Bardsong

What is Bardsong? 🪈

“Bardsong” is the working title for a video game I’m developing. I must admit that the direction isn’t very clear at this stage. The genre and mechanics are loose and I sure has hell haven’t written a game design document.

I’m in the inspiration stage exploring themes that resonate with me, but at it’s core, I think I want to tell a story. 📖

Inspiration

So what’s currently inspiring me?

Baldurs Gate 3

No, I’m not proposing to create an RPG of this scale. I know I can’t create something like this as a solo developer. It can still inspire me.

If you haven’t played BG3 stop reading this. Seriously. Go play it now.

The writing, voice acting, player agency, storytelling and worldbuilding is exceptional ❤️ If I could capture the heart of that in some way in my own game, I’d be happy.

I know my constraints mean I can’t execute to this level (once again not expecting to), but creating a more linear and tight story with similar heart may be achievable. Passion seems to be the theme I’m trying to articulate. Show the player that passion was put into the body of work.

Beyond this, I’m also a fan of Dungeons and Dragons. So there is a thought marinating in my mind as to whether I focus on turn based combat.

Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings 💍

I’m by no means an expert of this series so my explanation here is going to be rough and loose!

Within Tolkiens works, there is a book called “The Silmarillion”. Here one story talks about the “gods” of the world coming together to sing a song, and bring forth life and the creation of all things. However one of them, Melkor, decides to sow discord and his own will into the song. This would lead to true evil and terrible events would thus unfold. This is known as The Discord of Melkor.

Tolkiens heroes and villains are often black and white, and so what Melkor does here is wrong. I can’t help but wonder: “what if it wasn’t?” What if there was more to this character, and a morally grey reason as to why they did this? I’ve always enjoyed morally grey characters and the idea of feeding this into the gameplay loop for replayability somehow is turning some gears in my head.

Here I’m also going to plug Nerd of the Rings which is an excellent way to experience the more “high fantasy” parts of Tolkiens work (first and second age) and will give you an “un-butchered” explanation.

Blending it all together…

Leaves me with more questions than answers. But that’s totally fine! That’s how most software is built anyway.

What I’ve built to date has focused on re-implementing a Vampire Survivors clone I created in Godot in Monogame (maybe a post for another day).

I’m not sure whether I’ll stick with this type of gameplay or explore the D&D / turn based combat style (could be worth a prototype) but I am a bit more sure on having some form of rougelike game loop.

I’ve enjoyed games like:

• returnal
• hades
• slay the spire
• vampire survivors

and there’s something great about being able to jump in for a 30 - 90 min gaming session and feel like you accomplished something or had some fun going through that loop.

A rougelike may also act as a nice creative constraint. Perhaps I can reduce the number of assets and resources I need by thinking of how I can make minor changes across the game world throughout the loop (without requiring whole new areas, towns, cities etc that would completely blow out scope)

As you can tell these are all the ramblings of someone brainstorming. Hopefully I can build a clearer picture as time progresses and I iterate. In fact, I’m sure iteration will provide this in due time.

Anyway, it feels only right to leave you with my crappy programmer art in the spirit of iteration and feedback loops (another blog post I’ll need to write…). Perfection can fuck off at this stage.