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Fighting, Writing, Deriding and Righting

I have a new blog post out on Doom Eternal. You know, Doom Eternal. That thing everyone played back when that thing happened where everyone had to stay indoors for ages and pretend like that wasn't something they did anyway. It was called "Youtubers' Guide To Writing Easy Unfunny Jokes." Anyway, the post is on my site. Here's the link:

Here's a Link:

Look at him go.

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New site!!!! Wow!!! Awesome!!!!!!!

I have a new site now! I started planning it last summer, started writing it in January and it’s now live, in June, so you can expect the next minor update sometime next year. But it has a blog, and it even has an exclusive post in it! Holy shit!

Damn, look at that. So cool. You can yell at me in the reblogs to maybe update the site with some features you users (read: plebeians) would like to have.

Oh also, yeah it’s quite likely I'll post on my site instead from now on. Don’t worry though, I’ll still try to remember to post the links to the new posts (this is confusing) to this tumblr, so I can have next to none readers instead of simply none. Anyway, look forward to whenever I write the next time.

Until then, asdsfdgfasgfdgasfdgf!

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Marketers are Morons

E3 is dead, but suits still need to get their fix for both their crippling gambling addiction and their exhibitionist fetish somewhere, so you know what time it is! It’s… a random weekend in June.

That’s right, with no real reason or cohesion to onlookers, this just happens to be the exact moment when all the executives could no longer hold it in and had to bust all over Twitch, which is much easier nowadays thanks to the camwhore apocalypse. As such, we have a fuckton of new trailers and other assorted trailer-like homunculi to pour over as the good little consumer piggies we are.

But the past few years, the ads have seemed increasingly unlikely to stir any excitement. Trailers are more cookie-cutter than ever, and actual gameplay reveals are a disappearing art. And much like last time when I complained about gaming news, all the developers actually making the games are mysteriously absent. Yes, you read that right, this blog has continuity now! Look forward to the blogomatic universe announcement later this year.

Looking back at E3s of old, these new events are cheaper, more condensed, more accessible and entirely controlled by the corporations and not vulnerable to the oh-so-familiar gaffes of live shows. Yet they still happen just as rarely as E3. Somehow the genius executives at the top have decided that, you know, instead of letting people know what’s happening more often and spreading the games accordingly to give them all room to breathe, we stuff even more crap into a shorter timespan and as a result nobody even remembers what we saw two days later.

Confoundingly we’ve decided that now gameplay reveals are also trailers. Both Perfect Dark and That Indiana Jones Thing Because Disney Has To Stay Relevant™ had “gameplay reveals”, but both were some sort of amalgamation of gameplay clips strung together and overlaid with the same piano-inception horn trailer music trash every other trailer was full of. Why even bother? Just cut out the middleman and show us a CGI video clip at that point for all the difference that makes.

I’m honestly a little confused about what all the suits even do all day. They’re paid exorbitant sums of money and all they can come up with is the same shit all their friends and THEMSELVES have been doing for years. Does the marketing team also double as the company’s cocaine quality assurance wing? Presumably the business school all these clowns come from is equally tilted in their goals, since I’d imagine “don’t immediately shoot your product in the foot” and “don’t make your product look as undesirable as possible” would rank fairly high on a business 101 class’ Don’t-Fuck-It-up-o-meter. Alongside wisdom like “don’t burn all your money like Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight”.

I feel the early onset Old Man Syndrome setting in again. Last time it was gaming magazines/news, this time it’s gaming events. There’s another one about marketing and gameplay gifs on social media that I think I’ll save for later. It’s a little frustrating that consistently I hit the same issues with the consideration of “it worked so much better before, what the fuck happened?”

Many complain about E3 et al. being just loaded advertising breaks, but the truth is, even in a moneyless society marketing would still be needed to let people know your artwork exists. A marketing campaign doesn’t just exist to sell you on something monetarily, but also timewise. Even if a game was free, the time commitment still means that you’ll filter out a lot of art unless you know it’s worth your time.

It’s a little disappointing that a theoretically better and more accessible system still makes me miss the haphazard cringefest that was E3, but a well oiled marketing machine also completely lacks the humanity that this medium so sorely needs right now. So please, bring it back. E3 needs to exist for this industry’s long term survival.

And also the E3 bingo cards. Those are the most important bit.

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News for Gamers

So the most notable recent gaming news is that there’s going to be a whole lot less gaming news going forward. Which to most of you is probably a massive win. See, IGN announced that they’ve bought roundabout half of the remaining industry that isn’t IGN, and with online news also dying a slow death due to the approaching new wave of journalism called “absolutely nothing”, I can’t imagine IGN and its newly acquired subsidiaries are long for this world.

Not too long ago, I was studying some magazines for my Alan Wake development history categorization project (please don’t ask), and reading the articles in these magazines led me to a startling realisation: Holy shit! This piece of gaming news media doesn’t make me want to kill myself out of second hand embarrassment!

Many of the magazines of yesteryear typically went with the approach of “spend weeks and sometimes months researching the article, and write as concise a section as you can with the contents”. Every magazine contains at least 2 big several-page spreads of some fledgeling investigative journalist talking to a bunch of basement-dwelling nerd developers and explaining their existence to the virginal minds of the general public.

Contrast this to modern journalism which goes something like:

Pick subject

Write title

???

Publish

Using this handy guide, let’s construct an article for, oh I dunno, let’s say Kotaku.

First we pick a subject. Let’s see… a game that’s coming out in the not too distant future…Let’s go within Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble. Now we invent a reason to talk about it. Generally this’d be a twitter post by someone with 2 followers or something. I’ll search for the series and pick the newest tweet.

