Before the Game, There Were Just Words
The notes
Before there was a game, before there was a studio, before there was a team — there were notes on a phone.
November 2nd, 2024. 10:48 in the morning. I opened my iPhone notes and wrote: "Sueño juego" — "Dream game." Below it, a messy rush of ideas trying to catch something I had dreamed the night before. It didn't fully make sense. It didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was not losing it.
That's how it all started.
At all hours
From that moment on, every time I had an idea, I wrote it down. It didn't matter what time it was. Didn't matter if I had just woken up at 3 AM. Didn't matter if I was on the bus, eating, or about to fall asleep. If something showed up in my head, it went straight to the notes.
There was no order. No structure. No design document. Just a constant flow of bits and pieces: what the main character was like, what she needed to grow in her story, what kind of world surrounded her, what I wanted to say through her.
I'd organize it later. I'd fill in the details later. First thing was to not let anything slip away.
The main character
From the start, I knew she'd be a girl. A girl with a huge inner world. Her age changed a few times — a teenager? younger? — but who she was never really changed. I knew her.
What I didn't know yet was her silence. That came later.
At the time, I was going through something intense with music. I'd been playing bass guitar for years, but I had started learning the cello, and music was changing things inside me. It helped me connect with emotions I couldn't put into words. So music became her biggest ally — her tool, her voice before she had one.
The silence came later
Her silence wasn't in the first notes. It came when I realized it was something I had wished for myself, sometimes. There were moments when I thought everything would be easier if I just couldn't speak. If I didn't have the need to.
I've always been very quiet and introverted, especially as a kid. That's been changing over the years, but that feeling of wanting to disappear into silence... I know it well.
And when that connected with the main character, everything shifted. She wasn't just a girl with a big inner world anymore. She was a girl who had chosen to go silent. And the story wasn't about adventures anymore — it was about getting back what you lose when you decide not to speak.
Therapy as a driver
A lot of the most important ideas didn't come from brainstorming sessions or studying other games. They came from therapy. After a session, something would move inside me, and ideas I couldn't see before would just appear. Connections between what I was going through and what I wanted to tell.
I wasn't copying my life into the game. It's more that the process of understanding myself gave me the tools to understand Lyra. Every personal discovery became a piece of her story.
From notes to something more
At first they were just loose notes. Then they became paragraphs. Then scenes. And little by little, without really noticing, it stopped being a bunch of notes on a phone and became something that needed to exist.
But that's another story. And I'll tell it in the next devlog.
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