Hello and welcome to another entry of me talking about my projects and the thoughts behind it.

As of right now 2 weeks have passed since the release of my game "Lieblingsmensch" and I already wrote an entry for the Postmortem And Secrets Of Lieblingsmensch and next up I want to share the main inspirations and thoughts behind this rather narrative driven game.

First comes first

What is "Lieblingsmensch" (per definition)

The word itself is german and is put together by the parts "Lieblings-" which means "favourite" and "-mensch", which means "human" or "person".

That being said the whole phrase is translated to "favourite person" and is used to describe someone who you unconditionally like. 

It is a very intense word of affection to say that you feel mutual to someone, you never get bored of, you love to share thoughts and feelings and might even be an ancor in the rough sea of life so that you do not feel lost, floating aimlessly.

I really like that word for the importance and intensity it brings with it, so why did I used it for this project? Let's come to:

The Personal Inspiration

I once had someone I would call my Lieblingsmensch.
This simply led to me wanting to share some feelings, because when this person exited my life, I was devastated to say the least. 

It felt like a break up, even though this person and I never were partner in the first place. In between the parting of ways and the start of creating the game, I spent time finding new strength in various ways. With that experience in hand and an idea in mind through my other concepts and inspirations, the form I wanted to give the project you see now was set.

I need to say though the story you experience is just inspired by mine and not a fully adapted one, because in the end I wanted to do something people can interpret for their own and maybe take something out of it.

I might add a little explaination of the game's events at the end of the trivia section , but for now I want to give attention to:

The Media Inspiration

this will be now alot!

There are several things I took from other sources and I want to split them into smaller chunks. First:

Genre

Lieblingsmensch as the game I released is a 'first person narrative auto-runner' so you cannot stop the speed, see through your "own" eyes and have a story to follow along. 

The whole concept of this game is more or less directly taken from another one called NO THING by EvilIndieGames, who also did a first person runner game with heavy narrative aspects and I thought it was such a cool genre, that I wanted to contribute my own take on it. At first I was a bit scared I would copy too much, but in the end I think I did something that is not a clone, but something that can stand on its legs just fine!

Huge shout-out by the way, please check their game out, maybe they inspire you as they did me.

Looks

The looks and general art direction are taken from multiple sources. Besides the priorly mentioned game NO THING, I decided for a more grid like style at first, which changed to a outline-heavy style. 

The main idea came from the game "Vib Ribbon", which fascinated me a lot, being a rhythm game made entirely out of simple vector graphics, for the sake of being small enough to be saved in the PlayStation 1's RAM, so you could eject the game disc and put a random music CD into the disc-drive and play custom songs!

Another huge inspiration was the ENA web series, especially the episode "Power of potluck"

The scene, where the protagonist ENA stands in front of the house at the beginning and end of the episode, in this grid like enviroment, filled with solid 3D objects, really stick to me and gave me the thought of combining these solid objects and outlines to make a black and white space, where I could change the mood drastically.

The sprite work within the level are a combination of NO THING's approach of visuals, my prior experience with this kind of style (to see in my game "Clerk"), but also because my game is set within a dream like world and I though of it being a good way of having something with definition, yet unclear enough to not break focus if that makes sense. At least for me I cannot clearly recall details of stuff I see in my dreams, but can still determine the concept of what I saw, so I tried to replicate it that way.

Themes

The main theme is the love at first sight story I already explained, that it is taken its inspiration from my own experience, yet another influence for how I approached it was through the topics within Tyler The Creators album "Igor" of all things and the feelings I had while hearing through this over and over in my "regaining strength" phase I wrote about earlier. 

The album is about a relationship triangle and dealing with that for better or for worse and it helped me A TON, which is why I also took 2 quotes out of it and used it in game. 

