It’s 6:30am. In a small flat somewhere in West London, a frenzied apparition tumbles out of bed into unfamiliar surroundings and begins beating at the walls in an unsuccessful quest for a light switch. Blundering on through the half-light, colliding with walls and items of furniture, a clutching hand eventually comes to rest on a small bag. Burrowing through the contents, a pen and some scraps of paper are extracted. The delirious figure hunches over a low table in the gloom and begins to scribble.
I am that tumbling buffoon and so begins the tale of Astrogarth’s Moggin.
First scribbles
My name is Matt Dixon. I’m an illustrator working in the games industry. Over the coming weeks I’ll be charting the development of my first game here. Let me start by giving that opening scene some context: I was in London for a comic convention. As usual I’d travelled down the day before the event to set up my table and had returned to my digs near the venue for a pizza and a few beers before some much-needed rest. Sadly, my slumber was interrupted by a dream.
It was a dream about a card game and such a vivid experience that it woke me with a start. I leaped out of bed, desperate to note down some of what I had dreamed before it faded from memory. In the foreign environment of an AirBnB apartment this proved to be a challenge and there was much stumbling and cursing in the dark before I finally located the necessary tools and began some frantic doodling.
Doodles from the convention
My wandering marks made in semi-consciousness don’t make much sense, but they helped me to pin down some of the ideas from the dream. Anyone who stopped by my table at the comic convention later that day must have found me rather distracted as the dream was all I could think about and I took every opportunity to make additional notes as new ideas came along. By the time the weekend came to a close, I had the bones of a card game in my head and pages of untidy notes and doodles. On the journey home, I decided that I would try to make the game a reality.
But how..?