Hello, I'm a text box speaking on behalf of Tobias Cornwall, the lunatic who made this website and the various creative things that it exists to feature!|What did you expect to find when you clicked the 'About' link? Some slickly-worded marketing blurb about what Alora Fane dot com is set up to achieve or whatever and why you should give it your trust and money? Well. Instead of that, would you like to hear the uncomfortably personal - and exhaustingly long - tragic backstory of an unsuccessful solo indie games dev that I wish I'd just invented to emotionally manipulate you into supporting me?? I didn't make it up, though. I'm just a text box, with a limited imagination.|If you are screaming "PLEASE GOD YES I WANT TO READ THAT SO BAD" at your spittle-spattered screen, SLAMMING your fists on your computer pew in orgasmic anticipation, then you may be relieved to know that it's probably not illegal to READ ON!
But first, a word, or several: I'm a meek, bashful recluse with terrible social anxiety, and I fret endlessly about what people might think of me... but despite that, I've also always had an urge to be as open and honest as possible about who I truly am.|So much of human society seems to be about wearing masks. People put on an act during job interviews, or while dating, and set up their social media profiles to portray themselves in the brightest light, tweaking their carefully-taken photos with filters to give the most flattering results.|I suppose it's just a symptom of my social ineptitude that I can't be bothered with any of that, that I wander about in the metaphorical nude, digitally at least. Are my dangling defects intriguing to people, as a train wreck might be, or are they just repulsed? I do wonder. But I know I like getting glimpses into other people's minds, so here I'll offer you quite a generous ogle into mine.
That said, let's begin with my cheery childhood:|I was born in 1988, and spent my formative years in a broken home with my father and two brothers, suffering through poverty, squalor, and abusive neglect. Growing in such poisoned soil unsurprisingly left me with lifelong mental issues.|It also inspired me towards creativity, however, as I'd use that to escape my less-than-pleasant present and to add to my life what wasn't provided to me by my caregivers.|I had a particular fondness for weird, otherworldly things like aliens, and designed and drew several alien species which inhabited different worlds in a shared star system; a reflection of my early interests in creature design and lore.
While I didn't have many games, I played and replayed the few I did have endlessly. I started with 2D sidescrollers for the SNES and MegaDrive (Genesis) like Sonic 1-3 and Super Mario World, and later got very much into RPGs for the Playstation, especially Final Fantasies VII, VIII, and IX. Pokemon also made its explosive entry into popular culture around this time too, much to my delight.|I had the urge to make my own games, but not the means; all I could do was draw levels of imaginary platformers and 'bestiaries' of (crudely-designed) RPG monsters on paper and in MS Paint.
I was a frail, fearful child, afraid of my own shadow; despite being recognised as gifted, I skipped school a lot, due to what I now understand was likely a combination of malnutrition and social anxiety.|When I did show up, I didn't have any friends, at least during my earliest years of primary school; I'd spend break times in solitary play, imagining that the playground was a video game level I had to jump around or something.|I had an oddly intense fear of brains; I was greatly distressed even by drawings of them, and my frequent nightmares often included disembodied brains just floating there. My biggest fear was having a brain tumour, though I was always told to stop worrying, it's all just in my head (well, yes, that's where it would be, but... that's not what they meant).
After this dismal childhood spent in England with my father, when I was about 14 or so I moved with my mother and her partner to Australia, and into a much better (that is, fairly ordinary middle-class) home environment. I got my first PC, through which I discovered and experimented with a few different ways to give my imagination form.|I got hooked on any games that included level editors, but always tried - unsuccessfully - to make RPGs with them.|The game Neverwinter Nights provided an editor which came the closest to what I always hoped for, and so I became obsessed with it. I first taught myself the basics of programming from written online tutorials (this was pre-YouTube!) to customise the 'modules' I'd make in this.
I also discovered emulators around this time, and used them to experience old games I'd missed out on during my childhood, like the six earliest entries in the Final Fantasy series for the NES and SNES.|Unlike the 3D games for the PS1 and PS2, which might as well have been brought into being by magic to my naive eyes, the relatively primitive technical aspects of these simpler games made me think "I could probably make something like that myself".
