Scrolling down my Twitter timeline, then scrolling it down again and again, I've found out that the first tweet featuring ideas about the game that now is published and is known as "Forgecore" was posted on June 19 2016. At the time I was referring to it as "the game I won't finish", but some of the core ideas (no pun intended!) were already there.

After a couple of months I stopped working at that idea, I wanted to try to do something I could actually finish.

After a couple of years I recovered the old project and I rewrote it using a completely different toolkit. I was thinking to make something simple out of it to participate to a game jam. Eventually I realized that it was not the case and I've decided to finally commit to the project.

Since then I've worked on "Forgecore" in my spare time. There have been pauses, even long ones. In the end the game took probably around 6 months of full-time work to be developed, diluted over the course of 2 years. I did only develop games for game jams before, which is the opposite approach. Working at a slow pace like that had some notable effects, positive and negative.

The good thing is that I had a lot of time to think about what I was making. I ended up having a clear idea and I aimed to do something simple and essential, trimming all the unfocused stuff that could drain my scarce development time.

The bad thing is that I really had a constant dread feeling that I'll never actually finish.

The weird thing is that I've managed to actually finish it. It makes me feel wise and patient, almost adult.

I had the inspiration for the story during a visit to Pompei. I've been living near Naples since 2009 and I've been learning a lot of local folklore and traditions since then. One thing that I find particularly striking is the consideration of Mount Vesuvius: most of the people living here aren't scared or worried at all, they see Mount Vesuvius as a symbol of being home, as a guardian even. Also, I feel that the real threat for humanity is its own darkest side, not nature.

The idea of having a construct as the protagonist was borrowed from another game I've made, "The Clock & The Chaos". I usually try to develop simple and focused games, where the protagonist has a single goal or a straightforward task, I see that as more suited for a machine that for a person. Also people seems to like unconventional, weird and somewhat cute protagonists. Someone empathize with them, even if they are machines. At a certain point I've let some friends of mine toy with an early prototype, when I've told them that I wasn't actively developing the game anymore, one of them told me "Poor thing. I'm imagining the glowing core slowly getting dim and ultimately going off!"

The flame propulsion was inspired by the extensive use of jetpacks in "Tribes: Ascend", a game I've enjoyed quite a lot back then. In the early versions of "Forgecore" you could also control the rolling direction of the protagonist with the keyboard, but in the end I was holding the "roll right" button all the time. So I came up with the idea of giving to the protagonist the stubborn and single-minded behaviour of always rolling right on its own.

I was also thinking to have the temperature as a limit to the use of the propulsion and some sort of classic health bar, but I liked the idea that you could sometimes benefit from what would normally kill you and the risk-reward gameplay that could spring from it, hence I came up with the idea of having the temperature as the only resource to manage and an environment that wants to freeze you.

It's needless to say that most of the design happened very early in the developement process. There was just that little detail missing, the implementation. I also may have overcomplicated it a bit, by the way. Let's say I wouldn't do it how I did it if I could go back, but in a way I had to give it a try, at least to understand how it really worked. It deserves its own dedicated post anyway.