The Birth of Ghost Mission
Ghost Mission began as a seed of an idea in January of 2020. The slow death of media literacy and the viral spread of mis and disinformation in the modern world and how it influences entire personas and identities was something I found terrifying. The constant sight of otherwise rational people sharing, digesting, and believing in blatant falsehoods without questioning the veracity of their sources came to be more and more astounding, and I wanted to explore this phenomenon in a story with personal agency. My background is in television and film production, and as much as I thought this theme could be investigated in those mediums, I thought it was important for a potential consumer to experience these things firsthand with some kind of control for the message to be effective.
What would happen if you were constantly bombarded with conflicting narratives? If the truth was presented to you in verifiable means but you chose to ignore them? What you would you do if you were the one making decisions?
The story for Ghost Mission fell into place shortly thereafter, and a video game seemed like the perfect medium to tell this tale.
Despite gaming my entire life I had zero experience in game design or coding and I had no idea where to begin. I knew that the game didn’t need to be a modern, 3D, hyper-polished AAA title to get its point across. I also knew that I wanted to model Ghost Mission off of the original Metal Gear games on the MSX2/NES (and if I’m being brutally honest, the non-canonical “Snake’s Revenge” , a game with a banger of a soundtrack and one that I came to love in the mid-90s despite it not exactly being a fan-favorite). The final thing I knew though was that even though my project was MG-inspired, I didn’t want it to be a full-bore clone. Ghost Mission would borrow gameplay elements and narrative parallels from MG, but not try to replicate them or be fanfiction.
I wrote the game’s story outline, script, and basic level structure. I then looked at how solo game devs around the world had gotten their first works off the ground and tried to digest as much of their knowledge as I possibly could.
Preliminary research led me to Gamemaker Studio and learning its GML codebase – a perfect solution for someone with my background at the time. Come February 1st, 2020, my journey into coding and game design had begun.
And then COVID hit.
With my full-time career on hold, I had plenty of time to focus on coding tutorials and I devoted my days to learning the software. The most important piece of advice I took to heart in that time was “Do not start your dream project as your first project”, and I’m glad I didn’t. Coding is difficult, even with a software set like Gamemaker, and especially as the person doing every step of production yourself. The first project I worked on was a horror themed survival/shoot-em-up and it was a disaster in every imaginable way, but it taught me what I needed to know to move forward.
Ghost Mission started in earnest by the end of April, 2020.
It has been a long, long road to get where I am now and there have been major hurdles and milestones along the way. I’m excited to finally be able to share Ghost Mission with the world (and to release it so I can move on to new projects!).
I plan to use this dev log to reflect on Ghost Mission’s design journey and its upcoming path to release, so stay tuned!
Until next time,
-Kevin
Burn Below
P.S. – Absolutely none of this would have happened without the constant support from my wife. She kept this train moving plenty of times when I was sure it had run out of steam and I can’t thank her enough.
