LoveHrtz Productions began in a condo in Thailand, before I knew it would become a game company.
I was travelling, and the idea was a music and media company. A place to release my own music, and the animations and artwork that belonged with it. I was going to build a world out of the songs: animations, artwork, and T-shirts and posters dropped with each release. The music was the vehicle for that desire to build a world.
The name is LoveHrtz. It means love hurts, and it also means the frequency of love. I play with polarities a lot in what I make, much like yin and yang, and the name holds both. I wanted that human thing in it from the start. Not a soulless company. A place with some meaning, where a person could recognise themselves in what was being released. Closer to a personal, spiritual journey than a product line.
The artwork started telling a story. After a while it was obvious the story wanted to be played, not only heard or watched. So it became a game, and I started building it in Godot. I got as far as a foundation I liked. The loop of the game felt right.
The tools did not. I came from music software, Ableton and FL Studio, which are built so you can play. They are expressive, and they invite you to try something. The game tools in front of me were the opposite. Technical, buried in menus, and difficult to use in a creative way.
I gave myself a short stretch of time, a couple of weeks and a month at the outside, to make a VFX tool with more of that play in it. I thought I would start from Effekseer and reshape it. I ended up building Flamethrower instead. That is its own story.
The game is still the point. Building Flamethrower pulled me into writing an engine for the tools, and for the game. I will use that engine to make the game. When the game is further along and the engine is ready, I hope to release it for other people, in the same spirit as the beginning: game development that is more intuitive, more playful, and more fun to be inside.