Hello there, my name is Lorenzo, and I’m the creator of Milky Way Prince - The Vampire Star, now available on the Epic Games Store for Windows PC and Mac.

I see this game as my diary, a way to overcome, exorcise, and analyze a complex and challenging time in my life. I started working on Milky Way Prince immediately after a breakup and desperately needed to tell my story, have it written down, reread what I’d experienced, and look at what had happened to me from different points of view. I believe video games are the perfect tool for this, they become a machine capable of collecting different possibilities, which can be explored according to a precise logic.

As much as I wanted to show part of my private life, I remain a reserved person. The narrative has a metaphorical layer: stars and astronomy provide a veil useful for dealing with a topic as thorny as mental illness, particularly Borderline personality disorder. During the relationship that inspired Milky Way Prince, I often thought falling in love with a partner with BPD is like falling in love with a star. The more the love grows and the connection intensifies, the more unstable they become. I kept wondering what I could have done differently and what would have happened if I did so.

After reading psychology articles and studies, I noticed a similarity with the life cycle of stars, which end in three ways I associate with a positive, neutral, and negative outcome. What if I’m too harsh, what if I’m too submissive, what if I can break the cycle? I was transfixed by the idea of relationships as a way to cure each other's weaknesses and grappled with whether I was giving away too much or too little. Binary stars were the perfect metaphor to represent the mutual and obsessive codependency of the characters, and vampire stars, which actually exist, became the symbol of the parasitic abusive dynamics.

In terms of inspirations, I'd like to mention the Japanese animation director Kunihiko Ikuhara, master of symbolist narration, capable of minimizing complicated and sometimes incommunicable concepts. His anime series Mawaru Penguindrum is the primary reference for Milky Way Prince. Then, I tried to integrate aspects derived from my other passions in an organic fashion. The settings are drawn from Robert Wilson's essential and minimal stage design and Bertolucci's smoky and decadent atmospheres. The character design is influenced by Masaaki Yuasa's super-flat and distorted style and from Suehiro Maruo's plastic/neoclassical poses.

I scored the music – also because I needed to simplify as much as possible – to be the only sound hint for mood, ambiance, and character development. The soundtrack is mainly inspired by retro-aesthetics of artists such as Lana Del Rey and Arctic Monkeys and the evocative noir atmospheres of Angelo Badalamenti. In my game, music is as important as silence; characters’ verbal communication progressively disappears and finding a solution becomes harder and harder, paying homage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s films about incommunicability.

Milky Way Prince: The Vampire Star is out now on the Epic Games Store  for Windows PC and Mac with a launch discount, and I hope you can take something away from what was inspired by and soon became an intensely personal experience.