Perfect. Finally we need an entirely unrelated game series that has way more clout to attach to the title… What else features platforming and a ball form… Oh, wait. I have the perfect candidate! Thus we have our title:

Sonic-like Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble rumoured to have a gay protagonist

What? The contents of the article? Who cares! With the invention of this newfangled concept called “social media”, 90% of the users are content with just whining about the imagined contents of the article based on the title alone. The remaining 10% who did actually click on the article for real can be turned away by just covering the site in popups about newsletters, cookies, login prompts and AI chatbots until  they get tired of clicking the X buttons. This way, we can avoid writing anything in the content field, and leave it entirely filled with lorem ipsum.

Somewhere along the way from the 2000s to now, we essentially dropped 99% of the “media” out of newsmedia. News now is basically a really shit title and nothing more. Back in the day, when newscycles were slower, most articles could feature long interviews with the developers, showing more than just shiny screenshots, but also developer intentions, hopes, backgrounds and more.

Newsmedia is the tongues that connects the audience and the developers in the great french kiss of marketing video games. Marketing departments generally hold up the flashiest part of the game up for people to gawk at, but that also tells the audience very little about the game in the end, other than some sparse gameplay details. It was the job of the journalist to bring that information across to the slightly more perceptive core audiences. Now with the backing of media gone, a very crucial part of the game development process is entirely missing.

It’s easier to appreciate things when they’re gone I suppose. But at the same time, since gaming journalism is slowly dying from strangling itself while also blaming everything around it for that, there is a sizable gap in the market for newer, more visceral newshounds. So who knows, maybe someone of the few people reading my blogs could make the next big internet gaming ‘zine? Because I’m pretty sure anyone here capable of stringing more than two sentences together is a more adept writer than anyone at Kotaku right now.

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Update moment

Hey, we all love lame updates right?

Well, this month ended up being a bit of a mess. A lot of complicated issues happened and the things I wanted to get done in April never got done. Oops. So no blogpost this month. Now I know I said I had something written up last month. That’s still true - in fact, I have about 5 posts in my backlog now, but I can’t post them…

The truth is, I was planning to ditch tumblr this month, because I’m growing tired with having to deal with nonsensical online platforms where the main goal is to duke it out with other people in dominance for attention, like a bunch of people on ladders punching each other to send the others plummeting to the ground in effort to be the one highest up. So I’ve been working on my own site and blog.

That, however, didn’t go according to plan. The site theoretically works, but needs a lot more tweaking before it can go public. And I haven’t had the time to finish it. So, sorry. April sucked. In more ways than one. Here in Finland it was basically the last attempts of winter to claw themselves back from the brink of death.

Anyways, I can’t promise that I’ll have the site up next month either, but I think some bigger events that have been in the works for a while are finally going to pay off soon. Hopefully. I’m a little tired of working endlessly on things that never come out…

Please stay tuned!

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Games Beaten In 2024: Penny’s Big Breakaway

Call me a games journalist, ‘cus I’m giving attention to an indie game made by (some) people I know.

AAA gaming nowadays is a little like being chased by a giant machete-wielding monster clown, but the clown is in too poor health to actually sprint after you, and doesn’t really wield any interesting exclusive machetes, and most of the time can’t be bothered to show up and instead opts to virtually pretend to chase you in a Monster Clown Direct. And never even whips its cock out.

Anyway, in one of those aforementioned Monster Clown Directs, Penny’s Big Breakaway got a release date, which was right then and there. Probably the only 2024 game I was really looking forward to, since it was made by Evening Star, the studio that consists of a good chunk of the Sonic Mania team and a bunch of fans and modders surrounding it, and it was not a monster clown, instead being a cute little B-grade experience. It seemed to get a relatively muted amount of attention over the end of last year, but was slowly building up interest as more and more people learned about it and began to understand who was behind it. And then the game was shadow dropped out of nowhere. Always a great sign, the babies that flush out of uptown drain pipes into the city river are definitely not mistreated.

I got a little worried the game might’ve gotten shafted by the publisher. It doesn’t seem to be getting the greatest care for the marketing, compared to a more involved hype cycle over a month or so after a release date announcement. Hi-Fi Rush got the same treatment and I feel like as a result it didn’t make as many waves as it should’ve. It also really pissed me off since I had about a dozen other things I was working on at the same time, including another FINISHED blogpost that I pushed back indefinitely because I wanted this one to be more timely. Yeah, fuck you video games for breaking my schedule of misery and frustration to be all fun and shit.

So, Penny is a 3D platformer, as seems to be an increasing amount of indie games nowadays. 

The story is quite simple. Penny, in a freak teleporter accident, ends up merging with a 1970s plastic vacuum cleaner and materialises in a place called Vanillatown. She immediately loses her train of thought and ends up applying to a talent contest for no particular reason after also forgetting how queues work. After she fucks up her audition by stripping the nation’s wannabe- benevolent dictator in front of a live audience, she ends up chased out of the auditorium and around the world with no real sense of goal. That’s about it. But it’s a 3D platformer, granddad, 3D platformers are cool and don’t need story and stories are for Star Trek nerds anyway. Let’s get to the gameplay.

The game’s core mechanic is an animate yo-yo Penny just has for no explained reason (remember: story is for lamerz). The yo-yo acts as both an offence method as well as a platforming assistance. You can use the yo-yo to pull on stuff and hang from the air in a rather satisfying manner. Penny herself can only walk, jump and double jump, and together with the yo-yo you have around 6 different moves to execute, which doesn’t sound like much, but ends up coming together fairly well. Penny on foot controls a bit like a maglev brick, being both floaty and heavy, but this really encourages you to stay in the air as much as possible and chaining various moves to rack up combos that boost your points count.

