schirdotblog

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stop putting stem and arts majors against each other!! they are partners and they are in love!!

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a couple of neat experimental games

Hey there, let's talk about some neat games on the more experimental edge of game development.

ReYal ReYal is one of the more mechanically experimental games I'll be talking about. The controls are simple. The controls are left/right/up/down/select. Maneuver your character around a small room to press buttons. The buttons correspond to the same left/right/up/down/select commands to control the character in the next room. This runs about five layers deep. Once you've maneuvered the first character into making the second character move the third character move the fourth character into moving the fifth character, you have to make the fourth character make the fifth character pick up a key and unlock a door and walk out of the room. Escaping the fifth room makes a key appear in the fourth room and so on. There have been game-within-a-game games before, but this is a pretty pure study of the concept and is also accessible enough to be able to be finished before the idea wears out its welcome. A Broken City A Broken City is a very small exploration game. In it, you wander around a city that's empty save for a couple of ruins and a flying train. This sort of environment would be really easy to make a kind of vaguely unnerving sort of mood out of (as is the case in the next game I’ll talk about), but the total emptiness of the city accompanied by Satie's Gymnopédie number 1 echoing in the background ends up creating a more meditative experience. The relative smallness of the area plays to the game's strengths. The game evokes the feeling of wandering through the familiar part of your city as well as the block just outside of your usual route. The familiar is always in view, but just outside your usual area are fantastic and fascinating landmarks and sculptures. It captures the novelty of seeing what lies just outside of your usual paths while still keeping an anchor to the familiar. If you're ever lost in A Broken City, you can always look around to see the trains which inevitably lead back to the station. At the game design level this is a really interesting way of leading the player around while still letting them do what they will. Back on the point about wandering around the familiar part of a city, there's always an element of unease to walking around a city, even if there aren't any real threats. The game's emphasis of reds in its color palette captures this pretty well. If I were to dig into why I, personally feel an amount of unease while walking through a city I'd probably find some interesting assumptions about class and some imitated social behaviours picked up from marginalized people who have more reason to be uneasy while walking the streets.

Anyway, A Broken City is really neat and worth checking out. Oneiric Gardens Oneiric Gardens is another exploration game. Oneiric Gardens, as the author mentions in the game’s description, appears to be an attempt to cultivate a space of half-remembered dreams. Islands of houses reached by boat, Satan's Blockbuster, blocks that make weird noises when you ram into them, the tendency of dreams to devolve into strange hieroglyphs when the brain attempts to create text while dreaming, that sort of stuff. The spaces are interesting, but unfortunately I haven't read enough of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams to properly analyze what a block that says "bloop bloop" when you push it means about the psychosexual urges of the individual's subconscious. Cultivating and tending to these dream gardens seems to be the author, Lilith Zone's M.O as their other works are similarly dreamlike in nature. Their other games seem to increasingly focus on creating floaty dreamlike spaces and it’ll be interesting to see where their future projects go.

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Here's what I've learned from making games by myself for a little bit over a year now

Here’s what I’ve learned from making games by myself for a little bit over a year now

In December of 2017, I decided to get off my ass and actually start trying to make games. I worked on an RPG Maker game for about a month, and then burned out for the next four. I got back on the gamedev horse at the start of May 2018 while I was trying out speedrunning and seeing what I thought of that. I made a small level for one of the games I was runningto play around with one of the…

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The best games I played in 2018

That's what these lists really are, right? Just a list of the best things you played in a year.

I've been keeping track of what I've been playing, and it looks like I played somewhere in the vicinity of 215 games in 2018. I didn't finish most of the games I played, for obvious reasons, but I want to go over some of the better ones I played last year.

I think crowning any one game as being the best of the year is kind of dumb, and limiting it to just 10 means ignoring a lot of stuff that was equally good. I’m just going to talk about a bunch of games I liked in no particular order, and I hope that’s alright.

WHOLEHEARTED RECOMMENDATIONS

WEST OF LOATHING

Two years running now, West of Loathing remains one of the best games out there. It's the king of comedy in games. The jokes are masterfully crafted and there's more options to approach situations than just about anything else on the market that's even slightly worth checking out. I mean, they're so committed to the jokes that they're selling the game for $11.00 instead of $10.99 just because of a running gag (11 dollars? That's absurd. It's not even funny!).

I wish I had more to say about West of Loathing since it's the game I spent the second-most time on in 2018, but it's the sort of comedy where the jokes rely on the particulars of the phrasing and it sounds lame if you describe the jokes in any way other than the way they're told in the game. It's very experiential.

I'm looking forward to the West of Loathing DLC that should be coming out relatively soon. I think that Jick said that that's mostly finished on the most recent Podcast of Loathing.

Go play West of Loathing if you haven't already. It's quite possibly my favorite game of 2017 and 2018.

EVERBLUE 2

I really wish Everblue would get a remaster or a rerelease. It's so good. I mean, it's rough around the edges, but it's a really solid 'chill out and explore' sort of game. I think that the games press of today is a bit less stupid than the games press of 2002, and gamers today would have an easier time understanding what Everblue's trying to do.

Everblue 2 is a diving game where you hunt ruins for treasure, take pictures of fish, and help out villagers in a small town while competing against a big diving organization. If the game were made today by different people, there'd probably be a lot more cinematography and/or visual novel-esque cutaways. There's not, and a bit more art and making the characters bigger on screen probably would've helped sell the story bits and gotten people to feel more emotional than the relatively small characters and understated text boxes.