Music

Not as big of inspirations to find, but I wanted to have a dreamy atmosphere within the game which also included weird aspects, so I used  the tracks I ended up with and you can find them in the credits section on my itch page. Main inspirations for "weirdcore" and "dreamcore" music is once again ENA, which let this sub-internet-music-genre gain popularity!

Again huge shoutout to all these major inspirations and I recommend checking all of them out.

Of course I also had many smaller inspirations, like a lot of mobile games like the common endless runner or RPG games like OMORI or LSD Dream Emulator, be it ideas for UI, design or the overall game. Also here: feel free to look into all these things, especially LSD Dream Emulator is a concept I would love to contribute an own take, but this might not happen too soon.

This should be it for the inspirations I had for the project. There is one last thing left I want to cover in this post and the next one is a bit of a 90 degree turn. Let's get to:

The Trivia Of Lieblingsmensch (and others?)

Basically a rapid fire of fun facts now, which may or may not be interesting!

Pitches

When working out the concept of this game, I made a "mood board" with many different ideas I want to complete. The final concept for this was within the pitches and won, but there is more to know!

I made 5 pitches for what I want to do this project and I want to present them here:

- The first pitch was actually about a LSD dream emulator game about an everyday guy experiencing not-so-everyday-guy adventures in a dreamspace

- The second pitch was about dealing with mental health issues within a dream, heavily inspired by OMORI

- The third pitch was an art exhibition, where you could get around paintings and "get lost" in them, where you would experience the runner game, but stuck in thought captured by the paintings you see

- The fourth pitch was a highscore based runner shooter, where you are an antivirus program, eliminating bugs in the cyberspace

- and our beloved fifth pitch, a first person runner game about a one sided crush. split into acts, with the quote inspired theme of "what you run away from, you end up chasing"

All these pitches got some aspects of what we got now and I tried to combine the best parts from the other, to refine the final pitch.

Fun Facts

- The idea of the artstyle colors being a black and white, but with rainbow colors as style breaker, was set since the beginning. The controls graphic was made afterwards and it was the first instance, where I had to define set colors, so the graphic was better to understand.

- The projects title at first was "Dreamscape" and it leaned more into the dream aspects than the romantic aspects, but within development it changed weight so much I also changed the title. A concept for the Dreamscape title graphic was made though and it looked like this:

- All "person" characters in the game have names, you play "YOU", the rainbow person name is "RAINBOW" and the silhouettes are called "VISITORS"

- The game uses 7 Fonts, but there are 3 "Main" fonts, which are used throughout the game the most to convey emotions. There is one font for happy, fearful and neutral thoughts.

This is about all mildly interesting trivia I can give and now let's get to the last thing for todays post and it is the question

What is Lieblingsmensch about?

This is a bit from the heart now and maybe a lot cheesy but...

Lieblingsmensch was neither a big passion project or it was a game which helped me cope with the stuff I went through. It was a project I loved working on and did well to me, just like a Lieblingsmensch would do. This game was not difficult to make in particular, I was able to complete it without crunching and I was able to put more into the gameplay, than I expected first. I did put my love and care into it like I do with every of my works, because it is just what I want to do. I want to use games to express myself and this project in specific showed me, that I can do that without much help. I was able to do this on my own to a huge extend and I could probably do it again. Every step was a step forward and this will continue to push me with the experience I gained.

Lieblingsmensch is about a story of someone meeting someone and you think that this person does you well, pushes you to be better and you start to improve yourself. You love to share this progress to that person and maybe they start to improve themselve as well.

It is also a story about someone meeting someone you know it is destined to be but life got other plans and pulls you out of this sweet world you imagined yourself in and you feel like you missed something you did not know you lost.

It can also be about "you" finding someone who you connect with many years and then you split apart, because something did not sit right and you wonder what happened but when you talk finally, you start to rekindle a spark, you thought was gone.

This is a game about all of the above or parts of it or even none, if you interpret it so.

With that I wrap up todays entry about this project

I hope you enjoyed this little insight and see you next time.

- Draco