The control scheme is somewhat unique, in that the game emphasises using the right analog stick to aim the yo-yo while attacking or swinging. Thus you’ll have to jump using the shoulder buttons on the controller. The style is rather experimental and reminiscent of Grabbed by the Ghoulies on the original Xbox… which may be an insult now that I think about it. Regardless, the control scheme works surprisingly well when you get used to it. All in all, learning the feel for the game ends up making it incredibly fun to fly through the stages pretending the floor is some sort of molten rock trap for poor people and shouldn’t be touched. It’s satisfying in a way that’s hard to understand through written word, sort of like reading about sex in a middle school biology book.

So it’s really a shame that the game’s buggier than the annual cockroach dune buggy race in Bugscuffle, Tennessee, bugging you because of the noise levels. Penny seems to have the same roughness around the edges as something like the first Ratchet & Jank. It’s disconcertingly easy to go through a wall, so much so that I ended up doing it more times than I can count on my fingers during a single playthrough and died to it twice. Most slopes can end up softlocking you if there’s any kind of object underneath it since you don’t seem to have any kind of control in them so you end up sliding against an errant potted plant or tranquillised squirrel, and there’s a specific kind of rolling tube object that I think is supposed to have you stick to it like the spinning wheels in Sonic CD’s Metallic Madness. I say I think, since standing on them always plays Penny’s “about to slide off” animation, and you get chucked to oblivion about a third of the time when rotating around them.

Additionally, the camera seems to have started some sort of revolution against the tyrannical rule of The Player. Penny’s central design is that the camera is always on a fixed track, which is nifty since most modern platformers have opted for a camera design philosophy called “whuzzat? we were supposed to do something?” where the camera aimlessly hovers around the player like a rubber spider on invisible string and has no designer-specified guiding at all. The kicker comes from the fact that Penny’s camera is under psychotic levels of micromanagement, but also doesn’t always have a clear idea where it should be pointed. So sometimes you get the camera staring at a really well decorated wall and leaving you confused since there’s no clear idea where you should be going next, and sometimes it’s staring at the admittedly really pretty skybox and daydreaming about greek philosophers when you want to look down and see a platform you want to land on. Any backtracking always creates a fun Crash Bandicoot-style “guess where the bottomless pit is that’s right it’s under you right now” challenge, since there’s no programmed zoom out when running towards it and you can’t see where the fuck you’re going.

And these issues frustrate me all the more since I do genuinely like the game. I did almost throw my controller a few times, but despite the annoyance I always kept coming back to the game and ended up finishing it with a smile on my face. The worlds, while being fairly well-trodden themes, still have enough unique character in them through visual design and denizen dialogue so that they don’t end up feeling generic. The bosses have fun designs and the soundtrack’s really good. When the game does work out, it really works out and it’s one of the most fun platformers out there.

So I guess what I’m saying is, maybe wait a month or so for the most egregious issues to be patched out, or just be wary that you may end up being consumed by a really hungry wall at some point. These issues are the kinds of problems that you’d expect from a first time studio making their first big 3D release, and with the heart and fun present in the game I really hope Penny ends up being successful enough for Evening Star to refine their stuff in future sequels or games otherwise.

Ah, but it’s march, which means that the monster clowns are starting to wake up from their Q1 slumber and the really interesting machetes are being sharpened, so by next month I may even have figured out what the fuck I’m on about. Toodles!

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Funny heading to a blogpost on videogames that’s some sort of reference

Look, I already used the ctrl+alt+delete quote in a blogpost title. It’s February 2024, and it’s already a very wild year for gaming. We’ve had more layoffs than with the entirety of 2023, games shown off at events seem to be stagnating, interest in the art is waning. Youtube is filled with “modern gaming sucks” doomer blackpill videos. It’s a miserable time.

Is gaming just over?

Well, no. Of course not. The Sonic franchise has lingered for decades despite consistent failure. Games are more resilient than that.

Humanity’s relation to computing is still pretty fresh, and I’d say that despite the size and scale of a lot of it, we’re still going through major growing pains. Concepts like video games, the internet and special effects are still pretty new, despite being around for twice or thrice as long as most of the people reading this have been alive. Internal combustion engine -powered cars were invented in 1808, made mass produced in the 1910s, and even then it took until the 1950s for them to be common enough for the US government to bother designing cities around them. In the present day, many have come to resent the car-centric design mentality, even though the driving (no pun intended) factor behind them was mainly the same as with technology today: scientific and technological progression is unquestionably good, and therefore new and successful ideas should be pushed and relied upon as hard as possible. What could possibly go wrong?!

Video games are far from the only medium which is seeing similar problems. Movies have suffered greatly from a capeshit infestation, in which the abuse of VFX artists is valued over, you know, basics of good filmmaking, and the general public is clearly sick of it. On the internet, we’ve decided that megastructures like Twitter are better than forms of communication we’re good at, and it’s gone horribly wrong. We’re still learning the “do”s, “don’t”s and “who the fuck thought this was a good idea”s of tech.

Games as an artform are as alive as they ever were, but the sheer scale of the operations has grown to a point where nobody can really understand it. The numbers behind playerbases and the money traffic have so many zeroes that you can’t even fathom the number. Even if I used some metaphorical figure, like 20 000 cars. Shockingly, despite how console sales haven’t really increased in numbers (the top selling console of all time is still the PS2), most of the top-grossing games of all time are relatively recent. This implies that the behaviour of consumers has shifted from purchasing a variety of different kinds of games into purchasing fewer games of fewer different kinds. And I don’t think it’s a case of customers deciding to shift over naturally.

