What Making my First Indie Game Taught Me
Welcome to a developer diary of The Space in Between, an emotional visual novel about stargazing, Asian American identity, and mental health. I’m Emily, the team lead and writer behind this game, and I’ll be sharing my personal game development journey as well as giving periodic updates about our game.
What is The Space in Between? We are an emotional dating simulator that tells the story of June, an outgoing college student wrestling with her complicated relationship with her immigrant mother, and her boyfriend Miles, who is recovering after a period of mental illness. Set on a stargazing trip, the player connects stars in the night sky to create their own constellation. Depending on what shape they choose to form, a different story is told.
I used to take trips with my dad every couple of years to see the Perseid meteor shower, as it would always fall on my birthday. He would always point out different constellations to me, and I eventually started creating my own stories among the stars. The characters are born out of different parts of my own life: growing up as an Asian American, dealing with mental health, and emerging as a young adult trying to make sense of love.
I’ve always loved consuming and telling stories growing up, so when I discovered that technology could be an aid to that, I became obsessed with narrative gaming — some of my favorites include Night in the Woods, Firewatch, and Florence. Dating sims are usually comedic or lighthearted (@ The KFC game, Dream Daddy), and I wanted to make a game that honored those humorous elements but had a deeper message. While neither of my characters is serious, they deal with complex issues such as cultural conflict and self-discovery, a story that is authentic to my upbringing.
June: God has favorites and I’m definitely not one of them.
Miles: I don’t think that’s how religion works.
June: To be fair, none of us know God, if he’s even out there.
Miles: I think every religious person would disagree with you.
June: Look, God. Hear me out.
Miles: You’re really addressing God right now.
While I’ve been interested in game development for five years, I didn’t start creating my own games until my junior year in college. I always felt limited by my mediocre art skills, not to mention I’ve had an emotionally turbulent couple of years in college that paralyzed my creative spirit. Before I became a team lead at UCLA’s game development club, no woman in years had even applied for a leadership role and narrative games were unheard of. But since carving a space in my club for myself, I knew that telling stories is integral to who I am.
Through creating this game, I realized that I didn’t need anyone’s permission to enter the gaming space. As a long time consumer of games, I realized that there wasn’t a single game that told the modern Asian American experience, one that honed in on the everyday lives of Asian people, specifically that of a first-generation Chinese girl. I didn’t want my game to be in-your-face Asian, but one where the character just happened to be Chinese, in which her actions and speech are imbued with her cultural identity.
As the leader of this project, I give art direction, develop the narrative beats, run our Twitter page, write the dialogue, and work closely with programmers in the core gameplay mechanic. A few of my friends asked me how I create games with so much confidence, and the honest answer is I don’t know. I have a lot of enthusiasm and I take initiative well; all I know is that this is what I’m meant to be doing.
Even though writing is my first love, I realized that I equally enjoy the collaboration process of making games — managing the different departments, upkeeping our Trello, hosting events, learning about art and programming, basically being the glue that holds the team together. We are currently working with a $0 budget and a small team, but there has been great joy in the process.
An insecurity of mine is my history of quitting, from books I started writing and never finished, playing the piano, painting, and even game development. But I realized that what’s important is picking myself back up together and trying again —there is power in the attempt, as long as you are closer each time.
As for ways you can support us, we have a Twitter, set up an Itch.io page, made a community Discord, and launched a Ko-Fi page.