Let me outline some things for you…
… to make this article a bit more clear:
Santa Feeniks is a imaginary city, created by the Brotherhood of the Blood Phoenix. It is in the world of Midgard, a super continent on which humanity is at war with magic.
The brotherhood found a way to defeat magic and build a city near their source of power. In addition to this, they created a prison, the Prison of Nightmares, that holds the evil that cannot be destroyed.
But how did the idea come together, how did it start? Read on to learn about that…
The Secret Path (TSP)
it was around my time at Qantm (2007-2008) that I was thinking about creating my own world, in the beginning obviously mostly in a 3D sense. But the more time I invested in planning, the more ideas I got about it. And so I have contemplated over a lot of little ideas, most of which I never write down…bad mistake looking at it now.
But the first big idea was not a city. The first idea was a Dungeon, full of traps and and an ancient evil that will start following you and hunt you through the catacombs. One of the inspirations for this was the movie Cube.
…I even started to work on a Cube game, but lost interest fairly quick…
So the first idea was to become a dungeon crawler survival horror game. As a young student archaeologist, you stumble through the woods in Norway, searching for signs of an ancient civilisation. Deep in the forest, you discover a very old well that seems to be in the middle of nowhere. While you are inspecting the well, you lean over the edge and it starts to crumble. You fall….endlessly it seems.
…FADE TO BLACK…
As you wake up, you find yourself in a large room with 2 giant doors. A faint light was around you, the darkness was everywhere, but you could still see more than enough to make out your surroundings. One door was crushed open by a statue that fell over, you can see traces that your fall down into this pit might have been the cause. You slowly walk towards the open door and look through it…an empty room. But the darkness in there was different, it felt like it is soaking up any light that came from the bigger room.
As you make your way over to the 2nd door something moved behind you. You heard a noise. After you turned around very quick you saw nothing. But the room had changed, the darkness from the adjacent room was inside the pit now, you could see it on the walls, the floor…
With you walk over to the other door with quick steps, opening it and looking into a long empty hallway. Not wanting to stay with the darkness at all, you run out the door and along the hallway.
…first concept of the hallway…
The concept of TSP
In TSP you are supposed to run away from the darkness in a maze. There were supposed to be traps everywhere, but the idea was to turn the solving of the traps around, as they were meant to keep intruders out, but you were coming from inside, so you had to think differently than the obvious way to get around or disarm them, which should usually include some form of puzzle. All under time pressure as the darkness is slowly coming towards you trying to consume you.
So was the idea born for The Prison Of Nightmares, and incidentally also the Brotherhood who build it. The brotherhood build a prison that was keeping in an evil so powerful, it would consume the world if freed. So they build the prison in a way that nobody can get in to release the darkness.
And then I was spinning the story a bit more and thought: What if there is not only one setting? Only one level of the prison?
So I started thinking about how the prison is structured in several levels, the old crypt, the catacombs, the entrance….and then The City.
The player was supposed to be chased through all the levels, encountering traps and at some point even other monsters than the darkness, very default stuff like werewolves, ghosts, vampires. But the whole story slowly started to fail in my mind. It was becoming too generic, too “done already”!
Below you can see even more concept art about the hallways of the dungeon.
The city becomes the focus…and gets a name: SANTA FEENIKS
After I dumped the idea of having a dungeon crawler type of game my priority shifted. I already loved the idea about a huge city, so that was what I wanted to focus on. And as I already knew that the Brotherhoods guardian will be a phoenix, I looked for a good name. The word Santa was pretty much given from the beginning, I like the sound of the word, now I just had to find something that fits to it. But I did not want to call it Santa Phoenix, that would have been to easy and to boring.
So I checked out the word Phoenix ins other languages and the Finnish word won: Feeniks! And so was the name born: Santa Feeniks.
In the years 2009 to early 2014 I tried many times to start working on Santa Feeniks. But they all failed in one thing: I was overplanning everything. Every attempt started with a big planning phase, e.g. how are the streets? How are elevations? Where are parks or other special places?. Every time I started I got lost in the planning and then lost interest because I was not seeing any progress. I cannot really tell how many times I started in those years, but I would estimate it was about 15 to 20 times.
Below you can see 2 concepts of failed attempts…
The 2nd image shows my last attempt in early 2014, at least I think it was the last attempt at the time. It was going somewhere but then end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 was a really bad time for me.