In the past decade or so, the gaming industry has decided sensible experiences are a way of the past, and the future is making games for debt and making back the money with horse armour and other garbage the general public doesn’t really want.

But we’ve seen this shit before. In the 90s, 3D was “the future”, and 2D pixel art or hand-drawn art in general seemed to go the way of the dodo for polygons and ““realism””. About a decade later, 2D art would see a resurgence and in some cases overtake the big lads in lasting impact. In the end, people crave personal stories, varying ideas, and interesting ways to tell them. Not much has changed since ancient Greeks, besides that the medium of storytelling has largely shifted from some guy standing on a stage, trying to explain another world, to electronic devices actually showing us the other worlds.

I think as we play out the Icarus stories in real time, we’ll also learn when boundaries are pushed too far, and the scale of the bullshit simply collapses in on itself. When that happens, the public is forced to step back and reevaluate the ways we thought were the future, and what really is better for all of us.

When a storm flattens a forest of dead, decrepit trees, the sun and rain can now reach the ground and cultivate a new generation of different plant life. Once hidden beneath the dead corpses, now able to grow and bloom in a way the old generation never could. You should just keep doing what you think is right. Now’s the time more than ever to be the backbone of a better industry, for many applications of tech, from games to communication. And it’s better, if the backbone comes from the grassroots, and isn’t defined by the megacorporations. Because those cunts will never learn from their failures.

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In Defence of Gatekeeping

Hey, remember when I said I’d write a story? Uh, oops. Anyway, here’s something that’s in no way extremely inflammatory.

I’ve had discussions with several people in the past few days, and most of them have ended up in a final point that usually goes something like “this is just gatekeeping, and gatekeeping is bad.” Funny that.

Gatekeeping as a concept dates back just about hundred years. The term was initially invented to describe the habits of journalists, where newspapers would filter out some stories from print. In some regards this tied to inherent biases within the organisations - during the red scare in the United States, many stories deemed “too red” were naturally left out of print. This made gatekeeping a rather important concept, since for many people, newspapers were the only source of information outside the immediate surroundings. Some stories not being reported at all end up shaping the worldview of the readership quite drastically.

In the 21st century, especially online, the term has taken up a new meaning in urban circles. I’ll wager a guess and say that the idea came from Reddit some 10 years ago, mostly because a misappropriation of a normally high-concept sociological or otherwise critical term usually comes from Reddit. Online, the term is more of a liberally applied critique of a “no true scotsman” fallacy. The idea was initially mainly levelled at people who define extremely strict rules to what constitutes as a true example of some kind of identity. This is extremely common in hobbyist circles, you’ve all seen it: “A true programmer uses C++,” “A true musician doesn’t use FL Studio,” there’s hundreds of examples of it. It’s a fair backlash.

So now we’re already quite a few steps removed from the original intention. Am I going to argue that gatekeeping is becoming a bludgeoning weapon against any kind of curation or meaning within a circle? Yes. The answer is yes.

Gatekeeping’s application to identity rather than access of information has made it a rather troubling tool for assholes everywhere. Group identity is a rather nebulous concept to begin with, and the past few years’ rapid expansion of what counts as a “community” hasn’t helped at all. The term is rather widely used to browbeat people or groups who try to keep up standards or secrets of some kind.

Ironically, gatekeeping itself is a victim of the process due to its origin; decades of exposure to the term either via literary circles, or more recently, Twitter, has flanderised the concept to a point where it just stands for “you don’t like my idea, therefore you are bad.” You can witness this for yourself on r/gatekeeping, the majority of the sub is rather basic applications of lines being drawn in sand.

Wanting to conserve an identity against a change isn’t always necessarily a bad response. I think a  rather good example is the mid-to-late 2010s, where for a while you couldn’t avoid hearing about a certain citrus-flavoured American gentleman. 4chan’s /v/ mostly turned to discussions of oranges, Ylilauta’s /b/ mostly turned to discussions of oranges, and boy howdy were all subreddits all about discussions of oranges. Especially if the original concept was about something rather benign, like memes or photography.

It's very easy for a community to fall to what I like to call the newcomer dilemma. Opening your gates too much can easily lead to a flood of newcomers to the scene, either overpopulating places that the native members praised for their quietness, or leading to most of the shared knowledge in the scene becoming food for beginners. This can easily cause issues of communication between the veterans, and will sooner or later kill any advancements in the scene. It's a case where a lack of curation leads to stagnation, not the opposite!

Corporations tend to prefer gatekeeping being frowned upon. Any limitations to who a concept could appeal to turns out to be bad for business. Someone doesn’t like <brand>? That’s a lost sale! Better change everything that defines it! If you’ve happened to wonder why the language of marketing with many Disney brands is rather similar to the language pushed forth by many online moralists, it’s because their ideals tend to be the same. The difference is, Disney has a much clearer reason for their goals.

I personally have never felt as lost as I do now, mostly because of the lack of any real defining individual traits in many communities, online or offline. Wanting to create a zone for the discussion of one idea has for a while meant that unscrupulous individuals would eventually attempt to twist the zone to the discussion of another idea.

And I don’t think I’m the only one. In the past few years as we’re advancing into the 2020s, many seem to be tired of the battle of meaning and how much of themselves they should be willing to give up for the acceptance of newcomers. A lack of standards is lethal to counterculture.

So how is gatekeeping done tastefully? Good question. I don’t have an answer for that. I’m fairly sure no-one does. Nothing will stay the same forever, no matter how hard you try to force it to. Even a very closed group, such as a real life friend group of yours, won’t stay the same. People will get new purposes in life, some of them will get married, the discussions and ideas will change. Resisting any and all change eventually just makes you a living fossil. Some scenes and groups will die on their own eventually, some will undergo large changes, some will stay the same and make a comeback. You never really know what the future will bring, but you shouldn't be discouraged from being who you are.

