My indecisiveness over where to set my own fiction began at sixteen years old, with a terribly naïve first attempt at writing a series of nine fantasy novels. It has followed me ever since, in a never-ending parade of half-baked secondary worlds, most of them pseudo-medieval, but sometimes drifting toward Renaissance or Victorian aesthetics. And even though my heart was never drawn to making science fiction, I did once try my hand at a fantasy with some “urban modernity” in it.

I had totally forgotten about that modern-fantasy world. A collection of good names for public squares, train stations, and cafés remained buried in the ghostly outskirts of my head… until the tail end of last year, when I started to write and program a small slice-of-life game in clear need of a city.

Since then, the streets of Buresca have been spreading out, growing slowly into something more convincing than any of its feudal city-state predecessors. As the need for neighboring towns and cities came up (Onieva, Velamar, and others), I even found myself going into a bit of map-making. Of sorts.

Not that a small slice-of-life game would need a map… but still.