the names in Video Star are ABSOLUTELY inspired by the naming conventions of Twilight Mirage, which brings me to: I am cursing Art Martinez-Tebbel for the rest of my life for coming up with a name as perfect as “Grand Magnificent”. Do you know how badly I want to name a character Grand Magnificent. Do you know how much it vexes me that there’s no way I ever can, because the name already belongs to one of the Characters Of All Time. I promise when the game comes out it will not be hard to figure out which of my guys I wanted to name Grand Magnificent.

And finally, Neon Genesis Evangelion. I think when you look at Worthy Undone, it’s easy to see “depressed cringefail divorcee” and go “ah, the Harry DuBois influence”, especially after my essay about how much I liked Disco Elysium. But Worthy wasn’t patterned after Harry. Worthy was patterned after Shinji Ikari. Shinji is maybe one of the great failgirls of the modern era, and while I don’t think Worthy is necessarily pathetic in the exact same ways, I do think Shinji’s pathetic desperation to be loved is something I really wanted to channel with Worthy. I rewatched End of Evangelion while I was writing the endings, and I think the influence shows. Eva, near the end of the show & during the movie, got really good at representing characters’ internal states through imagery and metaphor, and I wanted to try to steal some of that for myself. Like the Disco Elysium example, my hope is that it’s still understandable to people without that context, but people who do have that context might have extra insight into where I’m coming from.

Also having two characters named “Worthy Undone” and “Turquoise Grace” was absolutely influenced by this immortal Austin Walker tweet about the Netflix dub of Eva:

There’s also a Twilight Mirage character named Worthy of Grace, so it can count as a double reference.

Anyways! I wanted to discuss some of my influences in Video Star. Like I said, it can be kind of difficult to talk about these things without feeling silly or overly important, but I think most of my worries come from my own anxieties about uh. Having emotions and feeling passion LOL.

CURRENT PROGRESS: All but two of the endings are written! I’m working on that last bit of writing alongside drawing. Worthy, Turquoise, and Assistance are fully converted to layeredimages, and I’ve made good progress on the other characters. I've also revamped Red's imagemap; I wanna stay away from redoing too many of the assets from the demo because otherwise the game will never come out, but I felt the imagemap from the demo wasn't really up to par in a distracting way. I should be good to have the writing done by the end of June, and then the rest is just coding, drawing, and editing!

That’s it for the month! Have a good June! Happy Pride Month!

*an aside - I don’t mean this to say “creators are required to respond to every dude who crawls into their mentions to rant about how their work doesn’t reflect that dude’s Hyperspecific Lived Experiences” - I mean it more in terms of responding to good faith critique with “wellllllllll idk the story just kinda got away from me lol”. Write with intent! Draw with intent! Etc!