Hello. This is my first attempt to reach the game developer publicly, and I am doing this because after more than 15 years of trying all other options available for me, I had zero success and at this point I already lost all the hope to ever gain anyone’s attention. I am quite sure that majority of my letters were never even read by actual developers and just put to the spam folders by hr or community managers. So I hope that maybe if I try to establish contact trough open sources instead of reaching for support\hr emails, etc., at least a single developer will notice me and read what I have to say. My only wish is to be heard, so let me start with explaining why I so desperately need that:
Unlike many people my interests in life are very limited, and nor do I have various abilities. I am fixated on one thing I do the best – writing for video games, as for everything else - I am usually unable to learn anything that normal people learn with ease, or have zero interest in doing so.
I started writing for games when I was 13 y.o, and now, when I am 32, after long process of refinement, I am proud of having a bunch of high-quality plots for games of various genres, spiced up with general gameplay concepts with unique mechanics to forge a stronger bond with the stories. I believe that my work is way above the average level you can see in video games, and I would be happy to show it to someone who might be interested in good plot and concept for the game, because I finding greatest joy in seeing how my thoughts are being shaped into the video game, but… Nobody ever takes me seriously.
There is a couple reasons for that – for example, that I live in Ukraine, that makes me eligible only for remote job, or my lack of special educations, that I am physically disabled, and, most important – have some of the mental issues. Most of potential employers would probably stop reading right here, because they are not interested in dealing with people whose brain is not normal, despite it’s having mostly positive affection of the job I am doing. Like I said – I am fixated on one thing, the writing, and spending almost my entire time to be better in it, to shape my stories into perfect state, and also to study work of other people to see what major flaws and errors I should avoid, to learn new things and gain inspiration. I know, and most importantly – feel the aspects of a good story, and I know how to combine it with gameplay elements to create amazing experience for lots of various genres.
But this level of dedication comes with a price of me being unable to learn anything else. My memories and thought process appear to be very selective – for example, while I perfectly remember almost each detail of my stories, yet I still have cardinal points written down in the text document, because my brain refuses to remember such simple thing like left=west, that could be remembered even by the child, and each time I play a game with directions like that I have to open that damned document and read it over, and over, and over again. This is why I fail terribly at any other task I try, including my attempts to learn programming, 3d modelling or art – anything that could get me into game industry in much easier way than writing, but I am utterly uncapable for any of those jobs. What’s even worse – I cannot learn English beyond the basics that I am using right now, and this means that I am unable to write a beautiful text on English without either translator or at least and editor. Of course, any employer will give me a hard pass after reading that – because they still don’t know what I am capable at, but they also already not interested in learning that because there are other candidates for the job that can write perfectly in English, and they simply do not believe that despite all this trouble the quality of my stories will be worth it. Changing their minds would be easy if they agreed to spend at least 10-15 minutes on reading any of my work that I am willing to show, but in more than 15 years of life I have not found a single developer who would agree to do that. People just do not believe that I am capable of anything at all, they haven’t see my work but already assume that it’s so bad, that even spending time to look at it is already out of the question. And I see no way to get over this kind of prejudice, to somehow make at least a single developer believe in me enough to at least look at my work.
I fully realize that my disabilities are my personal problems, and the world won’t change their habits or take extra steps just because I am different, and that I should be glad that society cares about human garbage like me enough to pay a disability pension so I won’t starve to death (but what’s the point of supporting my pointless existence anyway?). This is why I am ready to work in any conditions, for any payment, and people can even take a full credit for my work, I am fine with that as long as they let me create, because living an empty life without doing anything is just too painful. Yet people still refuse to at least look at my work no matter what I propose to them.
No, I do not limit myself with big studios – I tried to join the small teams, usually those that are making mods for the games. Each of them silently felt apart, after members one by one just stopped posting updates and responding. Sometimes even projects leads never announced closure – they just vanished from the radars without saying a world to the rest of the team.
Then I met one very gifted artist and together we created Project Fire – a small rpg that we managed to release on Steam for free after almost 5 years of development: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526430/Project_Fire/
We faced many challenges during the development: for example, we had to cancel many original ideas because we didn’t had a programmer in team and could not modify code of the engine to make new features (except the stealth system that was made by my partner trough in-game events). And we realized that full game would be too big for use two, so we made only a prologue story, that introduces player to the lore of this world, several main characters and their first adventure. Also, since we didn’t had any budget at all (I even had to search for volunteer to make an English translation) – there was zero promotion, so not many people found out that the game even exists and it was lots in a wave of new releases quite fast.
