An Edmonton-based journalist-turned-developer is getting ready to release a new video game that draws on his experience as a reporter.Times & Galaxy is the latest product in the works from Copychaser Games, an indie studio founded by former Edmonton Journal reporter Ben Gelinas. It's a bit of a marriage of two passions."I have a Super Nintendo controller tattooed on me next to a newspaper," said Gelinas, who founded Copychaser in 2017 after working for almost six years at BioWare.The game centres on a playable robot-reporter intern who gathers information and writes stories with the goal to be hired permanently by the titular newspaper, the Times & Galaxy. Its trailer dropped on May 2, ahead of a planned release in early 2024."I've often said that you can make a video game about anything, and I wanted to make a game that really focused on exploring a unique science-fiction setting," Gelinas told Taproot. "But I didn't want the player to go around needing to shoot things every 10 minutes like you see in a lot of science-fiction games."Funded primarily by the Canadian Media Fund, Gelinas works full-time on the game alongside a team of 10 part-timers. Writers Penelope "Sunny" Evans and Paul Blinov (who was once the arts editor for the now-defunct Vue Weekly) also bring real-life journalism experience to the game."We're bringing in our experiences from our past lives to inform the game's story and setting, and to really bring a sense of reality to this very unreal world that we're creating," Gelinas said.While there are already some games that involve journalism, such as The Republia Times, they are often "dystopian" and focus on the roles of editors rather than reporters, he said."We wanted to go left of field there, and still say things about the practice of journalism," he said. "But really put the player on the ground so that they have this experience of what it's like to gather news, and how challenging it can be to decide what is important for your readers."