Beginnings

Welcome to the first DevLog entry for Anemoia. This is intended to document my progress as I work on my first large-scale video game. I don't know how long this is going to take, but I anticipate years, and I'd like to share my work not only to document it but also to keep myself accountable so that hopefully it doesn't fizzle out.

The Inspiration

At the risk of sounding my age, I grew up in the NES and SNES eras. I beat The Legend of Zelda before I started elementary school, and I spent many hours pretending to help my Mom play the Dragon Warrior series (what Dragon Quest was called in America back in those days). Lots of great memories writing out clues that villagers provided, drawing maps on graph paper, and thinking about what I would do if I were building my own game.

On my own, I became obsessed with the early Final Fantasy games as well. I beat the original multiple times using every class setup I could think of. When we got a Super Nintendo, I was blown away by the story and characters of Final Fantasy IV (II at the time). And then, oh boy, Final Fantasy VI (III at the time).

The town of Cornelia in the original Final Fantasy on the NES, with armor and weapon shops beside a stone plaza
The original Final Fantasy on the NES.

Final Fantasy VI captured me like no other game I had ever experienced up to that point. The massive cast of interesting, playable characters living in an epic story that didn't talk down to me, even as a 10-year-old. The themes were dark, the world was lived-in, the customization and systems were top notch. It was a revelation and remains one of my favorite games of all time to this day. I'm doing yet another replay of the Pixel Remaster version right now.

Fast forward a couple decades and in walked Stardew Valley. I had been a fan of the original Harvest Moon on the SNES but hadn't played it in many years. In the decade since Stardew Valley released, I have easily spent well over 2,000 hours in its world. I have purchased it on Steam, PlayStation, Switch, and iOS. I have played every update and achieved 100% perfection at least 10 times. It is my favorite game of all time. The story, the characters, the daily loop, the customization, the secrets, the art, the music. Everything is not only perfect but also the result of one man's dedication. For me, it changed what I thought was possible from an indie developer and led me back to the days of scrawling in my school notebooks about what I would make if I were a game developer.

Well, it turns out I know how to code, so why not build my game?

The Plan

"Anemoia" is a word coined in 2012 by writer John Koenig to describe "nostalgia for a time or place you have never personally experienced". My goal is to create a world, characters, and story that will evoke this feeling in myself and hopefully others. I hope to combine inspiration from a lifetime of gaming into my own preferences, ideas, and passions in order to engineer something beautiful that I can share with others.

Over the next weeks, months, and potentially years, I am going to attempt to build the game that I've always wanted to build. I fully expect to fail repeatedly and learn constantly from my mistakes. I've built small games before, but not in many years and nothing even within an order of magnitude of the scale that I'm going for here. I am going to enjoy the journey but hopefully also reach my destination.

The Tools

  • I have chosen Unity as my game engine. It is not something I would say I am familiar with, but I have used it before and I got a better feel for it than I did when I tried Godot several years ago. The wealth of tutorials and community information is massive, and the ability to build the game on many different platforms was very important to me.
  • I am using Claude Code for the AI portion of the development process. I know this is already controversial in the games space, as we've just seen with the criticism of Big Walk. I am disclosing this here very openly. You can read my thoughts on AI in software development as a whole in other articles, but suffice to say it is part of my process now and will be used on this effort.
  • For art I am currently using Pixaki on my iPad. I love pixel art and the resurgence of modern pixel art games over the past few years. There is a nostalgia to it for people of a certain age, but I genuinely believe it has a beauty all its own. I also have Aseprite and Pixquare, which I'll be testing out. I have not decided whether I will have LLMs help with any of the art at this point but I can guarantee that I will personally touch every piece of artwork that goes into this game because that is very important to me.
  • I have nothing in the way of music or sound effects at the moment, so that is something I will need to think about in the near future. I do have a MIDI keyboard and a background in playing music so I will likely use that heavily. I also may take classical pieces that are in the public domain and create my own performances of them.
  • The rest of my tooling is pretty standard for my workflow and is documented elsewhere on this site. I am using Notion for my massive set of notes around story, characters, mechanics, systems, etc. I am using Git and GitHub for version control. I am using Byword to type this DevLog.

The Future

So that's where I am currently. I have started building out some of the basic systems and a simple test overworld for me to play around in. I have created art for the main protagonist and environments. And now I have begun this DevLog where you can find further updates as I have them.

A pixel art character with orange hair and dark armor stands outside a red-roofed farmhouse, beside a lake, a dirt path, and a row of turnips
The protagonist in the test overworld.

Happy building.