Volos, City of Games : The beginning

Hello everyone! I’ve been busy. Not with writing a book, like I was planing to do, but with something new. Creating a local game development scene from scratch, with the creation of the community “Volos, City of Games”.

So what is City of Games? How it started? What are its goals?

Let’s find out.

It started when I was doing my annual “am I following the best path to achieving my dreams” day. My dream is to create video games, (1) because I want to tell stories through them. It would take years to build my writing portfolio and even then there was no guarantee that companies would take a dedicated writer over a writer that had also created video games. If I was to one day create the video game of my dreams, I would need to start soon and go big.

Big video games are not created by individuals. Communication and teamwork are as useful a tool as anything I know about creating a story and video games. So the first step would be to find a team. Sadly, I live in Volos, a small city in Greece with no game development scene whatsoever and there is no option to move to a bigger city. I am stuck here for the foreseeable future. Well, I am not one to give up so soon. If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. I had to create a game development ecosystem in Volos.

But before I sinked hours and hours of work into designing how I would do that, I had to gauge public interest. So I went and created posters with the instruction for people to join a facegroup group. It took me about a month to create one that I thought was good enough. In hindsight I might have been procrastinating, scared of failure. In this month of work, exams on universities had started and my posters would be overlooked by overworked students with the thought “I don’t have time for this”. (2)

The first day after posting the poster all around the city, 1 person has joined the team. On the third day, another one joined. Along with two friends of mine, we were all 5 people. I got disappointed because my grand dreams would not come to reality. Let me acknowledge how wrong this was. Human, but wrong. Reality is all that we have and dreams are good but we shouldn’t get too attached to them. Even if I got 5 people, I shouldn't have been disappointed. They were much better than no one and I was lucky to have them. I could build my skills with them and next year do even better. I thank my friends for reminding me of that when I told them how I felt.

But fortunately for my dreams, the story didn’t end there. The next day, 5 more people joined up and then another 3. Soon enough, the team reached 30 members and I was satisfied.

That started the next step of my journey. Designing a summer workshop. Here the story repeats itself. I took too long to design the workshop and when I did, most people have left for vacations. Did I need that much time to design it or was it perfectionism that got in the way. I’m inclined to say the second, but then again, I don’t know what would have happened if I just jumped right in. Maybe I wouldn’t be ready. (3)

A side effect of walking the road that would lead to my dreams, is that I got a job offer. Someone from the University of Thessaly is planning a technological literacy program for teens, that includes Robotics, Programming and yes Video game design. So when I told him that I’m looking for a place to meet with my team and that I was doing game design classes, he offered me the game design class. I’ve been unemployed for most of my life, so to get an offer like that is something that makes me feel like I am doing the right thing and I am not just chasing butterflies.

So where am I now? We have 50 members on our facebook group. I’ve completed my first summer workshop with 10 people in it (for more information on how that went, check out this blog post) and going for the second one. I am still looking for a place to meet with my team, but I hope that this will get solved soon. Lastly I am trying to prepare for the beginning of the regular team classes.

I will continue to document how this venture will go. For the second blog post, I’m thinking I’ll just describe the goals of the team and what a “good year” will look like.

That’s it for now. Thank you for reading!

About the Psychonauts Asylum patients

The “Milkman Conspiracy” and “Black Velvetopia”. These two levels are standing out the most when talking about Psychonauts. The Milkman level has some excellent deadpan humor, a crazy layout and delivers on the premise of the game. Velvetopia is gorgeous beyond belief. I would love to love both those levels. But I don’t think they should exist in this game.

Oh, there goes 90% of my readers. For those of you who stayed let me clarify some things. It’s not that I dislike those levels. I just think that they don’t belong in the story that the game is trying to say.

Think about it. We spend the first half of the game in the camp. We get to know the other kids, our teachers and their stories. We develop some relations with most of them. A crush on Lily, a rivalry with Bobby. There is also plenty of foreshadowing from very early on about the end of the game. We hear something about a lake monster kidnaping children. We see that Coach Oleander identifies with Raz over their daddy issues and being marginalized by society.

So when problems start, we are invested. Someone is stealing the brains of our fellow campers! Someone kidnapped our crush, right after she told us to make out! It is the moment the adventure really starts. We go after the lake monster, defeat it, learn that Lili is in the Asylum and then...

Well we have to spend an hour into the mind of someone we never seen before to get him to open the gates of the Asylum. Yes it’s funny. Yes it’s weird. Yes we needed more time inside some weird brains to deliver on the premise of the game. But it doesn’t fit. It slows the game down.

And after that we have three more levels, with people we have never met, don’t really care about and their stories add nothing to the story we were in. By the time I finished with the last of the inmates, I had forgotten all about my urgency to find Lili, because I have spent the last 3 hours thinking about finding a gourmet dinner for Napoleon’s knight or how to proceed in Velvetopia.

“But,” I hear some argue, “those are the best levels of the game! All the magic of the game would be lost! We would lose all the humor of having government agents mourning in deadpan their supposedly dead husbands. How dare you Dimitri? How dare you.”

Well let me get you a copy of your arguments from a parallel universe, when I tried to tell them to include the “Black Velvetopia” to their version of the Psychonauts. “But Dogen’s and Boby’s brains were the most interesting brains in the game! Look at all the great humor at Bobby Zilch's brain! Look at how crazy interesting and weird Dogen-the-guy-who-accidentally-blew-the-heads-of-four-people brain was! Why would we want to replace that with some random guy's brain?”

You see, the talent of Tim Schafer is to turn anything he touches into comedy gold. We love the “Milkman conspiracy” because it is what we got, but we don’t account for what we have lost. Do you honestly believe that if they wrote some other two levels, they wouldn’t be just as good?

What to replace them with? Well, we have spend so much time around some very interesting characters. Why throw them away for the finale? Use them! I would pick Dogen, Bobby and Lili. Why? Because I love those characters. Those are the ones that *I* want to explore. But any other camper could do.

The developers could invent any reason to have us go into their mind. Like having them wired into a locked door, that they maintain closed with the power of their inner issues. Or something like that, only funnier.(1)

What we achieve with that is that we have a familiarity with those people. We feel connected with them. We care. We want to save them before we proceed, instead of helping them to acquire some items, to fool a guard, like we are in the worst kind of adventure game.

Don’t think I don’t like the game. I love it. It is one of those games that I love playing over and over again. I am planning to write a post someday with everything Psychonauts did masterfully. The only reason I am writing this is because it is not perfect and I wish it was. There are more issues of course, some of them about the gameplay, some more about the story and I may visit those in the future. But the problem with the Asylum patients is the one that irks me the most.