I played the recorder briefly at school as a child, but beyond that my experience of music was limited; I didn't even listen to bands like most young people did. I'd listen with great fascination to the soundtracks of the games I played, though; some of my earliest experiences with the then-novel internet were of visiting Final Fantasy fan sites to listen over and over to midis of their soundtracks.|I remember getting a thick, difficult book about how to code games - this was before all the accessible options available to today's lucky younglings! - which I barely understood or read, but it included a CD with several useful programs, among them a thing called DirectMusic Producer, which allowed me to experiment with creating my own music for the Neverwinter Nights modules I'd been making. I had no idea what I was doing, though, and the results were rather ear-bleeding!
When I was around 15 or 16, I joined the blogging website LiveJournal at the urging of a school friend - this is likely why I continue to keep a blog - and through that I discovered deviantART, a community of fellow creative weirdos.|I posted my mediocre attempts at digital art there, and was inspired creatively by the works of others. I also felt a faint sense of belonging for the first time ever. And there were girls there, gasp! The first time I'd interacted with any, I think, as I had no young female relatives and, while I'd found friends at school by this point, the group I was part of was made up of weirdo boys who girls wouldn't go near.|My art didn't get much attention, but I'd eagerly check for comments on the stuff I'd posted every day, and read every one with excitement and appreciation.
While I'd never been religious, I'd mostly attended Christian schools due largely to their proximity. I was frustrated by what to me seemed to be obviously nonsensical aspects of the beliefs, though, and found solace in the atheism movement that was conveniently big around this time; I vaguely recall watching debates between Richard Dawkins etc and creationists on this intriguing new website called YouTube.|I'd also dabbled a bit with making websites (in Notepad, the basic Windows accessory), and used the idea of a silly fake religion called Yalortism - which I'd invented (ostensibly) together with my school friends - as the basis for my first site with community features. A community did somehow form, and while it was small, I got my first bitter taste of being an admin and dealing with disrupters.|Yalortism also inspired a lot of my creative work during this period.
I had a handful of piano lessons when I was 16, though I never did any grading exams. They did however lead to the rapid, excited creation of a whole bunch of compositions that almost sounded like actual music this time. I still used the default midi soundset, though, as I knew of no alternatives.|Somehow - I forget the details - I found a program called Sibelius, which allowed me to create music with the same notation as what I was practising on the piano; I gladly switched over. (And I'm still using it as of 2022!)|Sibelius had a site where musicians could upload their compositions, and listen to others' while watching the notation. I spent a lot of time there, learning compositional techniques through their visual contours as much as their sound.
Flash games and animations were big in the 2000's, and my friends and I would spend our lunchtimes in the school's computer lab on Flash portals.|I got a (pirated) copy of Flash myself, and eagerly experimented with making my own retro RPGs in it.|My first attempt, the bizarrely-named Fig Hunter, was based on an unfinished Neverwinter Nights module, which was named after a throwaway joke with my brother, which was inspired by a silly but forgettable Monty Python sketch. Convoluted!|It was a fully-functional - if bare-bones - JRPG, with battles, a field to walk around, a world map, and even a character creator at the start, like the western RPGs I'd played. It also provided a context for my earliest attempts at game music compositions.
Thinking Fig Hunter would amount to something great, I created a website, also called Fig Hunter, where all the many legions of fans it was sure to attract could discuss their favourite... figs, or something.|It was quiet at first.
I gave up on Fig Hunter for whatever reason, and tried to make a few other RPGs which used pixel graphics in the field, with stories that involved Yalortism in some way or another.|My plans were always for enormous epics though - like the RPGs I'd been influenced by - and I'd abandon them after a few weeks or months when the scope became too overwhelming.
When I was about 18, I grew close to a fellow artist I'd met through deviantART. While we were oceans apart, eventually this developed into my first and only romantic relationship. Nicer, simpler times.
Frustrated that I could never finish anything, but still eager to make and release something, I came up with an idea for an RPG I'd release in several short chapters.|I created a folder for it called 'QuickQuests', and - because I didn't feel it was important enough to come up with a new story for - I based it on my only finished Neverwinter Nights module, Governance de Magi...
MARDEK was released in three parts, and together they were played millions of times. This entirely unexpected reaction got me feeling like I'd really made it, and the way people treated me made me feel like some minor celebrity.|But since Flash games were free to play in your browser, they made little to no money; while I got some sponsorship funds for MARDEK, they were nothing compared to how long especially the third chapter took to develop (around $10k after ~3 years, I think?).|Still, due to anxiety, I'd always feared getting a 'normal job', and used MARDEK's success to convince my parents I could make games instead. "It'll work out one day, just you wait and see!!"|I deeply regret this.