Yet still it was received well, and I am especially proud that it has zero negative feedback about the story – despite it’s being only a prologue and having only a minor plot twists people still liked it and said that they wanted to learn the rest of the story. I would be most happy if we could deliver it for them – but my partner was busy with his family and irl work, and without him I was just a writer who could not make a single good-looking location or somehow else keep developing the game. By myself I am nothing, and to make my dream come true I need at least a few talented team members who would share my passion. I was hoping that having a released game would help me to find a team willing to either help me make a full version of this game, or just look at my plots and concepts for other games – but nothing changed, my letters to the developers were left unanswered, as they always did.
You probably want to ask the same question people already asked countless times – "why don’t you write books\text games\visual novels instead? ". I did that when I was teen, and got mostly positive feedback for short stories I wrote. But eventually I realized that with writing like that I am not using even half of the potential I have, and things I write are not bad, but not really good either. Writing different things requires different skills. I doubt that a typical horror writer will write a good romance story, etc., and the same works for me – I write especially for video games, and a good chunk of my stories are told trough visuals, gameplay elements or even music. I picked the video games exactly because they allowed such a wide choice of storytelling tools and even more of a possible combinations of them – and my stories would not be as awesome as they are now if you cut all those elements out. And there is also a few concepts (7,8) that barely have any story, focusing on gameplay instead, as well as concepts like 4 where original gameplay is just as important as it’s story. Quality of my work as a game writer is the only thing in the world I am certain in, and I don’t want to swap it for something that I won’t do well.
Some could also ask "why not form your own team then? " – but I cannot do that because I am not the leader. No, I never had problems as a team player, in all teams I worked with I had zero conflicts, and could always easy explain my point of view or what I wanted other people to do, or finding a different solution if they could not do what was needed. But I just not a social person (I don’t even communicate irl and have only one online friend), and have no idea how to gather and motivate and entire team to work for free (because with my 60$ month income I cannot afford to pay anyone for anything). Even when I worked along with the artist on Project Fire, I did it so easily because we were partners who shared same vision, and because I was very lucky to meet him, but that luck won’t repeat again. Only already established team can become my salvation.
(I will have to continue this letter in comments, because forums does not allow to write posts that's above 10k characters, sorry for that!).
(Update - and it seems like i am unable to do that because of auto-merging feature, so please, can someone leave a comment so i can write down second part of the letter please? Until someone does that - i cannot continue. )
Unlike many people my interests in life are very limited, and nor do I have various abilities. I am fixated on one thing I do the best – writing for video games, as for everything else - I am usually unable to learn anything that normal people learn with ease, or have zero interest in doing so.
I started writing for games when I was 13 y.o, and now, when I am 32, after long process of refinement, I am proud of having a bunch of high-quality plots for games of various genres, spiced up with general gameplay concepts with unique mechanics to forge a stronger bond with the stories. I believe that my work is way above the average level you can see in video games, and I would be happy to show it to someone who might be interested in good plot and concept for the game, because I finding greatest joy in seeing how my thoughts are being shaped into the video game, but… Nobody ever takes me seriously.
There is a couple reasons for that – for example, that I live in Ukraine, that makes me eligible only for remote job, or my lack of special educations, that I am physically disabled, and, most important – have some of the mental issues. Most of potential employers would probably stop reading right here, because they are not interested in dealing with people whose brain is not normal, despite it’s having mostly positive affection of the job I am doing. Like I said – I am fixated on one thing, the writing, and spending almost my entire time to be better in it, to shape my stories into perfect state, and also to study work of other people to see what major flaws and errors I should avoid, to learn new things and gain inspiration. I know, and most importantly – feel the aspects of a good story, and I know how to combine it with gameplay elements to create amazing experience for lots of various genres.
