wind and waves

I keep starting sentences as if I have something important to say. How do you make video games while also having a life? butter knife, what a life, anyway frank ocean - pink matter

Since I wrote last, the game has opened up. Thankfully, 'cause I had written myself into a corner, which I have a tendency to do when I work alone. 

I was working solely linear, like a book, but then Llaura helped me turn everything upside down in the best way possible. What is a game: is it a bound story, or does the player need agency? 

Years ago I also looked into narrative, yet more mainstream, gamey games. Kentucky Route Zero, Night in the Woods, Oxenfree, etc. I could see it work for my game - A woman travels with her newborn to a little village in the outskirts of the woods. 

But I ditched the idea, because I thought you had to be a working on a big scale production in order to make such a thing (which basically means: a walking animation....). At that point no one really seemed to be interested in the game, so I thought I had to keep it at a bare minimum production wise. 

I guess, in some way, a linear bookish story is so much more work, because everything has to be created anew. Walking round a city is actually very simple in comparison; fewer assets, maybe more dialogue and most importantly: player agency and more wavy, open storyline. 

Here's some of my sketches for the city map, that will not be a city or a map, but something more ... fluid.  

 

It was too... mappy.
Then it quickly became like this, even more open:

And already now, it's turning into something new and even more open, no lines, no restraints. The different areas will contain different story bits. Either a piece of dialogue, a feeling, a memory, an actual cutscene with game elements, etc. 

Describing this abstract theme of motherhood and existence, I think this is by far the best way to go around the subject; there's no linearity in the feelings and experiences anyway. 

Here's some early character sketches for the walking sim:

 (notice the messy mum hair bun, which i want to give place in the video game world)

The long and slow process enables so many possibilites. It gives the story space. Both me and the story need the space. 

dreams

 

 

 

 

 

sketches by ida hartmann, may 25

 

I'm working on the beginning of the story, figuring out how to get a hold of the feelings. I like the absurd giant baby.

When I was 10 I constantly drew "Big Fat Baby" (and Tweety bird and Kenny from south park). Now, when drawing this dreamy, giant baby I couldn't help but feel a bit inspired by the Big Fat Baby.

Giant babies are FUN. And I need FUN in this story.

(Source: Warner Bros, from show "Histeria").

retreat yourself

within a bloom there's more I want to see,
i didn't know what way to turn,
until i saw the lilac tree, 

From the open window at the residency where i will work from the next couple of days, close to the fields, and very close to the local big road, the scent of the lilacs floats in,

Yesterday on my evening walk I first walked with a distance to the purple trees, admiring their beauty. On my way back I romantically picked a small branch of them, took a deep inhale with the flower up in my nostrils, but it didn't smell like perfume or my lost childhood, instead it smelled of ... cat's piss? 

I lost myself on a cool, damp night
I gave myself in that misty light
Was hypnotized by a strange delight
Under a lilac tree
(jeff buckley - lilac tree)

Anyway.

Declutter

For weeks I've been longing to work, and I booked this trip in order to work, but I also have to admit that I came to be truly and utterly and completely isolated and alone. 

Lately motherhood's been demanding my full attention, my full being. Sickness, vacations, new kindergarten. My daughter has learned to hug hard, full on choking me, several times a day, and I can brush it off, like; while being choked I say (as much as you can say while being choked): isn't she cute, while my insides are slowly and blissfully dying.

I want you, she says.
I WANT YOU, she screams.

I started cleaning the apartment frantically, going through closets and shelfs and basement and memories, and when I first got started, I couldn't stop, where did we get all this stuff from, this unbearable clutter, I hadn't realized we gathered all these meaningless things. I wanted to throw it all out, but it seemed like the more I tried to declutter, the more things emerged. 

Yesterday I took the train out of the city. The moment I sat on my seat, a profound peace crawled over me.
I took a deep breath. Finally. 

Dona nobis pacem

Next to the residency, an old, idyllic cottage with flower ranks growing on it, there's also an old church. Upon arrival yesterday in the sunny afternoon, I went to a special peace service there, for prayers and candle lighting to end all wars and climate disasters. I liked the sound of that. 

It also felt suitable for the next four days where I will live as a monk (who smokes and drinks and watches bad television). 

Working in a church for over a year has diminished the awkwardness of going to a weird place where strangers sing and pray together, talking about an old, dusty book with very dramatic character arcs. Now I even enjoy it, and it somehow gives me peace, though I really can't explain why. 

