From a video game, to a manga, to a novel.

[JohnStacy]

In 2010 I started work on a video game.  It was going to be a SNES game made in the same style as Tales of Phantasia.  The visual style was going to be similar as far as environments and backgrounds go, but the character and enemy designs would be done differently.  For this game, I had a synopsis completed that was actually somewhat solid. 

I had a small team that would work on the project.  We were all dedicated and would work in our free time, since we were also young and money wasn't the biggest problem yet.  I had myself working on writing, music, and sound design.  My sister, who is a professional artist would do character and enemy design, as well as a little bit of other visual assets.  I had two other artists who would do other visual assets.  I had 3 programmers, and a few other people.  The team wasn't the biggest, but it was a little smaller than the team that worked on Super Mario World.  We also weren't aiming to make a game really quickly.  It would be a process we worked on over 5-10 years, since it was on a volunteer basis and used as a fun project to learn new things about game design.  My sister had already worked on manga, and did work in that style, so this would be a project in animation.  The programmer had already worked on games before, and is actually a successful game designer now.  At the time he had only worked in small scale 2d and 3d games, but never a large scale 2d game.  I had never done a full soundtrack.

The project was declared a failure when the team left the project.  It wasn't apathy that killed it, the people were dedicated.  It was things like having to take on a second job because of hard times, taking on more responsibility at school, other things like that.  The team gradually thinned out until it was just my sister and I.  At that point, I started two side projects that would allow development to still happen and things to be done, but not directly in the development of a video game.

I would flesh out the story and add much more detail, to make it able to stand on its own.  I would convert the story into a novel and a manga.  As I got to writing, the story stopped making sense since there were suddenly a lot of holes to fill in.  For example, the journey from one side of the world to the other took a while in game time, but only a sentence in novel form, and was very dull and uninteresting. 

By converting it into a novel, the story changed significantly and I started to enjoy where it was going.  However, there was suddenly a huge hole in the middle because what was there originally no longer made sense.  It is here that I got stuck, and I haven't touched the story much since 2014.  What I have here is the prologue from the novel.  If I fill in the gaps, I could finish this novel somewhat quickly, however, lack of time, motivation, and other things have caused it to fall into the land where things never get finished.

I am posting the prologue here to see two things.  One, if my writing is worth anything, and also to see if people would be interested in continuing reading.  If you are interested, message me and I'll send you more to read. 

Click here to read a pdf of the prologue.

Thank you for reading this long write up, and also if you chose to read the prologue.  I am open to suggestions if you have any thoughts as to what I should do with it.