KPWU : Well, first things first, what kind of person would you say you are ?
ALEX : Hard to say. Probably the type that hangs on their pc all day.
I find it's better to let other people judge what somebody is like.
KPWU : That's a fair point. What kind of person do other people say you are, then ?
ALEX : Wouldn't know, I don't ask.
KPWU : A fair point, once again. When did you first get into game design ?
ALEX : I guess technically 20 years ago when I first opened the map editor in warcraft 3 and started messing around in it.
KPWU : It began as a game of experimentation and seeing what sticks, then ?
ALEX : I mean back then it was just having fun playing around with it.
I wasn't really consciously doing any gamedev.
KPWU : Around when did you start doin gamedev ?
ALEX : It's more of a gradient than a starting point. I think the "legitimate gamedev" cutoff for that would be 2016 when I learned how to write gml in game maker.
But really it's been a long process of learning things that's started way before that with wc3 mapping, fraxy and the like.
I'd say it's more a mindset than anything. You don't necessarily need to know how to do game development professionally to be able to contribute to the process meaningfully.
Drawing, writing, etc. are all valid outlets that can lead there.
The difference between doing it for fun and professionally is what I think most people see as the difference between it being a hobby and a job, but that aside there really is no meaningful barrier between those.
KPWU : What is one project, gamdev or otherwise, you remember and find important, as insignificant and purposeless as it may be ?
ALEX : I think it would be a warcraft mapping contest I won in 2016. It gave me enough of a confidence push to give this whole professional gamedev thing a try.
KPWU : Was that jump from a hobby to a professional thing scary, and did it change your creative process ?
ALEX : Oh, yeah, pretty terrifying tbh.
A lot of anxiety when you don't really know how things are supposed to work.
The process itself never changed tho, it just got more and more complicated over time.
KPWU : Did you have people to help you with that jump ?
ALEX : In real life? Not really.
KPWU : And online ?
ALEX : It was me, Pure and Garo and we just keep working.
KPWU : How did the three of you meet, and how did you start working together ? That is, if it's not too private to say
ALEX : I met Pure on a shmup sandbox forum somewhere before 2010 and we collaborated a bunch there.
There were a lot of people there, including Flan and Garo.
KPWU : What was the first project you all worked on ?
ALEX : Handheld probably.
KPWU : This project is notorious for being somewhat obscure and unknown despite being referenced a lot in Star of Providence. Can you tell me a bit about it ?
ALEX : I was running a forum adventure game on msfpa.com back in the day and it was basically just a small companion game, that you searched for clues in. I had no idea how to program at the time, so it was all pure while garo did the music.
KPWU : That was before you decided to do gamedev proffessionally, right ?
ALEX : Yeah.
KPWU : What was the first project you started working on professionally ? Did you start with Monolith/Star of Providence ?
ALEX : Yeah, Monolith'd be it.
KPWU : Monolith has a very specific tone and atmosphere to it, in part from the music, in part from the art. What was the original idea for thatatmosphere, and for the themes the game talks about ?
ALEX : The idea came from a ton of places, mostly just games or stories I liked. I think I can't fully convey the themes in one place and a big part of me is more interested in what people take away from it on their own or what impressions it ultimately leaves them with.
KPWU : A major theme of Monolith, which plays into the vagueness and subjectivity of the story is the loss of history and trying to regain it. What was one of the major inspiration for that theme ?
AlexMdle — 15/01/2025 23:15
I wouldn't say the narrative is really focused on trying to recover history as much as it is about being haunted by it. The framework of scavenging things is a consequence of the story being set in a postapocalyptic scenario and it helps get the player into the right mindset. They're about as clueless about what's happening and where they really are as the characters they control. There's a whole lot of stories like that which I like.
Decent part of that might be the small bits of lore about Hellsinker I've read about back in the day.
I've always understood that there's might be a huge barrier between what the author was writing there and what I was imagining from the scraps of lore it presented in the supplementary material.
But I'm very satisfied with my reading of it, even if it could be wrong.
KPWU : At the same time, despite seeing very little of it, it's implied there's a lively city outside of the facility
ALEX : Lively might be a very ironic way of calling it, but it is there.
The surface is not a very important part of the setting during the events of the game.
KPWU : Years ago, I watched jaimers_'s hard mode run. I remember the final fight against the monolith being haunting. I couldn't play the game, and so couldn't know the lore, and so I imagined the city that briefly shows at the beginning and end was a normal city. I feel like this skewed my perception...
Even if it's not important to the story, is there in-dev lore and information about that city ?
ALEX : There actually is a little, but it's oblique and unimportant.
KPWU : Do you feel like you are haunted by history, yours or otherwise ?
ALEX : I'm definitely haunted by poor programming practices.
KPWU : Which programmer isn't, to be fair
You say "the players are as clueless as the characters they control"
Was there a particular effort to align the players' and the characters' emotions ?
ALEX : Yeah. Since a player character is a sort of a vessel for the player's gaze, their curiosities and frustrations in the game, it was important to me that the player cares about them to at least some extent. I was worried people would find it hard to care about ships as much as they would about human characters, even though from experience I was sure that a player can feel attached to anything.
KPWU : I find this philosophy particularly inteesting in regards to the switch in perspective from Null to D-13, going from a power hungry husk to a modern orpheus
ALEX : Now that I've had time to think about it, kinda. You know those trippy neural network videos that rapidly morph the feed wherever the program recognizes something, like making it all look like it's made out of pictures of dogs and cats? I think when talking about ideas, where they come from and what they're trying to tell, it's hard to really tell truths that aren't technical, because ideas aren't static. They don't always touch on singular topics and are often amorphous, intertwined and changing with perspective or context. They remind me a lot of those videos in that way.
Thinking back on what you said about D-13 being a modern Orpheus, that kinda gave me a pause, because that reading is most certainly not intended, but I get it. I see where it comes from. The facility was never planned to explicitly resemble an underworld, but the abstract touches on it all the same. They are not unrelated. I find this very interesting. The way people encounter these ideas and what shapes their mind's eye sees in them, what they speculate, all the things they get wrong, the surprisingly correct guesses they sometimes make, all that gives me a right tickle. I wish I could see what they see.
KPWU : In the end, its all down to waht people think about. I talked about Orpheus because I've been thinking about that myth a lot recently, but someone else might have referred to another myth. Ideas, even to their creators, are alwasys shifting, because an idea is in the eye of the beholder. So, my question is : what do you, Alex, see in Star of Providence ? Alex as in the person, and not necessarily as the creator of it ? What is your subjectivity on this game ?
ALEX : I think some distances are so large, they're scary and it's easy to get lost. But no matter what direction they go in, if they walk enough, people will find something again, eventually. I hope they can cherish what they have while it's there.
I think that's the set of thoughts that occupies my mind when im thinking of the game.
KPWU : I understand that a lot. A big part of what I write is from based off of, or emulating, small sparks of hopes and life in the interactions you have with others in a world that is otherwise a steaming pile of shit. Sometimes these interactions aren't with others, sometimes they're with things, or memories, or light filtering through tree leaves.
And always we have to make an effort to cherish what we have and what we find... because no matter how big and scary the distance is, if we make an effort, then we will find something to cherish, and time will skip ahead, and the distance will collapse