I gave the priest my wet, freshly sanitized hand as she welcomed me, and found a place to sit in the back of the church, trying to be as anonymous as possible. I didn't really listen to the talking, and I really tried to sing with my thin, crusty voice. The other 20 church goers sang their hearts out. 

We sang a song that I had heard some weeks before, it really moved me, "Du spør mig om håbet" / "You ask me about hope" (Mads Granum/Lisbeth Smedegaard Andersen), 

but just when you think there is nothing
there is
hope
it's there.

And maybe I came to the church just to hear exactly that. For a fleeting moment there was a notion of hope and peace in the world, in this little, round church, these old people with clear voices, the candles lit at the alter. 

We all went from the darkness of the room, out the doors and into the crisp evening sun. I went back to the residency cottage and felt a deep peace and gratitude of being able to be here

Now, what's cooking?

I don't even know what I am trying to say with all of this.
It seems like I am warming up to something I'm not sure of.
I really want to work.
I really want to relax.
I want to work on my game.
And I want to write a book. I also want to make a children's book. And a song.
I really want to sleep.
I want to fall deep into the grass, until I am completely absorbed in the soil,
I want to be an organism, single cells,
I want closeness

To be continued while I spiral into the unknown

... "and be who I want to be"

 

yolk

Within Easter there's an egg. I open it, the yellow, thick yolk sticks to my fingers. I let it stay. I try not to worry. The child screams and cries. The new period of my parenting is apparently based on: damned if you do and damned if you don't. I can't win. Instead I try not to lose my temper, patience is key. Right?

A project can't move forward, when you can't do anything right. Creativity is lost in the lost sleep. Why are we so tired, I ask him yesterday evening. I guess it's a vacation thing, he answers. I think to myself, maybe it's exhaustion. How can you tell the difference. 

Giving Birth

One of my friends is in the hospital, for a week now. She gave birth. It was messy and violent, as births tend to be. I still don't know what exactly happened, but somehow deep within I just know. Mothers know.

In the game I wanted to depict birth. My own birth was also bloody and fearful, a vacuum delivery. It was never critical, but I thought I should die. I realised in that exact moment that birth is life-threatening. No one had told me this at my hippie birth preparation, where we mostly learned rebozo massage and to breath properly.

No one had told me, I would be cut in two halves. 

I thought of it mostly like a distanced action, if I were to make it into a game. At first, it should be in the hospital bed, where you play another simple, light game while the birth is going on, as a sort of dissociation, leaving the body behind, while still knowing what's going on. 

The text would be (Something I wrote after my own birth): 

jeg burde være død, jeg døde,
vi døde, barnet og jeg,
nu er vi noget andet

I should have died, I died,
we died, the child and I,
now we are something else

Birth factory

One of my old friends is an obstetrician. After only 6 months in this job, he’s already kinda bored of the monotony of the work tasks. He described very mechanically the sound and movement on how to deliver babies with a vacuum (suction cup), making a sound like a finger coming out of a glass bottle. Pop. While pulling his hand back, like using a plunger or something like that.

I then created the game idea: Birth Factory. A lot of female bodies (no face), very simplistic drawings, giving birth. One at a time. You drag the suction cup onto the eggs head, you pull it out. Done. Next one comes. Meanwhile there’s loud techno music playing, like being in a fitness center. All the eggs are gathered in a bowl. 

 (The text says: Is the player God? Mother Earth?)

Afterwards the big egg would be cracked, and a whole civilisation would walk out of it, celebrating life.

 

Transition

But it no longer feels like the right way to do it. My friend giving birth and sending me fragile pictures from the hospital bed this Easter, reminded me of what's really at stake. It shouldn't be from society's POV, but the mother's POV.

It gives me a new headache, because how on earth do I describe the feeling of birth? 

While giving birth you leave the old part of yourself behind, while a part of you has removed itself from you. It leaves the mother as an empty holster in deep transition. 

You have to pick up the pieces of a shattered self, while you have to take care of this little baby that grew inside of you. You have to figure out the transformation, all awhile you don't sleep, your hormones are all over the place, and someone possibly cut you in halves, your skin was torn, your blood and insides where gushing all over. 

The Animal

It's weird giving birth at a hospital. Most of the time you're naked while screaming and bleeding and hissing and laughing of pain. You belong within the deep forest, in the roaring ocean. You're an animal trapped in civilisation. Then you give birth, and you have to pretend you're civilized again. But are you really? Can you ever god back to what was? 

