I used to hate English lessons at school. I always found it difficult to engage myself during classes, and my mind tended to wander a lot.
Like many teenagers growing up during the 2000’s, I spent a lot of my free time playing video games. For the first time, online gaming was becoming more and more accessible to people thanks to services such as GameSpy, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network.
My adventures in online gaming had started long before this. One of my earliest memories involving gaming was when my dad picked us up from school one evening. He told us that he’d picked up some computer games. Naturally, I was fascinated by this. I can still remember some of the earlier games.
One I remember fondly was a minigame called “Beaver Dam”. It’s taken me a while to find it, but I’ve discovered that it was part of a puzzle game called “The Time Warp of Doctor Brain”. The game involved building a beaver dam whilst avoiding turtles, electric eels and other saboteurs. I found it great fun and enjoyed it immensely.
Another game was called “Odell Down Under” and it was a game about the undersea food chain. You played a fish and it was your job to survive by feeding on smaller fish, and swimming away from larger predators. Again, I hold many fond memories of this.
The final defining game of my childhood was called “Torin’s Passage”. It followed a farm boy travelling between different worlds in search of his parents and was a point and click game that was very enjoyable. It also had a lot of adult references in, that I completely missed as a child.
The point to all of this is that I daydreamed a lot in English class. My head was always in the clouds and it was during this time that I started planning to make a game of my own.
I did plenty of research and eventually stumbled upon an obscure Japanese program called “RPG Maker”. It allowed anyone to make their own top-down role playing game with very little skill. For a young man dreaming of making his own game to share with his friends, it was a goldmine.
There were many issues getting it to work on my PC. The main one being that I didn’t understand Japanese. I found out that there was a patch that would allow the translation of the program into English, so I learned to navigate the complicated folder structure of the program to install the patch in the correct folder.
Eventually, I managed to get it working, only to find that there was a 14-Day trial before the program would stop working. To young, broke, teenage me, it was a major annoyance. Even if I did my paper round and managed to save up the money, I had to navigate the Japanese website in order to buy it.
So I did what any thirteen year old boy would do. I simply backed up my core files, and uninstalled the program, then delved into the windows registry to remove any references to the program, so that a re-install would reset the timer.
It worked for a time, but I quickly got tired of doing this. It took many years but I was eventually able to get a legitimate version of the program (and have since brought later versions also.)
So I started making a game. I called it “The River of Time” as it sounded cool and mysterious. I also based the characters in the game on my friends. To put it simply, I had no idea what I was doing.
The games were interesting to play, but they never felt like real games. My friends loved the screenshots and videos I would show them, but the gameplay was always lacking. Then I figured it out. There was no real plot.
Characters would simply move from one place to another, fighting monsters to no real purpose. I was also hideous at map design too.
Eventually, I started to realise this, and sought to remedy it and I started writing the outline of a plot. It was empty and soulless. It was then I realised that the plot was nothing without a world for the game to be set in.
It was then that I started building the world. I started off doodling maps in class, writing the names of Kingdoms and Cities down on a hastily scrawled piece of folded scrap paper. It eventually turned into a hobby as I created the history of my world.
Why were there monsters in this world? Because an angry dying god had created them in his final act before his destruction. All of a sudden, the world became more interesting, and so did the plot.
As we skip forward many years, I am still building this world, and it has gone through many iterations to the point where it is unrecognisable from the original maps that I would shove into my shirt pocket to avoid them being confiscated.
Eventually, I moved away from the idea of making it into a video game, but I still continued building the world. As an unintended side effect of this, I developed a love for history as I took a lot of inspiration to write the history of my own world.
I eventually studied the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the Cold War that followed. I also wrote my A-Level coursework on the fight for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom. I also developed an interest in recent history such as the Miners Strikes of the 1980s and the fall of the Conservative government in the mid-1990s.
This also allowed my writing skills to improve, and I quickly became much more comfortable writing long walls of text (Though I never quite mastered proper paragraph formatting.)
My love of Worldbuilding has led me to take an interest in geography. No longer was I drawing random rivers on a map. My rivers now started as mountain streams before flowing down to the sea, carving out long valleys as they meandered down before eventually reaching estuaries.
The mountains on my maps started sitting on tectonic plates, and the geography of the world started making more sense, and as I did that, the world really built itself. Coastal towns relied on an economy based on fishing and overseas trading, whilst the villages next to the rivers made their money through farming on the fertile land fed by the rivers.
The few crossing points on the rivers became fully fledged towns and cities, and the villages in the mountains and forests carved out a living from mining stone and cutting wood.
Now, I am in the process of writing my first book based in my world. It is a fantasy novel following a dwarf named “Klagg”. Once a respected constable, the death of one of his closest friends at the hands of a powerful dark mage leads him to experience extreme survivors guilt which eventually leads to depression and alcoholism.
Picking up years later, the plot of the book involves a now homeless and indebted Klagg learning to deal with his demons, and accepting that he couldn’t have stopped his friend’s death. It also follows his quest to bring his friend’s murderer to justice years later when the dark mage resurfaces.
All of this has come from playing video games and daydreaming in my class. Come to think of it, I can’t remember much of what I learned in my English class. Not to discredit my teachers, of course. I will always be grateful to all those who taught me. It’s just that I didn’t have a love of reading boring stories and looking for meaning that wasn’t there.
My video game inspired daydream has given me a love of writing, a greater understanding of history and an interest in geography and cartography. I was told off quite often for doodling and not paying attention, but in a way, those classes taught me many things, just not in the way that they were intended to teach me.
I’m still worldbuilding fifteen years later, and I will keep building my world, and expanding on the history and stories contained within. I may never publish a book, but who knows?
There’s still time.