Alright! Well! I told myself that once Young Suns was announced, I'd start maintaining a portfolio website again and maybe even start writing a blog. Young Suns is announced now, so... here we are!
It feels kind of like a waste of time and fanfare to start off the blog just being like, 'hi I have a blog now!' and not... I dunno, something interesting to say. And since Young Suns has been taking up the past 2+ years of my life, I sure do have a lot to say about it.
So... Where do I begin?
Young Suns was in the works before I started at KO_OP in 2022, but it didn't officially enter production until much later. Towards the tail end of GVH's development, I started phasing off of that and on to Young Suns, which at that point was a prototype and not much else. Not a lot of worldbuilding or writing of any kind beyond just broad strokes of intent.
One of the reasons I was brought on for Young Suns specifically was actually one of the same reasons I was hired for GVH, too—my college senior thesis game, That Which Faith Demands, was about late stage capitalism... in space! (It was written entirely in Ink, which is what GVH was written in, hence that part—but thematically, it had more in common with Young Suns.) Young Suns was always intended to be cozy and optimistic, though, and TWFD is decidedly neither of those things. But any optimist worth their salt is grounded in the knowledge of their material reality, and choosing to be optimistic because of it. Not in spite of it, and not by burying their head in the sand. Optimism and ignorance are not the same thing, and a lot of cozy, wholesome, feel-good stories are aimed at being refuges from the horrors of the real world, pretending they don't exist for a brief spell. Or worse, shooting the cozy-beam at the horrors like a "cozy" TSA game.
Young Suns is meant to be different. While it's far-future space fiction, a lot of our worldbuilding is grounded in real-world history and revolutions, and examining the work necessary to make those revolutions happen AND the work necessary to make them stick.
You have to have faith in people, and have faith in the ability to do your part to help make the world better. Not in a chosen-one-saves-the-world way, and not by waiting for someone else to do the hard part so you can come out when it's safe.