People who'd played MARDEK came to my Fig Hunter website, and the community grew to a few thousand people.|At first this felt great; I was getting more attention and praise than I'd ever got in my offline life, and I felt like what I was doing mattered to people, even if it wasn't profitable...|But I was a socially inept, sensitive weirdo who hadn't been raised properly running a community of almost entirely male teenage gamers (a group hardly known for their tenderness or tact). Of course it turned toxic!
Someone I met on deviantART introduced me to the 'Four Temperaments', which was my first taste of personality psychology. I took to the concept quickly and deeply, as I'd always felt like I didn't fit in, and this potentially offered an explanation as to why ("because I'm Melancholic/Phlegmatic!").|I incorporated them into my growing Fig Hunter website, and developed an aversion for people with the disagreeable choleric temperament, who were prone to argument and forcefully asserting themselves; the 'rude customer' types, essentially.|Later, I discovered - and developed an even more intense interest in - other personality type models, most notably Myers-Briggs; understanding that I was an 'INFJ' seemed to make a lot of sense of things that I'd long wondered about... but again I grew frustrated, this time with facts-over-feelings 'T types'.
The MARDEK chapters grew larger and larger in size, and the third took me three years to develop. By the end of it I was sick of them and needed a break, so I tried to make a few other games.|The only one I finished was this silly platformer - inspired by a joke shared with my then-girlfriend - called Clarence's Big Chance. Such a strange thing to look back on, because it's so different to all my other stuff! Very much a product of its time, too; some of its content makes me cringe now!
I seem to have flittered around between a few projects around this time. There was this one, Miasmon - essentially a Pokemon clone - which I recall spending a lot of time with. It might have been the first time I took creature design at least slightly seriously.
Another was this thing, Alora Fane: Regression, which was inspired by a dream. It was where I first came up with the basic ideas for the Alora Fane world: six 'dreamed up' pocket dimensions each inhabited by its own race, each aspiring to reach a central heaven-like 'Nexus' via spiritual growth. I incorporated a lot of flora motifs, and designed the original aster symbol to represent both the world and the 'Unisis' philosophy/religion of its creator gods.
I struggled to focus on anything, though. The combination of existing mental illness, isolation, games taking forever to make, and running a toxic community while making no money from any of it wore me down to the point of collapse.|It wasn't just that people would say mean things (though that was definitely a big part of it); they'd actively try and hack my site, dox me, or they'd use devious means to try and specifically hurt me outside the main community. Rude customers are upsetting. Stalkers, moreso.|(If even just 1% of people are psychopaths, and you have a community of 1000 people...)|I made some small, invite-only communities hoping to escape, but they'd try and intrude anyway - "how DARE you not let ME in!" - using force or deceit.
I'd wake up after every night of fitful half-sleep terrified of what mess I'd have to clean up this time. I started avoiding comments entirely because I couldn't bear the vitriol. I tried to explain my struggles in candid blogs, but due to my naive assumptions about people's better nature, I was only hurt further by doing so.|I used to vent to my then-girlfriend to stay sane, but it was all too poisonous and she (understandably!) left.|I'd moved back to the UK with my parents, too, right after school ended, so I'd lost all the connections I'd made in Australia.|I was painfully alone, I had panic attacks, my head hurt constantly.
My creative output reflected this horrendous inner state.|A big part of it was that I was prone to guilt when things were coming along more slowly than I'd like, as I feared letting anyone down, and when I felt this was happening, I had a penchant for candidly baring my heart to explain the reasons why.|I suppose a lot of people - especially young boys? - are discouraged from this kind of naked heart-baring early on, and react negatively to others doing this in the way that their parents reacted negatively to them? Something like that? Or maybe it's just because some people are by temperament disagreeable. I don't know.|I suppose anyone in the public eye to any degree requires a certain amount of resilience to endure the more brutal members of the audience. My resilience was insufficient.
My feelings about my own earlier work were soured, too; MARDEK was no longer a source of pleasure for me with all the strangers shouting and spitting at me to finish it, and berating me for being anything other than a games-making machine.|Eager to put the whole Fig Hunter stage of my life behind me, and reinvent myself a bit, I started a new website, alorafane.com... though most of the same people came straight over anyway so what was even the point!
I got counselling, and after several months of that I felt lifted enough to attempt to escape my rut by trying - in my mid-twenties - to finally move out of my parents' house and start an actual career.|I'd spent years doing game dev... but I knew pretty much all my colleagues doing that would be male, and the overwhelmingly male audience of Fig Hunter had (unfairly) given me the belief that techy male programmer types were a source of pain. Plus I'd been spending a lot of time developing my art skills, perhaps because I found my ex through art and hoped that if I got good enough, lightning would strike in the same place twice...|A course focused around video games art seemed like a sensible way to make use of existing skills and find connections to a part of the industry more suited to - and less painful for - me, I thought.
