Psychic Somewhere
Just a warning, this post won’t have any real content updates, but I thought it would be important to share some thoughts.
As I’m getting closer to the end of development, I’ve had a bit of time to do some thinking. And basically, what I want to do is talk about what motivated this game, if for anything, it’ll be for myself when I look back on this... for posterity’s sake I guess you could say.
Psychic nowhere
At its core, Night Loops is about the journey of finding one’s place in the psyche, a True Self. It’s about a woman who is traveling through life numb, floating in the day-to-day tedium. Through the path to the True Ending, you help her rebuild the inner world and take back ownership of her mental sense of Self (i.e. finding her “psychic somewhere”).
During the end of art school, I was focusing on this subject of “psychic nowhere”. Originally coined by psychoanalyst Shinhee Han in her discussion of the psychic lives of young adult Asian Americans, the term describes a state of dissociation, a detachment from the psyche. In other words, the sensation of the “False Self” having taken over. It’s a condition often correlated with the absence of a clear geographic belonging or destination.
Being Asian American myself, it felt natural to begin incorporating these topics into my work. I began to realize growing up maybe I never had a window into the psychic lives of others like me. So I knew I wanted this game’s overarching journey to be one of traveling through the planes of the psychic nowhere to the eventual finding of the psychic somewhere.
Funny thing is though, I hadn’t really thought much of this original thesis until recently. Which brings me to my next point...
How do you stay true to the essence of the original after 2+ years of development?
So the first version was scrapped after ~6 months. The demo version you see here (v0.13.0) is the product of 2 more years after that point. So I have to ask myself, did I stay true to the original purpose?
To be honest, when I look back at myself 2 years ago, it’s a completely different person. I can’t help but still smile a lot from it though. So that’s just to say, there’s hardly a chance the finished product will exactly reflect the thoughts I had on this subject at that time. I guess there's no rule that says it has to though, right? And this finally brings me to a last thought...
It doesn’t really matter, does it?
It sounds somewhat nihilistic, but what I really mean is that it doesn’t matter if I meet my expectations for this game. What really matters is you, the one who actually plays it, and the experience you take away from it. Our interpretations of the same game or painting could be vastly different.
But all this talk about shared experience and original theses won’t be worth anything if I don’t actually complete the full game. So that’s some more motivation for me to reach v1.0.0 ASAP.
Anyways, if you made it this far, thanks for listening to what could amount to rambling at this point and till next time, sincerely,
Jia
As I’m getting closer to the end of development, I’ve had a bit of time to do some thinking. And basically, what I want to do is talk about what motivated this game, if for anything, it’ll be for myself when I look back on this... for posterity’s sake I guess you could say.
Psychic nowhere
At its core, Night Loops is about the journey of finding one’s place in the psyche, a True Self. It’s about a woman who is traveling through life numb, floating in the day-to-day tedium. Through the path to the True Ending, you help her rebuild the inner world and take back ownership of her mental sense of Self (i.e. finding her “psychic somewhere”).
During the end of art school, I was focusing on this subject of “psychic nowhere”. Originally coined by psychoanalyst Shinhee Han in her discussion of the psychic lives of young adult Asian Americans, the term describes a state of dissociation, a detachment from the psyche. In other words, the sensation of the “False Self” having taken over. It’s a condition often correlated with the absence of a clear geographic belonging or destination.
Being Asian American myself, it felt natural to begin incorporating these topics into my work. I began to realize growing up maybe I never had a window into the psychic lives of others like me. So I knew I wanted this game’s overarching journey to be one of traveling through the planes of the psychic nowhere to the eventual finding of the psychic somewhere.
Funny thing is though, I hadn’t really thought much of this original thesis until recently. Which brings me to my next point...
How do you stay true to the essence of the original after 2+ years of development?
So the first version was scrapped after ~6 months. The demo version you see here (v0.13.0) is the product of 2 more years after that point. So I have to ask myself, did I stay true to the original purpose?
To be honest, when I look back at myself 2 years ago, it’s a completely different person. I can’t help but still smile a lot from it though. So that’s just to say, there’s hardly a chance the finished product will exactly reflect the thoughts I had on this subject at that time. I guess there's no rule that says it has to though, right? And this finally brings me to a last thought...
It doesn’t really matter, does it?
It sounds somewhat nihilistic, but what I really mean is that it doesn’t matter if I meet my expectations for this game. What really matters is you, the one who actually plays it, and the experience you take away from it. Our interpretations of the same game or painting could be vastly different.
But all this talk about shared experience and original theses won’t be worth anything if I don’t actually complete the full game. So that’s some more motivation for me to reach v1.0.0 ASAP.
Anyways, if you made it this far, thanks for listening to what could amount to rambling at this point and till next time, sincerely,
Jia