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Lol, internet

The largest imageboard in Finland, Ylilauta and its offshoot Northpole (rip in peace) had a major faux pas this week. Threads older than 2 weeks are now placed behind a paywall. Imagine if Discord set message history behind a Nitro subscription, and you have the gist of it. The latter board was just flatout killed off due to legal issues.

This majorly pissed off the users, and as a result my fringe alt-imageboard (won’t name the one, rules of the internet 1 & 2) got a surge of new users. However, the results weren’t as I feared! While Ylilauta isn’t really representative of smaller corners of the internet like it once used to be and nowadays is closer to a modern social media platform, the users who showed up were still willing to play along the rules of the smaller board, even if they ended up mostly asking stupid questions. Watching the entire thing unfold was quite fun, actually, and really reminded me of the kind of stupid shit I used to do online about 15 years ago.

The noob raid ended up reminding me of how you actually learn to be a fun part of the communities you happen to stumble upon. Observation. Lurking. You learn new things by reading the old users and seeing what this place is just about. It’s an image board, you don’t even have accounts! You can just stick around and watch!

Search engines and the internet didn’t die because of corporate greed and SEO. Well, just because of corporate greed and SEO. The internet died, because we, the users, collectively all jumped to places like Twitter, Tumblr and Discord. Especially Discord. The internet has always been a haven of user-generated stuff (for better or worse…), but sometime in the past 10 or so years we all decided to stop making it available. Twitter is a collection of barely coherent thoughts in posts that can barely encompass a full sentence. Many good posts are spread across dozens of tweets, usually out of which one at most is indexable, but often the entire thread is missing. Tumblr is a blogging site where the users stopped blogging, and the blogs aren’t visible to outsiders because fuck you. Discord is an instant messaging application meant to compete with fucking TeamSpeak that through sheer user laziness and insane overreach managed to overtake forums, and the message history is completely inaccessible unless you have an account and an invitation to the server.

The result is that all of human knowledge is now contained on like 5 sites, most of which are never going to be accessible to outsiders. For the past decade, we have unknowingly waged a war on lurkers, and in the process driven them all into extinction.

The issue is, lurkers are mostly those who aren’t newcomers. They’re the ones who have learned to keep their mouth shut and try finding a solution first and foremost. The questions they do eventually ask are also the ones that are going to be the most specialised, and also useful to other lurkers. They share personal experience and anecdotes, ideas they tried out but didn’t work for their purposes. They share abstract, multilayered concepts that simply aren’t something that can be demonstrated or proven algorithmically.

The sites that exist and rule the landscape today are practically fraud. What they sell is not funded by them, nor is it created by them. They sell the writings, media, humour, anecdotes and other forms of bizarre interactions that we, the consumers create. Without any user activity, these media megastructures would simply shrivel up and die, as there’d be nobody driving eyes onto the site. They don’t really deserve anything besides maybe being paid for the server costs, which still constitute a fraction of a fraction of the total revenue generated.

But nothing prevents you from just leaving. The internet doesn’t suddenly end when you walk out of YouTube or Instagram. Sure, you can’t just upload your data onto The Internet itself, but the way the web was constructed means that you haven’t lost your rights to obtain a small webhost and an address and setting up your own ramshackle site. You’ll just pay in discoverability.

Internet users need to be reminded that the concept of the internet isn’t just a technology that transmits data to a small number of applications, it’s an interconnected series of servers, clients, more servers and more clients. A server can be any computer you can find with a little tweaking, and as long as you have a router and an internet connection, that’s all you need. You can forward the computer’s IP address and make it behave like a website. The internet was created by users, for users, and so far there’s nothing that can take that away from you.

The change isn’t going to manifest itself overnight, and I also wouldn’t recommend jumping out headfirst into the abyss, leaving everything else behind. It’s just good to know the possibilities anyone can have at their fingertips, as I’ve seen more and more people wallow in misery over the state of current and future internet. Maybe if enough people create wacko self-hosted sites as side projects, we may one day not need sites like the one I’m publishing this text on right now. And if you’re you’re interested and are willing to dive through some tech jargon, this talk by Mr. Cory Doctorow was an incredibly fascinating listen, and provides some solutions to fixing the issues from the perspective of a higher-level operation. It still contains some tidbits of info for you, if you’re concerned about how you’ll move your userbase from one platform to another with as little compromise as possible.

Now, I’ve had enough of this wistful nostalgic hopes bullshit. Next time I’ll just write a story.

[catonator]

Addendum: Game Engines

The post about Unity I wrote yesterday was the longest one I’ve published so far, and even then I feel like I left out about a hundred things. One of the most important ones I wanted to talk about was complexity.

When I first moved away from Game Maker in 2018, I really couldn’t imagine actually writing my own games without using a premade engine. I mean, Game Maker is a massive tool that’s been developed for decades, and the source must have thousands of lines of code, right?

Well, yes. But you don’t need to recreate Game Maker. You can make a lot happen with something called MVP; Minimum Viable Product. Let’s look at a practical example.

Super Mario Bros.. Released in 1985, for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Somehow I doubt it ran on Unity.

Objects!

Let’s start with the most important part: the stuff that moves around and does things.

Now, I’ve looked at SMB1’s engine code, and it actually kind of sucks, so I’ll instead focus on a high-level version of a system that matches what SMB1 has, but doesn’t recreate it one to one. Remember, I want to encourage you to get something made yourself, in your own chosen language and framework, instead of getting stuck looking at hex and memory address behaviour.

