SERENITY FORGE

How a near-death experience lit a fire in the Colorado-based developer and publisher

- ALAN WEN

Serenity FORGE

Founded 2014

Employees 40

Key staff Zhenghua Yang (CEO), Kevin Zhang (CBO), Frigyes Rácz (publishing director)

URL www.serenityforge.​com

Selected softography Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!

Current projects Roman Sands Re:Build, Centum, Slay The Princess: The Pristine Cut

To say that a videogame can change someone’s life – let alone save it – might sound a tad hyperbolic. But for Zhenghua Yang, head of developer and boutique publisher Serenity Forge, it’s true in the most literal sense. Yang, more commonly known as ‘Z’ (with the American pronunciation), suffers from chronic refractory idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, a rare autoimmune disease, from which he almost died at the age of 18.

That experience is retold in Yang’s, and Serenity Forge’s, first game, Loving Life. It’s a short nonfictional visual novel, the writing both affecting and unflinching, as it follows young student Yang from studying in his campus dorm to, suddenly, lying in a hospital bed – where he was given a pen and paper to write his will, with doctors not expecting him to survive the night. He made it, of course, but was told: “You’re probably going to die in the next couple of days. And then it was maybe two more weeks, a couple months, half a year.” He spent the next two years in hospital. “I just got traumatised, I suppose,” he recalls. “It was a really dark time, probably the worst time I’ve had in my life.”

His recovery arrives almost as a deus ex machina at the game’s conclusion, without any real explanation of how it happened – or the role that videogames played in it. “It was about half a year after my treatment when I made