Hello!

I'm Wetsock, the developer of Atlas Ablaze. This is my first attempt at game development, so it's possible players may see some minor bugs. (EXAMPLE: Skipping too often may cause the game to freeze. If this happens, do NOT save when the game is frozen and overwrite other save files. It will not work properly.) The engine I use is prone to certain bugs, however I haven't learned to use any other engines yet. I apologize in advance if anyone encounters problems while playing my game!

Some background on the development of Atlas Ablaze:

     I  began writing the plot back in 2019, intending to write a novel. As I was working on it, I improved significantly on my writing. By the time I was nearly finished, I couldn't stomach reading anything from the beginning of the book anymore. I chose initially to rewrite most of it, but I still couldn't decide on an ending. The idea to write multiple different endings for the reader to pick from had turned into an impulsive urge to turn it into a visual novel instead.

     I knew hardly anything about game development, but in a period  of 24 hours, I drew a handful of backgrounds,  designed some character sprites, bought an engine I didn't know how to use, and began to break apart the novel into different scenes that I could add into a game. Eventually, Atlas Ablaze was born. Since then, I have completely broken my game multiple times, cried about forum posts that no one ever answered, shared my progress with people who lost interest in my project, and I dealt with MANY more hurdles that quite frankly would be annoying for me to just dump here.

     I was told countless times that your first game should be an experiment for you to learn game development, and that it would probably go nowhere. My biggest issue with that had always been that I didn't want to be a game developer. This game was NEVER just a tool for me to learn from. I taught myself to make visual novels in order to tell a story I had written, a story that was incredibly important to me.

     Although I consider myself more of a writer than anything else, I'm grateful for the things I got to learn while bringing Atlas Ablaze to life. The character designs made everyone feel more alive, the pixel art brought a cute stylistic element to it, the choices I was able to implement allowed the players to immerse themselves in what they were reading, and the music really set the mood for my scenes. Everything I taught myself was for the purpose of completing this project, but now I not only have skills I can use for future projects, but a new medium of story telling.

What inspired me:

     The story began as a short vent I wrote from the perspective of myself when I was sixteen. What started as a way to both mock and validate my younger self, turned into me imagining someone in a similar position, thrusted into a situation I would've personally been terrified to experience. Over time, I altered Andi's personality more and more, turning her into her own person.

     Each of my characters stemmed from simple ideas, but the more I wrote the stories involving them, the more THEY wrote THEMSELVES. I would look over everything each character had said and done, look at the situations they were in, and say, "I feel like they would do THIS next, based off THESE facts about them." In a way, I was not creating characters, but getting to know them.

     To expand on the situation Andi is in, I'll address the elephant in the room. Why did I chose to make her fall in love with a s*x worker? I was raised in a Christian household, where many aspects of s*xuality were so feared that they couldn't even be addressed. As an adult, I've learned to accept myself as a lesbian, regardless of still being religious. Coming out of the closet is a part of my past, but I still struggle with even acknowledging s*x as a whole around certain groups of people.

     So here's the question I asked myself; how would sixteen year old me react to crushing on someone and then finding out her entire life revolved around s*x? When I met people who lived the kinds of lives I never wanted to live, I almost always started out judgmental. When I grew to love someone though, I'd start to look past it. The issue was that my version of "acceptance" would always seem to turn into blindly enabling people, whether they were a harm to themselves or others. My version of a 180 was dangerous, and had lead me into some really dark relationships.

     Iris's relationship with Andi is her form of escapism, but that actually goes both ways. Both of them are fading off into their own little world together in order to ignore the problems in their own lives. Andi makes Iris feel like a kid, and Iris makes Andi feel like an adult. Neither of them want to face their own problems, but they don't exactly want to face each other's problems either. When spending time with someone for fun turns into loving them though, those things become impossible to ignore.