We can define an object as something that’s interactable, and can change its state. This locks out stuff like the background bushes, clouds, mountains and also the ground (since it remains constant). However, this means that something like brick blocks and question mark blocks are objects.

In its simplest form, an object base would have a few parameters that every object in the game have: X and Y coordinates, current object state, and whether the object is active or not.

Most of the objects in SMB1 are either very boxy or actually just boxes, so for collision we’ll simply use an axis-aligned bounding box.

How you make the object do, you know, object things, probably depends on what language you’re using. In C I’d use some sort of overcomplicated function pointer array to point to object state functions. In more modern (and reasonable) languages like C#, Java and even C++ you’d probably just inherit the class and make the language figure out what to do with the object.

As for actually managing the objects, well that’s quite simple. The camera in SMB1 moves to the right, and never backtracks, so in essence you just have to worry about objects that appear from the right side of the screen. If you spawn objects only as they’d appear on the screen, and despawn them as soon as they disappear off the left side of the screen, you can easily get away with just a fixed-size array of say, 32 indices, and a for loop to update the active objects.

My very first game was quite literally just this. It’s as basic as it gets, and it totally works!

Level creation!

Generally speaking, one of the most frustrating parts in game development are level creation tools. Without a level, you don’t really have a game, and if your tools suck ass and level creation is a pain, your game won’t turn out so good. As of writing this, I’ve spent about 3 months writing a pretty comprehensive level editor for Radium. However, your first game (super mario) won’t be as complicated. We’ll use something tangible as an example again!

Let’s look at world 1-4, the first Bowser castle. At first glance it looks rather complicated, there’s floor, a ceiling, both change height at several points, there’s pits, all sorts of traps. It looks like a cohesive place.

But remember, video games are all smoke and mirrors. Ultimately all of this is just numbers in memory.

With that in mind, if you stare at the stage for a while, you might start noticing some strange details. Ignoring all enemies and simply looking at the ground, you might notice that the level never features any overlapping geometry. Bricks and question mark blocks may occasionally form platforms, but as far as the ground and ceiling goes, there are never any overhangs, tunnels, multi-layered passthroughs… it’s simply all solid blocks.

SMB1 constructs its worlds by defining a floor and ceiling height. The level itself is constructed by placing markers along the stage that change the floor and ceiling height from that point onward. If the floor is 0 grid units high, it’s a bottomless pit. Therefore, if you simply wanted to make a clone of the world generator and Mario’s player controller, the collision detection would at its simplest be whether or not Mario’s feet are below the ground level. For walls, you can scan the stage forward by Mario’s width and see if the ground level changes at all. If it does, you can check if it’s again higher than Mario’s feet level.

Thus, we have a level creation toolset that doesn’t even require tiles. It might not be suitable for a WYSIWYG approach to level design (for that I’d recommend Tiled or similar), but for a starting position you can quite literally just hardcode a list of ceiling/floor height change instructions separated by N amounts of tiles. Level design without an editor.

Conclusion

That’s not all I could talk about, but I already feel like this is a lot to swallow. Stuff like sprite batching, tile rendering, texture atlases etc. are all topics you'll probably encounter sooner or later. I'd really love to go on about stuff like this, but I'm trying to avoid writing a book. My hopes with this post are to showcase that making games outside of the carefully curated toolsets of modern engines isn’t always as difficult as you’d imagine. The likes of Unity and Unreal have made us believe that game engines are gigantic, unscalable mountains of code. In truth, a game engine is simply something that runs a game.

When I started my engine journey in 2018, I hadn't really realized this. I jumped to MonoGame because I thought custom engines were rad, but I didn’t really know how to actually make an engine, let along a game in one. It didn’t take long to figure just how many corners you can cut to just make something work in the most basic of senses. For every challenge, you have infinite solutions, far beyond the templatized ones provided to you by online Unity tutorials.

I made the source code for my first ever custom game open when I finished the game. It was written in about 2 weeks, and during the production I learned MonoGame, C# and engine design philosophies, all for the first time in my life. You can take a gander at it here and witness it in all its hacky glory. Despite that, it’s a game that you can play.

I’ve also opened up the questions page on my Tumblr, so maybe I can assist with some issues you may have when starting out. I hope I’ve at least inspired you to give a shot for outside the box thinking. The game you want to make may be a lot simpler than you initially imagined.

Happy carefree programming!

[catonator]

You hear about video game development?

Well. I wouldn't say I expected such a catastrophic implosion from Unity.

Now, I can't say that I didn't laugh at the situation. It's a hilariously terrible case of bad management coming up with bad ideas in desperation. But it's also a somewhat scary indication of the sorry state of the industry.

Unity controls about 40% of the engine marketshare (according to a linkedin post I found anyway). Unity dominates the engine scene by a large margin, followed by Unreal at around 30% and Cryengine by around 5%. Unity forms such a large part of the entire game development industry, that it's difficult to really even understand just how much they control the concept of games as a whole!

Most people are jumping to some paid alternatives, like the aforementioned Unreal and, to a lesser extent, Game Maker, but my suggestion is this: don't!

Within the last decade, all-encompassing closed super game engines have become less of a side venture and more of an expectation. Back in the 2000s, there were a few engines like this, mostly amateur ones. Game engines were less creation stations and more of a loose collection of middleware and tools. Purchasing the rights to the engine meant that you also got the responsibility of also tying the engine into something resembling a game yourself. I feel like this art has been lost.

