Kandria
Hello, Nick
I wanted to bring you a mid-month update to talk a bit about the ideas I have for Kandria's story. This is an email exclusive update, as a little thanks for your interest!
I've always had a fascination for artificial life, and especially androids. I'm not sure exactly what draws me so much to that, but there are definitely a lot of interesting topics to explore in that area. If you're interested in that sort of thing as well, I can very heartily recommend Blade Runner and Blade Runner: 2049, Ghost in the Shell, NieR: Automata, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The latter isn't about androids per se, but it is about transhumanism, a topic that is very closely tied to it.
While it is very interesting to think about how androids and transhumanism would affect our society today, I don't want to focus on that particular angle in Kandria. After all, Kandria takes place in the post apocalypse, so there isn't much of a society left to affect. Instead I'd like to look more into the human aspect of it, especially in a context where people are put under rather great pressure of survival.
Even with real-as-in-blood people, it's all too easy for us to dehumanise each other and forget that we're dealing with other people that have a life of their own too. Now, when we mix something in there that looks and acts like a person of their own, but is nevertheless basically a human-made machine, I'm very interested in exploring how different people would react. Would they treat an android like they would any other person, or would they outright reject the idea that a machine could count as human? When confronted with a life or death situation, would they save the person made out of flesh, or the one made out of metal? If they had the choice to effectively kill an android to get an advantage, would they pick it more readily than if it were another person made out of blood and bones?
It's almost too easy for me to come up with interesting situations and imagine how various people would react to them. But there's another interesting angle to explore, namely how would the android react to these situations? Given a person that actively knows they are fundamentally different from their peers, how would they act and decide? Would they try to deepen the divide and actively open up a chasm, or would they try to blend in and coexist? Would they resent being man-made, or feel superiority at being "the next step"? Would they accept their identity, or experience anxiety about their origins?
And finally there's the part that's exclusive to games: given that the player will essentially role play as an android, how will they experience these scenarios? This is something I'm quite uncertain about right now. I've played plenty of games where the main character I was playing as reacted in a dumb way, or made decisions that seemed unnatural. This of course broke the immersion and took me out of the experience, which is a bad sign. I'd like to avoid this dissonance wherever possible. The easiest way would be through a silent protagonist, but I think that's a cop out solution. The far better, but also far more difficult solution, is to make the character believable and consistent enough that the person playing it would accept the character's choices, even if they themselves had not necessarily made the same choices.
I feel like I'll need a lot of detailed feedback on this kind of thing to make it work. For now though it's still too early to worry about it. I have a very basic plot structure worked out, but I still need to hash out the details of that. I think I'll need to take a month or two of break from coding and drawing to really focus on that soon. This month though, I'll keep working on the combat and animation system. I've made some good progress, which I'm excited to show off in the end of the month update!
I'd also like to do another email update like this on Kandria's world and backstory soon, maybe next week, even!
Until then, let me ask you: which of the questions above did you find the most interesting?