As I went through all of this years back, I felt that I had a basic instinct, that I could rely on. Inside of me lived all mothers from all times. They told me what to do, when my modern, rational mind couldn't. Something inside me, an animal, an cosmic mother, was taking charge.

I will not go easily around this theme. It's very important. I hope I can figure out a way to show it the right way.

To be continued.

free form

Today I will start the day by drawing, the drawing will start! you hear? My body will curl itself over the table in the most non-ergonomic way as possible, I will stop breathing, I will float into space until my body aches terribly.

It's awkward for me to be a person who draws, I never felt at ease with the work. It's sometimes painful, and I have this old drawing injury in my left shoulder from the last months of Stilstand, that very easily returns if I don't take proper care of myself. And the self-loathing meanwhile, oooh, don't get me started.

My skillful, brilliant collaborator, Llaura McGee from Dreamfeel, asks me to be free in my storyboard, sketches, moods, poems. It's easier to piece together, if the form is free. Also, I am not paid properly to do this: There's no pressure. It's not a hobby, though. This is actually something that I want. 

Coming from more fixed ways to work, where every word counts, where every part of the process is carefully planned, and your abstract ideas needs to find a shape and goal quite quickly, so writing doesn't become the bottleneck, this kind of process I always dreamed off. 

I have every reason to stop doubting myself. 

****

So where will I start today?
TODAY was the day, beyond other days. Right?

It is easter. My daughter only wants to watch television about eggs. The daycare is closed.
Meanwhile I experience the past 35 easters within my system at the same time. I wonder if time really is relative. Most of all I want to sleep. Most of all I want to write and draw.

I work part time in my local church as a church waiter. After working there for a year, I have now been given the big responsibility to handle easter Sunday. The pressure is on. Jesus is returning!
I will clean the church.
I will make sure the flowers are standing beautifully and tall.
I will be the perfect church waiter in a crisp white shirt and black suit, hair tied back in the neck, singing the verses low from the back of the church. Here, I am first and foremost a mother, a wife, a waiter. A generous smile in a fixed form with fixed rules that repeats themselves year after year the past 2000 years

Now, at the café where I have two hours to intensively work work work, I have no clue what I am, I can be whatever, I am nothing and everything.
A free form,

*****

This is the drawing from today. Free, but carefully planned. A hole presents itself. 

Mother Earth in bathtub (or womb?). Ida Hartmann, 2025

 

body over mind

How does 
A body make a video game 
When it takes a brain to make one 

mamimal sketches, ida hartmann 2025

 
 

I turn to grass

Its subtle movements

My fingers deep in soil

A world beneath

I want roots

Desperately

 

screaming infants

I'm making some weird shit. When storyboarding I am thinking: This is so obscene. Then I laugh. Loudly. Ha ha. God, I'm so quirky and weird. No one has ever done this in a game, it's crazy man, it's just crazy. The first prototype of the game, will be the player pulling out an old woman's teeth.

Still from early prototype (Ida Hartmann & Dreamfeel)

When I started making comics on a serious level many years ago, my peers said: Stop escaping reality.  Don't hide your pain with surrealism. Okay okay, so I'll try to tap into my post partum era. FINE.

Post-postpartum
Every Tuesday the past year I've been attenting a postpartum restorative exercise class. I'm the only one there who has an almost three year old, who's also in daycare. The other mothers all have their infants with them on their mat. Crying, pooping, breastfeeding while I try to focus on doing the stretches and breathing.

And maybe being surrounded by cute screaming infants is not the best way to get out of a yearlong post partum reaction, even though it's a confidence booster to be best in class. 

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly found myself overwhelmed by the presence of all the babies. Out of the blue I was disturbed by it. The ultra slow pace of the movements was now unbearable. I even felt a stint of rage by it. I finally found myself in the mirror, my own angry face looking back at me: I am no longer postpartum, the enraged face expressed. 

But what am I then? 

A Beautiful Transformation
(Editor's note: I try to write this blogpost in a café, where a baby is "talking" very loudly and banging stuff into a table. Everywhere I go I seem to be surrounded by loud babies. Maybe it's meant to be -"this game is based on true screaming babies")

When I became a mother, I also became an animal for the first time in my life. The process started from the second my daughter was conceived. Before this, I had been a brain'n'thoughts kinda person. Not rational, per se, more like worries and mind clutter. And too much, some might even say. 

