I have lived my entire life in central Alberta, a province in Western Canada. It is a prairie province; driving between its major cities, you will see kilometres and kilometres of flat land and farm fields. The northern part of the province, though, is all forest, forest that isn’t unlikely to ignite.

Like a lot of Canada, Alberta can get punishingly cold during the winter. At least once in my life, where I live has been the coldest place on Earth. However, its unique geography means that it swings around to being extremely hot during the summer, too. I never thought it was that bad when I was a kid, but the summers seem to get hotter and hotter as time goes on. This isn’t just me getting old: data shows that average temperatures have gone up. We get more blisteringly hot summer days, and our hottest days are hotter than they used to be. That’s not great news for all that forest.

What’s worse, our neighbour to the west, British Columbia, is a true forest province. Climate change is hitting them just like it’s hitting us, but they have a lot more flammable material.

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as ‘wildfire season’ in Alberta. Wildfires happened, of course, but I never heard about them. They never affected me. But around 2017, we started to see wildfire smoke drift into the city, either blown over the mountains from BC or from fires in our own province. We’d have whole days where the sky was just grey, where you were supposed to stay inside and not breathe the outside air. There have been more and more of those days as the years have gone on. It’s just a regular seasonal hazard now. My nephew, now seven years old, has never known a smoke-free summer.

By 2018, I’d been pondering the base ideas for what would become DESERT OF ASH for a while. I had no specifics on the setting at that time; all I knew was that I wanted to explore the dynamics of gay sexual relationships after the end of the world. That summer, a game writer friend and I agreed to get together over a weekend to participate in Ink Jam, a jam for working in the Ink scripting language. We would make separate entries, but work in the same room to keep each other motivated. This seemed like a great opportunity to flesh out my gay apocalypse idea, and the first thing I needed to do was decide what kind of apocalypse I was going for.

Looking out the window of my friend’s apartment at the ashen sky, all I could think of was a world consumed by flame.

It’s been almost seven years since then. As DESERT OF ASH has grown and changed into what it is now, I have never been able to forget how it started. I get reminders every year, when the blue summer sky is blotted out by smoke. We’ve already seen a bit of smoke this year, and it’s bound to get worse. DESERT OF ASH is a grand exaggeration, a hopefully impossible scenario, but like all good dystopian fiction, at its core is something real.