button-man-herald

[button-man-herald]

The Kingsport Clam

in a studio the size of Styrax, a lot of development is "Bottom Up", in the sense that so much of what we make is collaborative, iterative, and often the ideas we are most excited about come from spur-of-the-moment conversations over lunch.

While brainstorming what it takes to build a real town in the imaginations of our players, Ron and I got to thinking: what's the signature food of Kingsport? For those new to Button Man, Kingsport is the name we have given to our fictionalized version of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the setting of our upcoming 1920s adventure game.

New York has pizza, Chicago has hot dogs, Montreal has smoked meat, and Halifax has the Donair. But what about Kingsport? What began as a simple aside turned into a distracting, nagging question for me. What sort of food would early 20th century port-town northerners create to fit the bill?

Pics from Wikipedia and NYC Tourism

Cities' signature dishes tend to share some characteristics. Firstly, they are designed for mass appeal, at least so far as the locality goes. If the local area has a sweet tooth, its gonna be a sweet food, for example. To maintain mass appeal, it also needs to be inexpensive, possibly cheap as dirt. Think of a $1 slice in NYC. Of course the higher quality stuff is out there with a price to match, but the word of the delicious thing wouldn't be out there if it weren't for the decades of legwork done by the humble $1 slice.

So we have broad appeal, low price point, and usually these foods are also a celebration of either a specific demographic in the community, or of an industry of particular pride in the community. For example, is it so surprising that the meat-packing city became known for delicious and cheap hot dogs?

Lastly, although somewhat optional, I've noticed that a lot of local delights tend to come with a little joke or saying, especially in the Northeast. Something playful, letting everyone who buys in on the joke.

Keeping in mind the industries, social classes, and regional culinary traditions in the mix, I finally decided on something that felt plausible, and possibly even delicious: The Kingsport Clam.

What is a Kingsport Clam you ask? Why, its a dark roux-based chowder of mixed whitefish chunks (Haddock and Cod mostly), served on a toasted and buttered bun, cut not quite all the way so the bun keeps a hinge like a clam. Hot, filling, and relatively easy to carry, the Clam would be a favorite among the damp longshoreman looking for a satisfying meal on the cheap. Or so I imagined.

Trouble was, I couldn't shake the feeling that this food I dreamed up might be absolutely disgusting. For the good of the game, and for science, I had to make a Kingsport Clam.

Being so close to the Atlantic, cod and haddock aren't terribly hard to come by. I popped by the store and grabbed some cod, haddock, and threw in some spare tilapia I had at the house when I got home. The "hardest" part was making the roux, but even that just required some attention for a few minutes. Threw in the chopped onions and celery, added water, let it boil off the flour, added the fish, and after a some time stewing... it was done!

As I plated it up, I couldn't help but wonder just how many calories I had managed to condense into a single sandwich. But to my surprise... it was actually looking pretty good! After admiring my work for a minute, it was finally time to give it a try... and it was actually alright! My wife loved it, actually. Overall, too heavy for me, but half of one Clam satisfied.

I was happy to report my success to Ron, and thus the Kingsport Clam was finalized, and ready to be inserted as the official food of our fictional city! Finally I could stop thinking about it.

[button-man-herald]

Styrax Dev Diary #3: Me and U(I)

Back during the first iteration of Button Man-- back when it was strictly a point and click adventure game via Adventure Game Studio-- the UI needs were fairly 'find and replace'. Point and Click Adventure audiences are not averse to change per se, but over the 40 year lifespan of the genre, some standards were expected. A semi-diegetic inventory screen which swipes into and out of shot, a cursor which changes shape or accompanying icon according to context, and a dedicated text description area for showing the names of objects/characters the player's cursor hovers over. But since the beginning, we also knew we wanted combat in Button Man. As a new team, the combat existed in a sort of theoretical space, which we would 'get to when we get to'. Pretty quickly, we got to it. So we started with a semi-turned based system, with icons surrounding the player which you would press via mouse click. Punch/ Block/ Use Item. But our ideas started to flow, and the combat became more interesting and intricate, but also became more... unrelated? It's one thing to marry Point and Click trappings to a modern combat system, but its another to require a whole new control scheme and frame of mind when switching between the two modes. But how to solve this combat conundrum? Coincidentally, for reasons I may get into another time, this moment of head scratching was followed by the first major shift in development: Side Scrolling.

The place where games are (sometimes) made You see, also at the start, the story and thematic elements were pretty set-in-stone. But what we did not have was a standardized art style. Much of the early artwork was strictly practical; a bench was a bench, there was no specific style applied. The breakthrough was the decision to establish an old pulp-comic style, in the image of Smilin' Jack and TinTin. With that style, it began to make sense to change the visual angle a bit, which in turn made a restricted horizontal movement style make more sense.

