I thought that it could be fun to discuss how some characters and other parts of the game came to be. Let me know if you want me to write more about some aspects of the game or the work I do. I love Stardew Valley, and the way ConcernedApe captured the very essence of Harvest Moon and other classics of the genre in his masterpiece, with great attention to details, is really inspiring. In 2017, having just finished a card game about female scientists (free print & play pdf), the idea to create a game like Stardew Valley but with Science and Robots came to me quite naturally. At first, I wanted robots to help with farming. They would need to be recharged frequently, you could customize them with extra batteries or extra backpack space to transport items, and so on, so they could plant, harvest and water the crops. But in a game where you can plant and build anywhere, it can quickly become a pathfinding nightmare, and I decided to put that idea aside for a while and use flying drones instead.
The first version of the robot was a bit ... scary! Another problem came from the choice of NPCs. Using real life scientists make it easy to add personality and fun facts in the dialogues, but it makes it much harder to have comic relief. I wanted humor to be an important part of the game, to balance the scientific content. I could make fun of the scientists, but I could not make them completely ridiculous. But a robot was fair game. And that is how Anne Droyd was born. Her humanoid look with a rotating hand and a clamp is in part inspired by Ada, from Fallout 4! I made no secret that Im a big fan of Bethesda, as you probably guessed during the first encounter with Alexa. Plus it totally makes sense, since the name of Fallouts robot is inspired by Ada Lovelace, a famous Woman in Science. Anne Droyds personality was inspired by reddits group r/totallynotrobots, a community of humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans (are you still following ?). The group is hilarious, and that was exactly the kind of robot I wanted. Later in game, Annes strange logic develops further in a quest inspired by the Antivax movement. The current dialogues are far from complete, and Im particularly impatient to further flesh out Annes personality. She will most probably join Albert Totally not Einstein - the lovable and surprisingly naive genius - , and Melon Husk (or is it Elon Musk ?) - a billionaire whose ambitious plans tend to fail spectacularly - in a comic trio.