[Blog #01] why the player needs to end and leave this game themselves

->[THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS]<-

My projects always start with a row of simple words that happen to impact me a lot for some reason:

trans action failed

random access memory

the hero denies their quest

my body feels recycled

we should try third-person

please think about me so i can exist

...

And with tomorrow is my birthday i wanted to ask the question: 

"why don't we just leave?"

It's an easy question (really!). It frees you from the integral rules the environment places on you and tells you that it's okay to take the exit. This is the catalyst of this story: Petal and Bios don't know why they should stay and why they shouldn't leave - so they do exactly that. But on their journey they realise that committing to something isn't a one-time-decision. It's rather a task that has to be focused on. (And with growing doubts, this is hard to do.)

While making the game I thought: "Well, maybe the player doesn't think it's a good idea to leave anyway." That's why I wanted to give the player the power to always decide if Petal and Bios should move on or go home again. After all! You can also quit leaving as well!!

If you have played the game then you know that its story is way heavier then a simple: "why don't we just leave?" Except... I don't think it is!! tomorrow is my birthday is just an extreme answer. When I started thinking about the game in its early stages I wanted it to be a mundane/slice of life experience. But this quickly changed once I started reading the manga Spiral Alive (which is a spin-off of Spiral: Bonds of Reasoning). 

The manga is about Imari Sekiguchi and Shirou Sawamura who already failed their lives (for different reasons) and only have a doomed future in front of them. (You can probably already see the parallels to Petal in this regard. Thanks for reading this blog btw! <3) Still, they disregard that fact. They just keep on going as long as they can. For every day they can still call theirs. This inspired me so much to drive the story and its characters to their edges.

tomorrow is my birthday ended up being a pretty violent game. But I hope you did notice the different forms of violence during your playthrough! Violence is such an interesting subject to me that I definitely will explore it further in my art. I just need to come up with a new row of a bunch of simple words...

[also if you have some free time you should definitely check out Spiral: Bonds of Reasoning! It's one of my favourite anime and manga 4ever :3 -> if you want you can listen to the same playlist i was listening to when i read the manga, heh]