Game engines nowadays are more of a purchase of a passing right to use and incredibly specific, closed set of tools. You don't get to define the tools, and you don't get to really own the tools. It's yet another example of the tradition of the games industry fucking over the customers, and the customers just going with it. Because of this, while Unreal got some free dunks on Twitter for this, I can assure you Epic is planning something equally terrible as Unity's PR faux pas, and it'll come into to play in about 3 years when everyone's just accepted that Unity sometimes financially screws you over.

But, game developers are indeed developers. They know software, and they can learn to make new software.

If you're a game dev and still reading this, I'd recommend taking a peek beyond the curtains of corporate cockfighting, into the realm of DIY game engines. It's a… somewhat janky world full of strange characters with unusual ideas on how much time it's acceptable to spend not working on a game, but it's also a place where you're not being sat on by fatcats.

Just as game engines have progressed in the past 20 years, so have libraries, middleware and resources for independents. Making your own engine isn't just picking up ANSI C and toiling for a year in software rendering hell. Open tools like Pygame, Monogame, LÖVE and Cocos2D (among many, many others) are far beyond just simple rendering libraries and border on being game engines sometimes. The difference is, these tools are open source, and they do not restrict you with what you can do with them.

There are several games you may have played made using these frameworks. Streets of Rage 4 (MonoGame), Celeste (MonoGame), Fez (XNA, aka. MonoGame), Miitomo (Cocos2D), Geometry Dash (Cocos2D)… I got tired of looking up more. There are a lot of games.

The future which I hope to see for game developers is one where you have a large assortment of simple tools you can pick. Level editors, asset converters, entity systems, all small chunks of a game engine you could drop into your own project to slowly build up your own collection of workflows to make games your own way, completely independent of any larger forces on the market.

The support for these frameworks is still somewhat barren compared to Unity, but I believe, that if more people jump to alternatives like this, more tools, tutorials and middleware built for them would start showing up. This is how Unity also got its start, about 15 years ago. You also really don't need all the power in the world to make your simple 2D Megaman clones. The fog created by the monolithic engines we have now have obscured just how simple the building blocks for your favourite games can really be.

It just takes some bravery and willingness to learn a new way to approach making games, but I think the outcome is worth it, even just for you.

[catonator]

Space Opera GX and the art of watching Gamescom from The Shadows

Ahaha. Monthly blog. Yeah.

So this past month has been a bit of a recovery period. I put myself through the wringer during summer while working 40 hours a week, doing college stuff and also trying to push projects forward. Needless to say, it didn't go so well.

So, what would make for a better way to recover from burnout that a little crunching! Yay!!

Opera GX wanted to make an arcade cabinet for their Gamescom 2023 booth. Arcades need games, so our little team ended up being picked as the people to work on the game, due to our work previously on Operius and (Mini) Idle Aura. This time they wanted a really hard shmup, but a more traditional one, unlike Operius from before. We only had about a month to work on it due to unrelated previous agreements and Idle Aura.

That game ended up being Space Opera GX. You can play it at Gamescom! Like, right now!! Maybe I'll end up elaborating on the production itself a little later when I have... less prickly opinions about it. The game turned out pretty well regardless of any background shuffles that happened during its making.

So instead I want to talk about how surreal this entire experience is. I've grown up surrounded by E3 hype. I followed the show from 2006 to its death in 2021, but since I live in Finland, it hasn't exactly been realistic to expect to be able to attend the LA convention before (and it probably won't happen now... good night sweet prince). I'm very used to seeing games demoed in the form of photos and videos of booths with people waiting to play the games shown off there.

Gamescom seems to be continuing this tradition, moreso than E3 even, since Gamescom doesn't seem very focused on the conferences taking place at the show floor. So I've been seeing a lot of footage of people standing in rows to play a game at-- hey wait a minute.

That's my game. I worked on that. People are waiting to play it. That's nuts. It's extremely phantasmagorical to witness your own work being demoed and tried at the show and only seeing a sort of fly-on-the-wall perspective to the whole shebang. Probably could never have imagined this situation while I was 12 and using forums online to talk about images exactly like this one.

Hoping to make it to Gamescom myself next year, this time with a game of our own design, from Distant Illusions!

[catonator]

Games I beat in 2023: Toree 3D & Toree 2

I was debating myself on whether or not I should even write about these games. They're barely games, each game is more like a demo without a full release available. 8 stages, the game it total takes like 20 minutes to finish.

The reason why I'm talking about both simultaneously is that they're basically the same game. Toree 3D was made for the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc 2021 jam in April 2021. Toree 2 was released in September of the same year. Both are games with the exact same controls, menus and structure. Toree 2 doesn't reuse the level themes from the first one and adds a final boss, but the games are so short and only have 5 level themes each so that it hardly matters.

Not that either game is bad. Aside from a few poor decisions (a run button and camera controls) they're perfectly solid platformers. They just don't have much more going on than that.

Now, if you don't want to be spoiled of Toree fucking 3D, then stop reading here.

I said that Toree The ThirdD, esq. was released as a part of a haunted demo disc jam. The game has the kinda clichéd "cutesy game hides a dark secret" twist... or at least something reminiscent of it? It's honestly difficult to tell, since the game barely does anything with it. You get a weird glitchdemon appearing in the early stages, then in one late stage you get a glitchdemon chasing you, and finally at the end you have a, uh, nothing. There's no final fight. There's a little platforming section in the void while the glitchdemon floats in a t-pose, but that's it.

It feels strange, like neither the "twist" or the tease with the glitchdemon go anywhere. There's no dialogue or anything. It's so strange. Toree 2 had even less going on since while there is a final boss, the big bad doesn't appear at any point during the game otherwise. Just makes you leave the game feeling kind of empty. Nothing much was achieved here, which is a little sad considering that the dev still made a decent game.