With that, we realised it also made more sense for the player to explore the world a bit more directly, via keyboard controls. WASD/Arrow key movement would add a sense of tactile immersion (you know, as far as these things go with a keyboard and a named character on screen).

And with THAT revelation... we arrived at the obvious answer for our combat-- Beat 'em up side scrolling. It fit perfectly with our protagonist, Bruce McKenzie, who is a former junior boxer and all around tough guy, and comics have no shortage of "BAM", "POW!", and "SMACK!" images called to mind. With a change to artwork and keyboard controls, the migration to a side scrolling adventure game inspired by point and clicks was complete.

Original Bruce, followed by the first pass at a comic Bruce.

Which brings me to the present moment. The road to the current look and feel was long and winding, as the Lead Designer (me) learned 3 separate engines during this time and spent a good portion of the last year trying to catch up to our Lead Developer's abilities and knowledge of Unity. I'm happy to report that I am competent and comfortable in the Unity environment now, but that means I'm now sweeping up after myself in the wake of all the education. So many factors and components were created as temporary measures; placeholder dialogues, placeholder location teleporters, placeholder animations, and placeholder UI. All of these components have had their own evolutions and iterations, as I learned what we are capable of producing. We now have an elegant character teleportation system, and excellent Dialogue Manager which is overloaded with functionality, and now its time to fully shift the UI away from the Point and Click to one befitting a side-scroller.

what a lovely gait

First and foremost, our artist, Sam Mameli, worked hard to make the locations look great-- lets not hide them with bulky, persistent UI elements! Today I am creating the animations to hide away icons when not in use.

We've also removed the Description bar from the bottom of the screen, which tells the player who or what they are about to interact with.

Instead, the interactable which the player is about to activate will animate or highlight, allowing the player to plainly see that they are going to speak with a character, for instance, without revealing their identity.

Next up, I'll be shifting our dialogue box from the wide format, bottom of the screen style, to one which emerges from the right side of the screen, creating a square on the left side of the screen in which to center the conversation. This means that the camera will have a clean, unobstructed view of the characters and the backdrop.

(The background artwork is outdate in the above image, but you can see the UI components which are about to be updated)

I hope to finish this all up in the next few days, so that our artists can go in and replace the placeholder artwork sooner than later, bringing Button Man one step closer to being Gamescom ready!

[button-man-herald]

Dev Diary #2: Post-XP Gaming, Am I Recovered?

A little over a week since XP Gaming wrapped up, and I still have a cough! Remember friends, if you're gonna shake hands with hundreds of strangers in a tight space, maybe bring some hand sanitizer.

But it was a great time! Ron doubled his roles while we were gone, acting as both my boss and my guide around Toronto, as I had never been there before. A nice city overall, and really clean (despite what all these Canadians keep saying to me. I mean, the presence of trash does not in of itself qualify a city as "dirty"). My goodness, the municipal confidence of having subway seats made out of velvet?? When I was finally brave enough to sit, I was amazed to find they were not, in fact, laden with piss.

Streetcars were neat, parks were plentiful, and despite how mean-mugged a lot of the cyclists were, the cycling infrastructure was far better than I expected in a North American city. On my first day I took a bike share ride around the city for a few hours, saw a lot of pleasant neighborhoods full of pride. I also rode by St. Anne's Church in the aftermath of its destruction. As a proper tourist, I had no knowledge of the church and felt like I was intruding as a handful of locals gathered around the remains. I snapped a picture and rode off.

Ron fed me too much while I was there. I had grand ambitions of cooking meals for myself and running calorie-light, which were dashed upon the delicious rocks of internationally rated ramen, beef tendon, soup dumplings, BLTs, A&W, croissants, and chinese barbecue.

Ron also showed me the Eaton center, which is a big ass mall underground; Queen's Park, which we sat in for a few hours in the long wait to our hotel's availability; City Hall, which looks like either an Avengers HQ or a spaceship (or both), and he even showed me the spot where he met his lovely wife. Hey Ron, thanks for the tour man. You really took care of me, and found time for us to see the city and not only work.

But as for XP itself? MAN, did they pack a lot into that. Nearly 100 speakers across two days, giving talks about the most pertinent issues facing the industry today. There was a lot of discussion about leveraging your IP correctly; ensuring that you aren't leaving opportunities on the table in the form of multimedia such as comics, micro-games, novels etc. Players really enjoy getting immersed and living in your IP, so make sure they have the different forms of media to fulfill that!

