I tend to like characters with scars. Whenever I draw a sketch of a fictional person, more times than not I add some kind of a scar. There’s an inherent coolness to scars. A mystery. A story behind it. Usually a very cool and badass one. Or maybe a horrifying one. But it’s something impressive, something memorable. Well, I’ve got a scar near my left eye. It looks like a layer of my skin is missing, though nowadays its color has more or less blended in with my skin color so it’s a lot less noticeable. But the story behind it is one of the stupidest things that could happen, ever.

So, which great adversary gave me this scar? Was it a giant hound that attacked at night? Was it a dragon that came to destroy the land? Were it the Reapers that I’ve heroically fended off from destroying the planet? Oh no. No. It was something worse. Something more devious. Something you’d never expect to betray you. It was a couch.

That’s right, I got scarred by a couch. Now you see how tricky it can be. It lured me in, after a hard day of work at the VFS Game Design program, promising to fill my body with the dose of rest it so needed. But while I was sleeping, it made a little scratch near my eye. No big deal, I thought. I had tons of these. Heck, one time I fell in a way that I scraped both my legs and one of my arms, I was covered in my own blood yet everything was still just dandy. But this couch. Maybe I was not used to the Canadian bacteria at the time. Maybe it has injected some sort of poison into my skin through that scratch, but the result remains the same – I got a skin infection. It was nothing to worry about, but a little part of my skin is now missing.

When it comes to creative professions, everything we experience, see or hear can serve as an inspiration. And this is not an exception. I want to subvert the ‘character with a scar’ trope. Create a game where there’s this tough, badass warrior with a prominent scar on his or her face. The warrior kills orcs and aliens and monsters like a pro, can take twenty people at once, so obviously the story behind the scar must be something amazing. There are legends about how this character got it, one more improbable than the other. But when we ask about the true story behind this scar, we hear, ‘I tried to hold a sneeze while I was cutting bread.’ Now that is an awesome story.