Now, I found myself being all body. My thoughts disappeared like small soap bubles, pffff, they were gone so violently fast. Something was growing inside me, it was all I could feel and sense now. Not in an idyllic way, where I sit peacefully on a flower field, knitting a wool sweater and brading my hair with hay, no, more couch style, mama couch, feeling life grow inside of me in front of television programmes about buying and redecorating homes. For nine months it was the only thing that I really cared about. All other things seems like a distraction from what I truly wanted: To see how much a stranger's house cost. 

(Editor's note: An infant has arrived to the café. It's already screaming like crazy. The distraction is frustrating; but this also feels like a way too long story for me to be able to write in this manner. Maybe I have to split it up in more chapters. I don't know. Maybe I don't even have to write it). 

OMFG.

"Bla bla bla, AND NOW YOU HAVE TO PULL AN OLD WOMAN's TEETH. Makes sense, huh?"

To be continued....

more

There is a game, and the name of the game is,
an already lost thought,
i only collect memories,
of a near future, then
a shift,

today i write sentences to grasp, something and someone who's not there,
my mind is constantly foggy,
the child is sick.
again.
but for the first time i experience the opposite feeling of 

prison,

i want to do stuff now
be someone, see people
im so so hungry, for the first time in years,
im so hungry
hungry

the child clings to me, she wants all of me, she says, while pulling my clothes,
im right here, i say, desperate, but it's not enough for her, she wants MORE,
more 

is everything
there is
everything,

the game has a name, it has drawings,
something sweet, something blue, something new,
i borrow my ideas from the dishwasher and sacred jeans,
from the stupid fears of being alive in a climate crisis, on the edge of a war, a child that probably will surpass 2100 and live to see the end,
computer games can seem so irrelevant, so irresistible,

i wake up, there is a day, there was the night,
light to dark to light again,
i continue.

poetry from a hole

One of my main issues when writing and drawing (comics, games, etc), is the balance between poetry and reality: How direct in the mediation of feelings should I be? I don't want to say too much, be too obvious and cliché, yet I don't want to be too cryptic and weird, so people won't understand a thing. 

I had the same struggle when I wrote Stilstand; I tried to minimize the use of language and let the visual and game mechanics speak for themselves, which made the few words used extremely impactful. But then comes a new problem: The words. Are they powerful enough, does this one word show exactly what I wanted to show, etc.

And then you can just continue twirling forever in a circular motion, going back and forth between poetry and directiveness until you deleted every word and then nothing in the writing makes sense, and then you find yourself in a pitch black hole, where letters are fading in and out, and you hear an omnious sound, a deep growl from within, a ... stop.

Becoming a poet lol

Now, in the beginning fase of storyboarding and prototyping, I make two versions: A direct one and a poetic one. For example, in describing pregnancy: 

Direct: I didn't know it would feel like this.
Poetic: A sprout. Then, a fever.

Personally, I really like the poetic notions, yet I am not a poet. I have no idea what I am doing. Somehow it feels more safe to be direct. The single sentence can be very impactful. With Stilstand it was definitely these honest reflections that hit the hardest. 

In the case of Mamimal (work title still), my new game about motherhood, I really want to open the door to it all. Yet motherhood is so abstract and other-worldly sometimes, that I want to reflect that too.

Poetic visuals?

Where Stilstand portrayed a real apartment in a real Copenhagen, Mamimal will be in an abstract universe. Inspired by for example Kids the lumpy female character will be in "the white room" of nothingness, where everything can happen. She moves around, becomes pregnant, gives birth, experiences the loneliness of motherhood, connects with nature, etc.

ida hartmann, artwork 'Mamimal' 2024

Parallel to the mamimal character, you will also enter the room of Mother Earth, who lives in a decadent apartment. 

ida hartmann, artwork 'Mamimal' 2025

Hopefully the visuals and the gameplay (mostly drag and drop, pull, reveal) will reflect the abstract feelings, and create a poetic room, where the few sentences will reach something in the player. 

Maybe if the visuals are very surreal and poetic, the language doesn't have to be too?

Or... 

Maybe it doesn't matter? 

Games can be magical, you know - when audio, animations, visuals, gameplay and writing comes together, it can say all the words I didn't know how to say. 