The fight with Insomnia
Since my time at Qantm and many years after that I was bound to “work as much as possible” on different little ideas that I had. While we were working at our final project for Qantm, I was starting to skip sleep. Sometimes a night, sometimes 2…and the amount grew and grew with every week. Lots of coffee or caffeine pills were helping me stay awake and keep working. In the beginning it was all fine and I did not really felt any side effects…
…but keeping this mentality up for years did severe damage to my physical and, which is way worse, my mental health. At some point I couldn’t even fall asleep, no matter how much I tried. I was laying in bed awake all night and couldn’t find any rest. I am not even sure when I stopped wanting to stay awake and just did it because if has become a habit. My days were pretty much a grind of staying awake, staying alive…being awake for 48-72 hours, then crashing completely for a couple of hours, lets say 6 tops, and then being awake again for days.
After 6 years, which was in early 2014, I got to the end of my rope. And so was my body. I started to suffer from something that is called “Narcoleptic Episodes”. My body would just randomly shut down wherever it was, no matter how exhausted I was….I had a total of 4 of these in 2014, twice I woke up in the hospital.
And this was the wake-up call I needed to start changing my life. I was trying to get my life and sleep in order by myself and it was not working at all, my sleep schedule was ruined and even if I tried to sleep for 8 hours a day, it took me 3-4 hours to fall asleep and then I was sleeping for a couple of minutes until I woke up and was wide awake again. There was no chance for me to fix this alone.
So I signed up with a sleep lab so they can analyze what is happening with me when I try to sleep and give some advice. After spending a weekend in there the doc told me that the moment the lights go out and I am in silence, my brain starts ramping up its activity by a lot, massive activity spikes were recorded. Meaning I was thinking about all kinds of stuff, work, private stuff, a lot of times about failures or mistakes…
So the recommendation was to find something that distracts me from thinking, not trying to sleeping silence but having something audible in the background that distracts me from overthinking everything. I tried a couple of bullshit Audio CDs with some subliminal tone that is supposed to sooth you, but it never helped. And then I came back to the one thing, the one person that always made me feel relaxed and put me to sleep in my younger years…. Bob Ross.
His painting show was my saving grace, it helped me to sleep again. And from this moment onward I always put his show on loop and I had (almost) no issues sleeping.
But why am I telling this story, what has it to do with Santa Feeniks?
Well, during this time I had totally given up on working on the city. There was no power left for it, no motivation. I was simply overwhelmed with the project and thought if I would work on this more, I could fall back into trying not to sleep, trying to power through and just keep on working. So I stopped it…
I stopped working on Santa Feeniks.
On a side note: Please never ever try to skip on sleep no matter how much you consider it a waste of time (like I did). Your body needs sleep to fully recharge, so never do stuff like staying awake for 3 days, get your sleep, get your rest, have sweet dreams! Going through shit like I did just because “I wanted to work more” was not even close to worth it. This whole thing nearly destroyed me, don’t make the same mistake!
Project 2015
abandoned high-tech or medieval fantasy?
Nothing happened for Santa Feeniks until the end of 2014 in which I had reorganized my life in a good way and slowly came to terms with my sleeping disorder and how to solve it. So I started dreaming again about my glorious city and how to build it. But although I already had some ideas about a story, I was torn between a decision for it:
Should it be a post-apocalyptic high-tech city or a medieval fantasy one?
To help me decide I create a Facebook poll among my friends to see what they thought. The poll showed that more people were interested in a medieval setting and I was relieved, because although I was really loving some ideas I had for a abandoned overgrown tech city, my heart was more set for fantasy and the idea of building in a Gothic, Victorian, romantic style.
So in early 2015 I started writing and building something new for Santa Feeniks. The writing went fairly well but the 3D work went awful again. I was still trapped in my way of overplanning and overthinking things and after a coupe of hours of working on the new city I was already losing any interest in it. So work here became very slow and very boring to me, which was a bit of a killing blow for it. But I was not giving up that easily, I motivated me as much as possible, even did something I would have never thought I would ever do…I streamed my work for the first time on January 13th, 2015.
And then, in March 2015, something stopped me completely in my work…
…a broken pinky on my dominant hand…
I little accident, a fall, and a pretty bad landing and I broke my left hand pinky. It needed to be fixed and with the cast and everything I couldn’t properly move my hand for weeks. NO work could be done! And due to a super hot summer that year the healing process ran into many complications, from infections due to sweat, the metal to keep the bones straight having issues with my nerves and causing massive pain in my hand and other things it took a total of 19 weeks to heal, and for most of the time I was barely able to use my hand as I was not able or allowed to move the fingers during the healing process.
And that was the killer for Project 2015. It was over when it came to working in 3D. And I totally lost hope for it and totally given up. There was just no chance for me to ever find the motivation again to do this.
But…
…most of you know that I did not fully gave up, that I restarted the project and have gotten decently far with it. How did this happen, where came the motivation from?
You will have to read this in the upcoming Part 3!