About#

How it started#

There once was a young man with a dream of creating a game.

I was going to say “The year was 2015”, but actually it goes way back. Around 2005, with RPG Maker XP, but don’t ask me what I was aiming for, it’s been 20 years - or more, depending on when you’re reading this.

Ever since, I remember having the urge to create a game of sorts. I designed it all: 3D procedural generated persistent world with great freedom of movement and infinite building/crafting, a mix of Dwarf Fortress and SimTower, recreating already existing games like chess and card games, and, of course, the MMO of my dreams.

But the paper accepts everything, as well as the lonely nights spent tinkering with various ideas to get nowhere.

Why Belfar?#

That is a good one, but we’ll have to delve into some portuguese words, if you don’t mind. As well in some background story for the background story.

The year was 2017. A little adult full of problems - that’s me - but spilling creative energy, free time and a handful of friends decides to start what would became an almost ten years tabletop RPG campaign. If everything goes right, you will read about the closing session of this epic story, as it is still running every other year. And once you do, please do take your time to savor the reading, as I will not accomplish such a similar thing anywhere near in the future.

Going back to the creation of the RPG world: I needed a name for the desert jewel city, home to all merchants around the globe, a oasis for the weary. What would correctly represent the vision I had for it? The focus would be commerce, and so, I started searching for words that would be related to it. That’s when I stumbled across:

Bufarinheiro: Street vendor of trinkets.

That’s the kind of old, weird word I’d like to mutate into something of my own creation. Searched a bit more:

Belfarinheiro: Corruption of bufarinheiro.

Belfarinheiro was even better, it was more pleasant to the ears. Just had to make it shorter: Bufarim, Belfarei, Belfara… Belfar.

Belfar.

That works. And here we are!

And why are we here?#

The very existence of this blog quenches two needs of mine: writing and developing games.

The first one is trivial to explain. A blog can’t exist without words, and I like to write them one after another - a little too much to get lost in thought, sometimes.

“But you can make a game without a blog”, I hear you say. And you’d be correct, if I didn’t lack the discipline and the belief that a game could be launched entirely by me. That’s a strategy that some content creators adopt: journal their process to create a sense of responsibility with their audience, building up a social pressure of sorts to keep on going.

Along with my fondness of writing, I believe this is worth a shot.

Before I ask you to read the entries, I have to say that the creation of this blog would be procrastinated to God knows when if it weren’t for a friend of mine to encourage me to finally do it.

Thank you, I hope you have fun reading each entry, even though I don’t have a newsletter as of now.

Now you can go, thanks for reading a bit about me and my dream.

Eduardo “MrTheDuts” Souza

Email: mrtheduts [at] belfar [dot] dev