A Song of Warriors is being created to take part in two game jams:  Yaoi Game Jam 2021 and SuNoFes.

The script (by me, PyrrhaIphis) is fully written, as polished as it's going to get pre-release (I am an obsessive fiddler and will probably learn Ren'Py just so I can muck around with the text for years to come), has been looked over by a sensitivity reader, and is now in the hands of our programmer, who is working on getting it coded.

Our artists are hard at work on the sprites and backgrounds.  (And, time permitting, a few CGs.)  And our composer is working on that rocking score the main page promises.  (Trust me, it delivers!  The tracks ready so far are fantastic.)

For this first devlog, though, I want to talk about the inspirations behind the game.  As anyone browsing my rather meager list of past projects can probably guess, I am just slightly fixated on the Trojan War (despite that I hate war!), so it should come as no surprise to learn that the primary inspiration for the game is, of course, The Iliad.  (Especially considering that the game's capsule text says it's based on the Iliad...)

Another major inspiration was my favorite movie, Velvet Goldmine.  (To those who know the film, this will not come as a surprise once they see Ace's performance gear...)

But before I delved into writing this '80s rock'n'roll take on an ancient epic, I also checked out a bunch of '80s rock'n'roll movies to really remind myself what the '80s were like.  (Yes, I was alive for the entire decade.  I am that old.  Admittedly, I was only five when the decade started, but still.)

The movies in question were:

• Purple Rain
  
• This is Spinal Tap
  
• Miami Connection (Rifftrax version, lol)
  
• ...and I could swear there was at least one more, but I'm blanking on what it was.  (Hey, I wrote 50,000 words and edited it twice over the course of the last month.  I think I'm entitled to some brain fail!)

Of course, there was also one more movie I had to watch before I could start writing.  The game's title is a legacy from a brief section of a work of fiction I wrote a few years ago, in which the hero, a rock star, became a movie star, starting with a then-modern rock adaptation of the Iliad, which was titled A Song of Warriors.  In that work, which was about the singer/actor, I only had to cover a little bit of the story of the film; pretty much all I wrote was his screen test, and then skipped ahead to a review of the movie.  So, I think it was always sort of nagging at me about just how the 1980s rock setting could have allowed for so much bloodshed in the finale, and this game is me finally getting to attempt to write that out.  While also letting it have a happy ending so our Achilles and Patroclos (Ace and Pat) can live and love each other happily ever after (unless you get the bad end).

In other words, the title of the game is a legacy from a previous work of mine...a previous work where the title didn't really need to make much sense, because the whole thing only took up maybe five pages out of about 90 or so.  Here, however, the title needed to make sense.  And how better to make it make sense than to name the band "the Warriors"?  It's a very apt name for the kind of band they are, after all.

But of course that meant I absolutely had to have seen The Warriors, because everyone would assume the title was a reference.  (And it was actually surprisingly appropriate, seeing as it, too, was a modernization of certain aspects of an ancient Greek work.  A work of history rather than epic poetry, but still.  Plus its visual aesthetic--despite being just slightly pre-1980s--was very much what I was envisioning as the aesthetic of the game.)  And I have to admit that despite some homophobia displayed by the characters in the film, it seems like the kind of movie that Ace would love enough to name his band after it.  (I actually refrained from using the often (perhaps over?) quoted line "Warriors, come out to play-ay!" despite that I could think of a place to put it during the bad end.  It just seemed better not to go there.)

If any of what I've said here interests you, then I hope you'll look forward to the game's release later this month, and please check it out.  (It will be free, btw!)

And please look forward to the next devlog, which I plan on titling "Meet the Warriors!"