There were talks about Gen-AI, the good and the bad, thankfully. I won't get into my opinions on it here, but I was happy that the conversation was more robust, thoughtful, and progressive than any we've been subjected to online. We got to see a bunch of games which are soon-to-be-announced, and I even got the chance to play a few alpha games that really blew me away. We are looking at a very exciting few years in the indie space, for sure.

Ron and I spoke with studio leads, designers, writers, and development coordinators, all of whom left the event with a copy of our comic. The enthusiasm for Button Man was invigorating for us, as we had some of those same folks finding us the second day in order ask us for more copies of the comic! After a handful of meetings and talks, we felt the event had really been worth it for a number of networking and exposure reasons, and hopefully soon we'll be able to share a little more of those specifics.

An unanticipated but welcome aspect of all this however, was the attitude. If you have even a passing interest in video games as an industry, you are aware of the layoffs. In many ways, the industry is in its worst state its been in years. While at the event, studio after studio announced its closure, unleashing another several hundred professionals into the job market. Despite dire nature of it all, the drying well of publisher funding, and the job insecurity in the industry, the many designers, writers, developers, and project managers who flooded those halls were filled with support, enthusiasm, and mutual aid.

For every grim announcement of another closure, there was a call-to-action for reemploying those who lost their jobs; workers helping workers find a place for themselves often before the ruins of their former studio had even finished collapsing. I was genuinely heartened and shed some of my natural cynicism in the face of so many people refusing to give up creatively, professionally, or as a collective. XP Gaming left us with a lot of hope. Games are going to be okay. Our games are going to be okay. Its going to be okay

[button-man-herald]

Dev Diary #1; Africville Research

Last week, Ron, Sam and I (Jordan) went to the Africville Museum as part of our week long survey of Halifax for visual inspirations and to get some historical context straight. It was a somewhat dreary day; gray skies and windy bluster, but the replica church in which the museum is held was warm and inviting.

Although Button Man takes place in a fictional city called "Kingsport", it is heavily influenced by and in places, replicating, Halifax. For instance, the Halifax Explosion is called "The Great Explosion" in our game, and it's influence on the socio-economic character of the city is inspired by the reality of that event. However, the geography of the city, the layout of streets, the mayors, the companies etc are a mixture of reality and fiction.

This is all fine and in the spirit of inspired creative license, but if not careful, this flexible use of fiction could lead to very real erasure of significant communities in the area. The story of Halifax is inexorably tied to Africville, Turtle Cove, George's Island, and McNabs Island, among others. We are not the creators, nor is this the correct project, for exploring the seriousness of the violence, discrimination, imprisonment, or betrayal of the people in those places, but we can be better citizens by staying informed of the real stories that shaped our community. We might not be the right people to tell a story that seriously and deeply engages with this material, but we can do some justice to those communities by representing them in our game.

Avoiding plot spoilers, there are a handful of important figures in the plot of Button Man who come from our analogue community to Africville. Their motivations, although held at arms length from our protagonist, can be understood to be in defence and service of their at-risk home. The grimy interplay of politics and big money are prominent in our rendition of the story, whereas in real life the issue was clothed in the language of social justice, despite the "solution" providing anything but.

After a few minutes of looking over the modest displays, chronicling the history of the since-bulldozed community, we were joined by the museum's Executive Director, Juanita Peters. We sat down to a wonderful conversation about personal origins and community, when the reason for our visit, as research for our video game, came up. Juanita lit up and asked us to check out the museum's own educational board game, then asked us if we would consider looking over the game and providing the museum with a quote for converting the board game to digital format.

Just a note about Juanita; she was a joy to speak with. She is clearly a wealth of information and stories, and was more than happy to impart some wisdom from her ~40 year career in film and television with three dudes making a video game. We asked her how she got the position as Executive Director, and despite her somewhat coy suggestion that it was largely circumstance, it was clear that her deep, motivating love for her community, sharing their stories, and immortalizing the lessons of Africville's destruction are why she became the Executive Director.

Given that my background in gaming is specifically from tabletop board games, I am very excited to dive in. I believe strongly in the idea that games are every bit as academic, artistic, and commercial as movies or television, but the opportunity to work on a game that also feels like a genuine contribution to your community is a bit rare. Such a project lacks any of the cynicism that so easily worms its way into just about any gaming endeavor, no matter how removed from the world of lootbox and crypto scams.

Today I opened the education kit and have started analysing the pieces-- but unfortunately they forgot the instructions! Oh well. Tomorrow I'll pick it up and take a look into what this project may take. Its not a given, but I'm certainly excited to get started. (Images were taken a few days after, so the weather was much more cooperative!)

What a beautiful park!