Fix Stories: Bring Me Hope and the Game That Was Too Big for Years

A Story About A Game That’s Too Big All Of The Time

Written by Fern Nigro for Fix Stories.

In May of 2023 I titled my monthly devlog A Story About A Game That’s Too Big All Of The Time, and I want to tell you what was actually happening behind that title.

On paper, things looked fine. I was four years into a ten-year promise to build one enormous game by myself, every sprite and song and system, and progress was steady. In reality I was working eight hours a day at my job and then sitting down every night to put in at least two more on the game, more on weekends, because the game demanded it. It is a 20 to 40 hour adventure being built by exactly one person. If I did not feed it every single day, the math simply did not work. And underneath the schedule, the truth I did not say out loud was that after four years, the most important part of the game still did not exist anywhere except my own head. The story, the reason I was making the thing at all, had never been written down. Cutscenes lived as tangled one-off scripts. I had built a world with no spine.

Then my personal life changed shape, suddenly and completely, and I found myself living alone for the first time in my adult life.

Bring Me Hope shows its action RPG side in a boss fight against Fallen Knight Guppo.

Here is what happened next, and it is smaller and stranger than a montage. I learned to do my grocery shopping by myself. I learned to wake up in an empty apartment and be okay with it. I started streaming development nearly every day, not because I had a marketing plan, but because I needed my days to have a shape and a witness. And somewhere in those months I noticed that when I looked in the mirror, I could smile at the little rat looking back at me. That had not always been possible.

The strange part is what those months did to the game. With no one else’s rhythms to move around, I finally sat down and wrote the story. All of it, beginning to end, the thing I had been carrying silently for years. Seeing it on the page changed everything downstream. Scenes I had been improvising suddenly had a reason to exist or a reason to be cut. Then I did the engineering equivalent of the same thing. I tore out my cutscene spaghetti and rebuilt it as a proper quest system, one structure that could hold every event in the game instead of a hundred fragile hacks. Writing the story down and building the quest system were the same act, honestly. Both were me admitting that a thing this big cannot live in my head, or in duct tape. It needs a spine.

The inventory screen in Bring Me Hope shows items, stats, and equipment systems behind the adventure.

The streams changed me too, in a way I did not see coming. People showed up. Not many, but they came back, night after night, to watch a tired person place tiles and argue with collision code. A small community formed around someone I had only recently learned how to be, and they liked her. When you have spent years assuming you are best experienced in small doses, that is not a small thing to learn.

What I took from that year is a rule I have never been able to shake since: the game grows when I grow. I used to think of Bring Me Hope as something I was building despite my life, in the hours my life left over. That year taught me the dependency runs the other way. Every time I have gotten more honest, more structured, or more okay with myself, the game has visibly leveled up within weeks. The most productive stretches of this entire seven-year project have all come directly after the hardest personal ones, and I no longer believe that is a coincidence.

Why does this story matter? Because I set out in 2019 to make a game that expresses every emotion I have felt in my life, and I assumed the hard part would be the craft. Pixel art, music, GameMaker. It turns out the hard part was having a self coherent enough to express. You cannot pour from a container that has not decided on its own shape. The game that was too big all of the time is still too big, it will always be too big, that is what it is. But I am bigger than I was, and these days the two of us fit together fine.

The rat in the mirror is a much happier one now. You can see it in the game, if you look.

Bring Me Hope Trailer

Bring Me Hope

Release: To be announced; demo available now

Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG

Developer / Publisher: Fern Nigro

Platforms: PC — Steam / itch.io / Fern Nigro Website

Related Reading

Riftwalker Hits 9,500+ Steam Wishlists as Ethan McKinnon Builds in Public

More Fix Stories on Fix Gaming Channel