But this level of dedication comes with a price of me being unable to learn anything else. My memories and thought process appear to be very selective – for example, while I perfectly remember almost each detail of my stories, yet I still have cardinal points written down in the text document, because my brain refuses to remember such simple thing like left=west, that could be remembered even by the child, and each time I play a game with directions like that I have to open that damned document and read it over, and over, and over again. This is why I fail terribly at any other task I try, including my attempts to learn programming, 3d modelling or art – anything that could get me into game industry in much easier way than writing, but I am utterly uncapable for any of those jobs. What’s even worse – I cannot learn English beyond the basics that I am using right now, and this means that I am unable to write a beautiful text on English without either translator or at least and editor. Of course, any employer will give me a hard pass after reading that – because they still don’t know what I am capable at, but they also already not interested in learning that because there are other candidates for the job that can write perfectly in English, and they simply do not believe that despite all this trouble the quality of my stories will be worth it. Changing their minds would be easy if they agreed to spend at least 10-15 minutes on reading any of my work that I am willing to show, but in more than 15 years of life I have not found a single developer who would agree to do that. People just do not believe that I am capable of anything at all, they haven’t see my work but already assume that it’s so bad, that even spending time to look at it is already out of the question. And I see no way to get over this kind of prejudice, to somehow make at least a single developer believe in me enough to at least look at my work.
I fully realize that my disabilities are my personal problems, and the world won’t change their habits or take extra steps just because I am different, and that I should be glad that society cares about human garbage like me enough to pay a disability pension so I won’t starve to death (but what’s the point of supporting my pointless existence anyway?). This is why I am ready to work in any conditions, for any payment, and people can even take a full credit for my work, I am fine with that as long as they let me create, because living an empty life without doing anything is just too painful. Yet people still refuse to at least look at my work no matter what I propose to them.
No, I do not limit myself with big studios – I tried to join the small teams, usually those that are making mods for the games. Each of them silently felt apart, after members one by one just stopped posting updates and responding. Sometimes even projects leads never announced closure – they just vanished from the radars without saying a world to the rest of the team.
Then I met one very gifted artist and together we created Project Fire – a small rpg that we managed to release on Steam for free after almost 5 years of development: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526430/Project_Fire/
We faced many challenges during the development: for example, we had to cancel many original ideas because we didn’t had a programmer in team and could not modify code of the engine to make new features (except the stealth system that was made by my partner trough in-game events). And we realized that full game would be too big for use two, so we made only a prologue story, that introduces player to the lore of this world, several main characters and their first adventure. Also, since we didn’t had any budget at all (I even had to search for volunteer to make an English translation) – there was zero promotion, so not many people found out that the game even exists and it was lots in a wave of new releases quite fast.
Yet still it was received well, and I am especially proud that it has zero negative feedback about the story – despite it’s being only a prologue and having only a minor plot twists people still liked it and said that they wanted to learn the rest of the story. I would be most happy if we could deliver it for them – but my partner was busy with his family and irl work, and without him I was just a writer who could not make a single good-looking location or somehow else keep developing the game. By myself I am nothing, and to make my dream come true I need at least a few talented team members who would share my passion. I was hoping that having a released game would help me to find a team willing to either help me make a full version of this game, or just look at my plots and concepts for other games – but nothing changed, my letters to the developers were left unanswered, as they always did.
You probably want to ask the same question people already asked countless times – "why don’t you write books\text games\visual novels instead? ". I did that when I was teen, and got mostly positive feedback for short stories I wrote. But eventually I realized that with writing like that I am not using even half of the potential I have, and things I write are not bad, but not really good either. Writing different things requires different skills. I doubt that a typical horror writer will write a good romance story, etc., and the same works for me – I write especially for video games, and a good chunk of my stories are told trough visuals, gameplay elements or even music. I picked the video games exactly because they allowed such a wide choice of storytelling tools and even more of a possible combinations of them – and my stories would not be as awesome as they are now if you cut all those elements out. And there is also a few concepts (7,8) that barely have any story, focusing on gameplay instead, as well as concepts like 4 where original gameplay is just as important as it’s story. Quality of my work as a game writer is the only thing in the world I am certain in, and I don’t want to swap it for something that I won’t do well.
Some could also ask "why not form your own team then? " – but I cannot do that because I am not the leader. No, I never had problems as a team player, in all teams I worked with I had zero conflicts, and could always easy explain my point of view or what I wanted other people to do, or finding a different solution if they could not do what was needed. But I just not a social person (I don’t even communicate irl and have only one online friend), and have no idea how to gather and motivate and entire team to work for free (because with my 60$ month income I cannot afford to pay anyone for anything). Even when I worked along with the artist on Project Fire, I did it so easily because we were partners who shared same vision, and because I was very lucky to meet him, but that luck won’t repeat again. Only already established team can become my salvation.
(I will have to continue this letter in comments, because forums does not allow to write posts that's above 10k characters, sorry for that!).
(Update - and it seems like i am unable to do that because of auto-merging feature, so please, can someone leave a comment so i can write down second part of the letter please? Until someone does that - i cannot continue. )
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