The last thing is that I found out there was a third game that I accidentally learned about while looking for the jam the original game was made for. Apparently the level designer got bored during the pre-production for Toree 2 and made a level pack with the assets of the first one called Jumbled Jam. I must ask, HOW?! Toree 2 was made in 4 months! Did that game even have a pre-production phase???? Complete insanity. Pre-production to DI's first game has taken 8 months so far with all the work on Radium. This really makes me feel a bit insecure...

[catonator]

Games I beat in 2023: Return of the Obra Dinn

So last week I finally played Return of the Obra Dinn. It's a wonderful collection of wacky 1800s English accents that punctuate a set of boring paperwork. Kinda like working as an amateur actor.

I was not really sure how much I'd end up liking Obra Dinn coming into it, and coming out of it I'm not really sure how much I actually liked it. But during everything between those two extremes I was completely sucked into the game like a pie around your mom. Lucas Pope really has somehow managed to turn cold bureucratic processes into exciting adventures, which is a funny contrast to Jonathan Blow, whose games are ostensibly grand adventures but are actually about as fun as filling out forms at the DMV.

To me, a sign of a great game is when I compeletely lose track of time and end up playing for 3+ hours in one sitting. Obra Dinn managed just that, and it's genuinely just because the game doesn't handhold you at all and lets you do all the thinking. Oh and because it's hard to find a cutoff point thanks to the terrible pacing, but I'll get to that later. The game really doesn't hold your hand when it comes to the meat of the game, which is just connecting the corpses you find to the names in the manifest. You'll basically never hear a name mentioned by anyone, and barely even ranks, so putting two and two together really does take some brainwork. Sometimes you don't even get a clear idea of what happened to someone! It makes every successfully solved name and fate only that much more exhilerating, since it doesn't feel it was an inevitability.

So if you haven't played the game yet, I'd recommend leaving now, cuz I'll take a cruise right to spoilertown (home of street racing enthusiasts) to bitch and moan about shit I didn't like.

For a detective game, the narrative is kinda flimsy. A part of it is that unlike a typical example like, say, Ace Attorney, the game's puzzles are less focused around figuring out a complex set of events and motives and more of a series of unfortunate events. That kind of means that game lacks an overarcing mystery that'd really drive the players to explore all the ship's secrets. There's a penultimate chapter behind a closed door that you can only unlock after figuring out every other fate in the game. You'd expect it to have some grand twist about the nature of the incident, but going into it I didn't really have any questions, and the chapter didn't really have any answers either, like an argument with your girlfriend.

I also mentioned the pacing, and the game's really strangely frontloaded. Getting through all the scenes of carnage on the boat takes a little over 3 hours, and there's barely any stopping points inbetween. Most of the deaths don't leave bodies, and instead you have to find a new death through a vision of another. Once you've gone through the grim inception, you're guaranteed to have most of the fates still unsolved, so the meat of the game is actually wandering around the boat, poking roadkill with a stick for a second time to see if you can squeeze out any more droplets of info or other strange substances out of the scenes you've already seen. This and the aforementioned lack of payoff really makes for a game that's fun to play, but disappointing to beat, like a competitive game against your girlfriend. It could've benefited from some more pacing and a better throughline, with a more linear division to chapters, for example.

But despite that, I still keep thinking about the game during my off hours, and that's just thanks to how fun it is to solve the names and fates inside the game. So with the sale still ongoing, you can pick it up for cheap and beat it with a smile on your face. Like your girlfriend.

[catonator]

Musing about media (also of the social kind)

Well then.

I'm back here, many, many years after I initially left to pursue greener pastures. Ironically a few years later tumblr itself became one, but I digress. I've decided to try to keep a (at least) monthly blog to force myself to write a little more. I don't have a plan, or really any idea about what I want to write about yet, but many things in life are little like being a forgetful skydiving tailor; jumping first, and then having to build the parachute on the way down.

So firstly I wanted to expand on something I wrote about a week back on Twitter. The new frontiers in social media. It seems like the 2010s are coming to a close, with many of the foundations of that decade suffering some shakedowns and shuffles.

The new 10's were a strange decade, and obviously we're not really far removed enough to say what did and didn't make the decade what it was, but I have a few pointers. I'd say there's at least one notable characterization: the celebration of corporatization.

Fittingly for tumblr, I'd say the decade really got its flame from the geek culture early on in the decade on this very platform. From my formative years here, I pretty strongly remember the fandoms, and especially the mixed media fandoms like "superwholock". Obviously big balls of nonsense fangirling isn't exactly anything new but the thing I remember distinctly is mainly how different the approach to media appreciation was, it was little less "hey I like this and I was inspired by it to do my own thing" and more just "I FUCKING LOVE BEING A FAN OF INSERT THING HERE BOY I WILL CONSTRUCT MY ENTIRE PERSONA AROUND BEING A FAN". A little self-indulgent, to be blunt.

You can probably pretty easily draw a feeble and tortured mental line from that to the later big IP fests later on, where big companies would just grab metaphorical action figures out of their massive vaultlike toy chests and mash them together, for massive profits!

So uh, what the fuck am I on about and how does this relate to social media? Well, I think the early tumblr years ended up colouring the internet far more than you'd expect. After most of the users jumped over to the bigger sandboxes like Twitter later in the decade, I think the internet in general started to transform a little, away from the small communities of fun people to users just living in their comfort zone.

I'm a little worried about the future of the internet, but also hopeful. I think the one big thing of the 2010s we should leave behind is living in some nebulous cloud of likeminded stuff masquerading as a community and instead learn to appreciate the smaller groups of people around you, for what they are. It's what I truly hope to see out of the new frontiers.

[catonator]

my hand has been forced; I am back on tumblr after 8 years