Planning & starting off.

For me, starting off with an idea is one of the most difficult parts of creating something. My initial thoughts were to cover things that I know other people have experiences in - for example the ways trauma can influence your sexual desires, or the ways in which the mental health care system in the UK has often left people feeling neglected or hopeless.

My main issue with these ideas is that I couldn't think of ways to display these creatively, and make multiple different individual results with them. So, growing frustrated with that, I went right back to the basics and wrote down the end products I know I could be capable of making. A game, comics, animation, videos, a podcast. Things that I know are within my capabilities if I try hard enough.

The game idea stuck with me, as I did game design in college and so I know the amazing storytelling potential in games, and the ways they can make the player feel a part of that story. From there, I thought of things I'd like others to understand the experience of. The first thing that came to mind was my own struggles with memory loss, and how difficult this can make life. The idea of a game that uses the players memory against them, and purposely confuses them, sounded like something fun and something that I could do for myself. This is my starting point for my idea, and I'll develop it further as my project continues.

I have a few sources of inspiration that have the same type of feeling I want to communicate within all of my work here. There are a series of songs about Kisaragi Station, all of which have no names, and the uploader of these videos has no name either. The only way I found these songs was by my youtube recommended page, and I thought it was incredibly interesting how the producer made these songs hard to stumble on or find, in an exact imitation of the stories of Kisaragi Station itself. I think it makes the songs that much more interesting, and gives them a type of personal touch in a way.

Other than that, I find images of liminal spaces inspiring too. I want the artwork of my game to radiate the same type of feeling: of something familiar yet completely unknown. This is something I'm constantly feeling throughout my life as I walk around in places I know, yet feel as if they're new. With the way my memory almost erases itself, it's so easy for me to suddenly not know where I am, who I'm with, what I was saying, or what I was doing.

My current plans are to create a game that uses glitch effects and blurs to obscure vital information from the player, in an imitation of how it feels to suddenly lose your memory in the middle of conversations or actions. I want the choices to feel deceiving, so the player feels cautious and never fully in control. I want the experience to emulate how life can feel for me, and for others who struggle with their memory, or forms of dissociation.

For the logo of this project, I want to mix the kanji used for Kisaragi Station (異界駅) with the word Liminal - as liminal space is an interesting concept to me.