I only knew the “little match girl” as a pathetic image, no narrative attached, before I saw this video in December 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzrFVUBpNkY&ab_channel=むにむに別館 I swear there were English subtitles on it at the time, and they described the story in such bizarre terms that I felt compelled to check out the original and find out how much had been lost in pop-up Lego translation.
When I saw exactly how bizarre the story really was, I felt compelled to write the first Little Match Girl game (and rush to finish it so I could send it to my Patreon people on New Year’s Eve). My whole idea was that in the original story, the little girl dies, that’s the point, but in this version she’s not going to die, and what happens to her instead is the main joke of the game.
“The Little Match Girl 2” is an inherently funny title for the same reason; she rightly ought not to be available for a sequel. And it seemed like it would be nice to give my Patreon people another exclusive game when New Year’s Eve rolled around again. It was intuitive to suppose that this second game would take place exactly one year later.
This reminded me of something either Jackson Publick or Doc Hammer said about The Venture Bros. (a series that has become a big influence on the Little Match Girl saga): We only see tiny half-hour snippets of these characters’ lives. We don’t witness even a tenth of all their adventures. If the little match girl realized this incredible time-travel power on December 31st, 1845, then by the same day in 1846, she would have seen and done A LOT OF INTERESTING STUFF. And I had been thinking about her through all of 2020, so she had developed quasi-realistically in my mind as well.
By the time I finished the second game, I had really become enamored of the character; her situation and her worldview reminded me of characters I admired from long-running epic stories that I wanted to emulate. And I had established a tradition of making Patreon exclusive games for New Year’s Eve. So I was basically obligated to make the Little Match Girl into a long-running epic story.
Nowadays I’m so jazzed about the series that I’m motivated to work on it even outside of a New Year’s Eve Tradition schedule, so that isn’t really part of the equation. What I’m most excited about is the opportunity to build these games into a story on the scale of Venture Bros. or Sandman or Adventure Time, something that will reward the invested player with some percentage of the joy I derive from putting it all together.
Thank you for your question. It’s so important to supplement depressing general advice with something that appeals to my ego.