I started such a course in 2013, aged 25. I moved into the uni's halls of residence, which was my first time living away from home, other than month-long stays in holiday rentals with my (at this point ex-) girlfriend.|I did quite a lot of visual art around this time, including designs for six races of the Alora Fane world I'd decided to continue developing and imagined setting multiple games in.|While my instructors recognised the skills I'd put a lot of time and effort into building, and I was a star student, academically, I didn't exactly fit in socially - likely a combination of the trauma I was still so sore from and preexisting mental health issues - and I made no friends. I dropped out after a year.
I'd continued working on games alongside my uni work, many of them experimental and short-lived.|Maybe the most notable project from this period was Alora Fane: Creation, set - of course - in the Alora Fane world, which allowed players to create their own stories as I'd enjoyed doing in Neverwinter Nights years before.|I felt I had to include some stories of my own before releasing it, but what I wrote were reflections of my poisoned mind, which I felt would only be hated by a wider audience. So, while nearly finished, it never saw a formal release.
Another, much shorter-lived project worth mentioning was Clarence RPG, a sequel to the absurdist platformer I'd actually finished.|Likely due to my less than peaceful childhood, I'd always had a strong aversion towards violence, and it bothered me that the games I made technically revolved around it.|So this had instead an 'emotions-based battle system', in which you could either charm or disgust your foes in a silly way, and you could inflict moods that would make characters visually emote and alter the effectiveness of 'elemental' skills used on or by them.
Lost after dropping out of uni, I moved back into my parents' house and wondered what to do next. I was still struggling with mental health issues, and discovered some spiritual guru whose talks I'd listen to while going for lengthy walks each day. This led to a 'spiritual awakening', where I felt like I'd taken off a pair of dark glasses and seen the end of my woes.|I'd also continued playing around with game ideas, and the two combined as a 'reimagining' of MARDEK with spiritual motifs, set in Alora Fane.|I actually released three chapters of this Taming Dreams! But I'd learned that mobile games were exponentially more profitable than all others, and thought that'd be a wise release method for this.|It was not.
Driven by a desire to escape the pain of game dev, to tame my inner demons once and for all, and by my previous interest in personality psychology, at the ripe old age of 27 I - aided by more counselling - tried uni again, this time to study Psychology.|While I was worried I'd be too old or broken, I managed to make my first close (and female) friends ever, thanks to some 'meet your classmates' events in the first week.|While I kept doing creative stuff on the side, much of it revolved around friendship - or even just basic human interaction - in some way or another, especially experiences of being an outsider or social anxiety. The spiritual themes continued, too.|I also learned about the Five Factor model of personality that the academics use to understand temperament, which replaced models I previously used to understand people.
As part of the Psychology course, I studied some neuroscience, which was interesting considering my phobia of brains! We were given an opportunity to hold a preserved human brain in our hands, and - thanks to a the support of a friend I'd grown close with, I was able to face my fear and actually go through with that! So surreal. I remember it being surprisingly heavy.|We had to participate in other students' and researchers' studies, and one that I took part in involved a brain scan in an MRI machine, after which we were told we'd be sent a scan of our own brain. I joked they'd probably find I had cancer or something.|Well!
Had I known this would happen before I was born, and that's why I'd had the phobia?? Or had worrying about it for so long caused it to become reality?? I wondered. I don't know. I suppose the mind flails around trying to make sense of the senselessly unfair to at least try to maintain a semblance of sanity.|I understood the brain well enough to take issue with my neurosurgeon's plan for cutting into mine, and suggested he take a different path instead (he wanted to take the interhemispheric approach, but I was concerned that damage to my corpus callosum would impair my creativity, so I requested a supracerebellar-transtentorial approach... I think; honestly my memories are fuzzy). How many people can say something like THAT??
I likely annoyed him by repeatedly postponing the surgery I needed much longer than he wanted, until I at least graduated, as I was so afraid of losing the few friends I'd taken so long to find...|But that meant it loomed over me for over two years. The weight of my worst fear coming true, the certainty of surgery in my future that might either kill me or leave me a shell of my former self, uni stresses, worsening mental health, and the close friendship I'd hoped for years to find growing sour due to my own social mistakes all built up to the point where I saw no path forward that I could stand to take.|In 2017, I think, I (almost?) attempted suicide.|I was 'rescued' by my 'best friend'... who abandoned me soon after.