Maybe my real real issues is existing somewhere else:
What it is I want to say with this game? 
 

oh shit.

developer blog?

For weeks I've been fantasizing about writing a developer blog. Mostly because I need someone to talk to. For the first time I’m in charge of a game developing process, working mostly alone, and while it might seem somewhat cool and independent (“Girl, I didn't know you could get down like that”) for some, for me it’s like…

so what do I…
hmmm…
what do I do now? WHAT?!

The developer blog will be my neurotic watercooler talk, that I previously have trapped colleagues in until their eyes became clear and distant (yet inspired by divine artistry? hard to tell).

In the beginning
… Was the word: Motherhood. Before I even thought about having children myself, I thought about making a game about motherhood. In games you often follow an exterior motive, a grandiose plot, a journey to the end of the world and beyond, but what happens if game design and interactive storytelling can reflect an inner journey, a bodily experience, something that’s abstract, surreal and painful?

And I thought: Where are the mothers in games? Are they all dead or evil? Where’s their softness, anxiety and wisdom? Their swollen, lumpy bodies, their broken hearts, their watery eyes and milky tits?

As a true method actor
- getting deep into character, or like a super dedicated anthropologist, I was fortunate enough to begin my own journey into motherhood. I found out I was pregnant while my husband was singing opera in a competition in Moscow. I couldn’t reach him, which of course meant that he had been kidnapped by Russian agents to be an opera slave in the Kremlin. I called the hotel several times, but they couldn’t understand me, which only confirmed my worst thought: I would never see him again.

It was like an opera tragedy in itself. I cried and cried like never before. My body was covered in a thin layer of sweat, and my whole life unfolded in seconds. I am not able to do this alone, I thought. I am not cut out for this at all. What’s going to happen to me??!  

After 2 hours of frantic panicking, my phone rang. He was calling from Helsinki Airport, where he had taken an earlier flight home.  I’m pregnant! I yelled while crying loudly, feeling relieved, but somehow the feelings stuck.

It wasn’t like in the movies at all. I thought it would be so romantic and calm, like the last scene in Notting Hill (spoiler alert): A spring day, a park bench. Julia Roberts is laying in a floral dress, showing her beautiful baby bump, with her head peacefully on Hugh Grant’s lap, while he reads the newspaper with one hand and caresses her with the other. Instead I was already transforming into a panicky sweat-monster, no floral dresses, no park benches, no newspapers, just pure bodily horror, constant crying and mindless drowsiness. 

Making game, making baby, tomato, tomato, potato, potato.
For the time being I struggle a lot with structuring the game process. I am continuously torn between my own motherhood (daughter is now 2,5 years old) and the creative process. Since I became a mother, I haven’t been properly able to draw and write the same way I used to. Like, no way near. It’s just gone. Or is it? I certainly hope not.

When I made Stilstand, pre-motherhood, I was constantly in the process of creating the game. For weeks and months, it was all I thought about. Even my dreams were about it. Now, she is all I think about.

A while back I read an article about “When Women Artists Choose Mothering Over Making Work” in the NY Times, which debates whether it’s possible to be an artist and a mother at the same time, which only fueled my worries.

I can’t stop thinking if men have the same problem? Haven’t really read a lot of artists who are also fathers, struggling with these issues and not being able to work. And yet I really try to not succumb to any structural victimization of my own artistic labour, I mean, I am free, aren’t I?

And is it all a question about structure? Getting a routine of working, insisting. I look to other writer’s who are also mothers, how they write when the kids have been put to sleep, or in the early mornings before they wake. The few hours available for work are so very precious, and I am afraid to miss the window.

The tickle

Anyway, I’m still figuring this out. Some days I want to stop being an artist, because it has lost its natural process. Every week I'm at status quo, it feels. Most days I’d rather just sleep or do the laundry. But when I do get there, in that brief, artistic moment, where everything flows and you feel that little, special tickle, oooh i’m on to something, let me go deeper, in the stomach, I just want to stay and see what happens there.

So I continue, even though I’ve never worked slower. I want to see what a game about motherhood can be like. I want to experience it while experiencing being a mother. I want to create something that can explain this wild feeling of being in contact with the deep nature of all things. Computer games seem so fleeting in this sense. Yet I strive to make the two worlds meet. Let’s hope it turns out for the good.

To be continued.
(This took me a whole work day to write.)

byebye
Ida

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

drawing from pregnancy,
ida hartmann, 2022