Hi! I’m Wil, and I’m gonna tell you a little story about how our project started. “Who the hell are you?” you might be wondering. Well, I’m glad you asked. I’m an electronic engineer that has been making a living out of building software for the last ~15 years. But you know what’s funny? I taught myself how to code when I was a teenager because I loved video games so much that I wanted to learn how to make them. That passion led me to loving computers, becoming a Software Engineer and leaving my home to explore other countries.

That career path took me to Chile, and while I was living there I made some very dear friends. Amongst them is Juan Francisco. We not only joined the same company on the same day, we share the passion for video games, the same taste for bad jokes and almost the same birthday. He’s a very talented musician and I write code, so it was just a matter of time until we started discussing game concepts (mostly associated with death and loss), our affinity for female protagonists and participating in game jams.

One of my favorite game jams was the js13k, a very interesting competition where you need to make an HTML game no bigger than 13 KB within one month and without importing or using any external library. Simple, right? And yes, you read right, THIRTEEN kilobytes. If you like a good challenge you should check it out.

Well, we decided to participate in the 2014 edition for the first time, joined by a couple of friends. We fleshed out the whole idea: a dungeon crawler generated procedurally with zombies, five different abilities, soundtrack and sound effects. Sadly, it was way too ambitious. The actual code (AI for the zombies, procedural level generation and fog of war) and the spritesheet for the characters didn’t leave us enough space to add the sound engine and Juan couldn’t do anything in the musical space. We should’ve scoped down the whole thing but hindsight is wonderful, isn’t it? The game turned out to be a decent entry (73rd out of 129) and I learned a lot about game development and javascript, so much that I got kind of addicted to the experience and continued participating in solo mode for 3 more years, achieving the top 20 in 2016.

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August 2018 was my fourth participation in a row but this time I wanted to make it to the top 10. I wanted to do something more meta, a game where you needed to program a drone to rescue you from your crashed ship. I started coding and got a pretty decent concept (similar to Turtle) but wasn’t quite satisfied yet. There was something missing. One night, I showed it to Juan and he got hit by the muse. The next day he sent me a short story describing the events in this crash and how the crew (I think it was 4-5 people in total) managed to overcome all the obstacles. This was the first time the names of Aeros and Agatha appeared.

It was a cool story but, again, the limitations in the js13k didn’t allow us to include all that narrative, so I decided to make some compromises. I got rid of all the procedural and AI stuff in the proof of concept in order to make room for some dialogues and include the sound engine. But, how was I supposed to make the game fun? There wasn’t enough room to make a text adventure, so I had to find another way to tell the story (or at least try). I decided to reduce the scope of the story and make several microgames to support the narrative but with a twist: adding two possible endings depending on the choices you make throughout the game. It sounded fun in my head. A game in 13KB where you have a microstory, microgames and branching, how cool is that?

Apparently not that cool. It turned out to be just another decent game that got me into the top 22 (out of 274). However, my hands were itching to create a more polished version of the game, to get something more elaborated. I wanted to add actual graphics (not just colored squares), background music, sound effects and a more rich narrative. Basically, I wanted it to be a real game. But life happened, Juan had some things to sort out and we paused the work together for a bit. Still, this new “idea” kept going around in my head.

In August 2018, I also visited Vancouver B.C. for the Open Source Summit and there, I reconnected with Azrael, another great friend of mine that was the best PR, the best beta tester and the most loyal debugger Turpial could've ever had. Turpial was a Twitter client for Linux that I started back in 2008 and one of my greatest achievements but wasn't being maintained anymore. We had some delicious tequeños, we chatted about video games, D&D, a game design course he was attending and the sort of stuff two nerdy buds talk about when they haven’t seen each other in a long time. Of course I told him about the competition and my plans to make this a real game but, more importantly, to keep in touch.

So, I was more than convinced that I wanted this to be my new big project, my new Turpial (in a way), basically something to be proud of. Thus, I gave it a more suitable name and called it “Hope” and decided to use my spare time to make progress and continued working solo hoping (no pun intended) that Juan could join me back at some point. Since I used to write fantasy and poems when I was young, I took my pen and started writing the personality traits of each crew member and some of their background story. As the days went by, the pen and the ideas flew and I started to fill pages.

One day I showed these ideas to Eduardo (another great friend of mine from Venezuela) and magic sparks started to come out. The synergy we had over the course of a few weeks was magnificent. Voice notes on Telegram coming and going, discussing politics in Gundam, the narrative masterpiece of TLoU, Sci-Fi approaches and a bunch of other stuff about our favorite movies, series and games. Such were the lengths of these voice notes (13 to 15 minutes long) that we started to call them "mini podcasts" . It was fantastic! We developed the background story in such a way that we ended up with enough material to write a 350 page book only for the prequel. But life struck again and Eduardo had to stop to attend personal matters.

I continued in solo mode, developing the story and working on a proof of concept in Unity. Then, in February 2020, Azra and I were chatting about Twine, a narrative tool he was using, and I told him about the story and then more magic happened. He said something like “I’m slow reading but I can try to help you in some way”. Azra was genuinely interested in the story and in working with me again. I smiled. The good ol’ team was reuniting. I was so happy that I probably overwhelmed him with a lot of information (sorry Azra :P) but it was great! We started doing weekly 1:1 meetings and he started to contribute immediately.

Then the pandemic kicked in. We were all worried, locked down and adjusting to the new normal and I thought to myself “Welp! Here we go again. Life is striking once more”. I was prepared for another setback and to start working in solo mode, again. However, it was quite the opposite. Despite all the bad things COVID-19 brought to the world, not all were bad news for us.

Juan came back from the underworld and when I showed him all the new things I had for Hope he got super excited and started composing new soundtracks for the game. Since we couldn’t go anywhere, we also started having 1:1 meetings to work on Hope. Azra and I also had a regular cadence in our 1:1 meetings and were making progress. Looked like the pandemic and the lockdown helped us all to establish some kind of rhythm, a pace. So I decided to take the next step. I wanted to introduce Azra and Juan and transform the 1:1 meetings I had with each one of them into work sessions for the three of us. I had great chemistry with each one of them separately but I was afraid this “experiment” could turn into something terrible and impact our friendship in any way.

It was on May 10th 2020, that I introduced two of my best friends with the idea of working together to create something special and it is what we have been doing since then. Now we are three best friends trying to make a very ambitious game and having a blast along the way. It is now our story.

And that, kids, is how this beautiful project started.