Despite everything, I managed to endure, and graduated in 2018 - aged 30 - in the top handful of my Psychology class of hundreds. I had major brain surgery soon after.|I survived, thankfully without any obvious (new) cognitive deficits, but - shockingly - even successful major brain surgery takes a long time to recover from.
Debilitated for months, I could hardly go out and do a Master's degree or get a job. But I could still use my computer, and I'd learned a bit about Unity on the side while getting my degree.|As there was a risk that the surgery might leave me with impairments to my memory, which I read could be alleviated with practice, I made an odd 'musical melody game', Memody: Sindrel Song, in about six months, which was my first 3D game and first Steam release.|I'd never had to do marketing with my Flash games - I'd just upload them to a Flash portal when they were done and many people would play them - so I didn't do any for this. That - probably combined with the weird gameplay and aesthetics - meant the game sold only a few dozen copies for a fairly negligible amount of profit. A flop.
Still not ready to go out and get an actual job, I looked to my singular past success, the one rose in the dung heap - MARDEK - and wondered whether I could try (again) to do something related to that. While I occasionally got emails from strangers wanting a continuation of MARDEK - which I'd left after chapter 3 of a promised 8 - I felt my mind, skills, and interests had changed too much since then to make a direct sequel.|While I'd already tried to reimagine MARDEK as Taming Dreams, I felt that was too esoteric and inaccessible, and the death of Flash meant I couldn't directly continue with that anyway. So I planned something of a blend between the accessibility of the original MARDEK and the spiritual themes of Taming Dreams, which I'd make in Unity. It was to be called Divine Dreams, and it was meant to tell an improved version of MARDEK's story, then conclude it.
I knew from experience that I always struggled to finish projects due to planning a vaster scope than I could handle, however, and what if I produced the first chapter and it flopped like Memody: Sindrel Song? I'd either be locked into a doomed path for years, or I'd have yet another disappointing unfinished project associated with my name.|So I came up with a compromise: a shorter prequel-of-sorts which would introduce Divine Dreams' setting and gameplay, but which would be a shortish stand-alone story with a clear conclusion.|"That shouldn't take more than about six months to make!", I naively thought.
I did have something working fairly quickly! But I wasn't happy with the gameplay mechanics, which were sloppy, unfocused.|With my early creative work, I'd just gone with whatever first came to mind, but as I'd grown I'd got into the habit of tweaking things to perfection instead. It means things take a lot longer as I work through several iterations, but the results are - I feel - so much better.
I'm at the point as I write this (October/November 2022), after almost three years of tweaking and revising iterations, where I'm very happy with the mechanics! I only have a 1-2 hour intro section of the actual story made though, as I wanted to get the gameplay sorted out before focusing on adding content.|Next, I'll need to somehow gather enough funding to keep going, likely through Kickstarter, and I'll need to raise awareness of the project in general... but it's so daunting. I still have mental scars from the stuff I've described here, and - while I enjoy and am decent at making things - my personality just isn't suited to marketing at all.
I wish I could conclude this overly indulgent oversharing by talking about how I found a way out of the darkness and I'm now happily living with my wife and swarm of little dog-children or whatever, but as I write this, I'm 34, and I've been living with my parents since the surgery. I've never had a job. While I've kept in touch with two of the three friends I made at uni, they're both busy with their jobs and partners so we rarely talk. I rarely leave the house. And I really don't know whether the games dev thing will ever work out. It probably won't.|I've started a few side projects I always hope will be quicker to make, but my mind's always drawn back to Atonal Dreams, which I can't not finish at this point.
Thankfully, a number of lovely people see enough value or potential in me to financially support me via my Patreon (there's a link to it in the top bar), but - as grateful as I am for it - the money it generates pales in comparison to what I'd get even from a minimum wage job.|I feel that at the very least, I need to finish Atonal Dreams, to resolve some personal insecurities as much as anything. But games take so damn long to make! And I couldn't cope with working on both this and a regular job. It's one or the other.
Overall, life has not been kind to me. But I'm also lucky, I suppose, to be 'blessed' with intelligence and creative skills across several domains, and I'm at my happiest when I'm able to make use of them to bring new things into being. I just wish it were easier to earn money while doing this!|For now, I want to finish Atonal Dreams before deciding what comes next...
