Well, Legion Was Here is finally here!
FINALLY.
I'm incredibly happy to see people all around the world giving it a try and, apparently, accepting the absurd premise of this "spy" game without much protest. I'm enjoying every bit of the feedback I'm receiving, the players' enthusiasm, the videos of streamers bursting out laughing at my silly jokes…
And now comes the time for unexpected bugs and compatibility issues that never showed up during playtesting... As well as providing psychological support for people who watched the end credits. But I'm so happy to see people having fun with Legion that I'm fixing all of that with almost no anxiety.
For those who don't know (which, hopefully, is most of you), Legion Was Here is my first video game. I'm originally a French comic book author, writing and drawing books for almost twenty years now. Then, three years ago, a developer friend told me about Construct, this amazing piece of software that lets coding dunces like me create games through a visual scripting system. After a few terrible early prototypes, I had a revelation: yes, I could make a video game too. Maybe.
Since I was already comfortable with writing and drawing thanks to my day job, I focused on those strengths when looking for a game idea, and left aside complex gameplay systems or... 3D 🙃.
When the idea for Legion came to me, it seemed so stupid that I immediately thought, "Yep, that's what I have to make." Exactly the same impulse that drives me to create comics. As a bonus, I also got to compose all the music for the game. I've always made music on the side, and I loved finally putting all those years of somewhat aimless practice to use on a project that would (potentially) be experienced by lots of people. I think the music is still a little too loud compared to the sound effects, but it's hard to convince a musician to turn his music down, especially when the musician and the person coding the volume settings happen to be the same person.
There are plenty of stories I could tell about the three years I spent working on the game on and off, and maybe in the future I'll share some behind-the-scenes details about the making of Legion Was Here. Like all the mission ideas that were considered early on (of course I wanted to make an infiltration mission involving elves), or the discarded game titles ("900 Million Faces" is pretty hard to pronounce when English isn't your native language)...
But for now, I mainly wanted to write this post to thank all of you for giving Legion such a fantastic launch. Personally, I'm choosing to interpret it as: "Yes, your game idea is incredibly stupid, but we're okay with that."
And I'd also like to extend my thanks to my publisher, Surefire.Games, whose team did an incredible job and are 200% the reason why the game reached so many people at launch. But please don't tell them about the elf infiltration mission. They'll want me to add it.