But, as it is, I think that lack of cinematography and overdramatization helps to give the game a really understated aesthetic. It's like the game's saying "look, just go diving and appreciate the ocean. Human drama's relatively small in the grand scheme of things, and what really matters is finding something you love and pursuing it aggressively." I mean, it feels a little bit off to navigate through the town. The town's done in a relatively static point-and-click sort of style. Moving a cursor around with an analogue stick feels a little bit off and makes me wish I was back in the diving section. And that's the point. The ocean is vast and huge and wonderful, in the game's eyes, and if you're playing as a diver then you'd want to just get back in the ocean ASAP. All the characters are small on the screen to help communicate how small and less-than-relevant all the drama is to the main character. Everyone else in the scene is going off about how "oh no, the evil corporation bribed one of the Amigos to get ahead of you in finding the treasure" but there's no cinematography to any of it so the feeling you get is just like "Yeah, but they suck at diving and I'm obviously going to get there before they do." You'll feel that way because it's a video game, but since the character's a preternaturally gifted diver, I'd believe that the character feels that way as well, even though they don't talk much.

Everblue 2 was surprisingly good, and I really enjoyed my time with it.

TETRIS EFFECT

Apparently there are people writing off Tetris Effect because it's Tetris. That's really weird to me because Tetris Effect is really good Tetris. I mean, I played a few different versions of Tetris in 2018 and Tetris Effect is by far the standout among them. If there's ever been a case for the value of sound engineers being closely involved with the design process, it's probably Tetris Effect. The subtle animation touches, the dynamic aleatoric music, the particle effects that are overblown but not in the mobile game way -- all of it mixes together to create one of the best versions of Tetris out there.

SEGA AGES: PHANTASY STAR

There's something about Phantasy Star that gets me. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic because Phantasy Star was one of the first RPGs I ever tried, but I feel like there's something that Phantasy Star 1 has that no other RPG I've ever played has ever quite captured. Maybe it's the sci-fi setting. Maybe it's the way that the game moves from top-down overworld movement into first-person dungeon-crawling. Maybe it's just that I really, really like the melody playing on the title screen. Maybe it's the fact that the game is fairly serious for an anime game, with the main character being a noble driven by revenge instead of a high school student being driven by the will of the plot.

Phantasy Star feels like a traditional sort of pulpy sci-fi adventure novel, and I think that's what really strikes me about it. RPGs don't really ever try to tell a straight-laced traditional sci-fi adventure, especially turn-based JRPGs. They didn't back then and still don't now. I mean, just trying to think of other RPGs that do the traditional sci-fi thing -- spaceships, interstellar travel, laser guns, robots -- off-hand, I can think of KOTOR, Mass Effect, Cosmic Star Heroine, Star Ocean, Ar Nosurge uh, maybe System Shock? A Blurred Line? Trials in Tainted Space? It's kind of slim pickings. And that's weird, isn't it? I mean, if we're trying to think of generic medieval fantasy titles, we can go and list off Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Dragon's Dogma, Ni no Kuni, Kingdoms of Amalur, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Age of Decadence, Pillars of Eternity, The Witcher, and so on before needing to reach into the bottom of the barrel for RPG Maker games and porn. It's like everyone writing sci-fi just kind of went "spaceships are lame, let's go do Shadowrun instead", and that's a shame because there's so much room to explore when you have literally the whole universe to work off of.

Genre trappings aside, I think the way that Phantasy Star transitions between top-down and first-person is really interesting at a gameplay level. Top-down exploration, at least at the time, would've evoked lighthearted romps like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, while the first-person dungeon-crawling would've made people feel a bit uncomfortable, since it's so claustrophobic and disorienting, evoking memories of more hardcore games like Wizardry, where traps were commonplace and the difficulty was insane. The contrast between the lighthearted and the deathly serious still comes through, even as this particular rerelease has gone and added automatic mapping and an easy mode that rebalances the game to be more accessible to modern design sensibilities. I could go and be all snide about the easy mode, but the whinging about easy modes is tiresome and the dick-waving around hard modes and difficulty and authenticity in games is dumb. The easy mode cuts out a lot of the grindy bullshit and makes it so that you can finish the game in a reasonable amount of time. It might be a little bit against the original spirit of the design, but it makes the game more enjoyable, and that's an acceptable tradeoff.

I really wish that Phantasy Star were its own genre of games, with new people experimenting with the mechanics every couple of years. Like, when you remember that the only other games that are structured in the same way as Phantasy Star are the NES and SNES Megaten games, right down to being able to talk with the monsters and having a first-person view of the item shopkeeper, you can start to see the edges of one of the most fascinating genres that games never explored. Top-down overworld into first-person dungeon-crawler turn-based RPGs with conversation mechanics has so much room to explore, and it's just intrinsically really gritty and cool. I wish more people would explore it. ... Goddammit, I'm going to have to make it myself, aren't I? I guess I'll go bash my head against that later.

Anyway, Phantasy Star is really great, and honestly one-of-a-kind. The spark of creativity that led to the first Phantasy Star game shines bright, even as the series has fallen off the map.

OCCUPY WHITE WALLS

Occupy White Walls is one of the most distilled social games I've ever run across. The goal of the game is to build an art gallery. Put up a couple of walls, go buy some classical art from the art that's loaded into the game's database, place it on the walls, open your art gallery, and wait to buy more art. The only things to do while you're waiting to get more money to expand your gallery and get more art are fussing around with the art placement, talking to people in the chatroom, and visiting other people's galleries. The fact that there's not some monetization scheme to speed up the timers makes me think that the point of the game is honestly and sincerely to get more people to appreciate fine art. The people in the chatroom are pretty reasonable, as online chatrooms go. Everyone has their own style of organizing their galleries, and their own taste in art. That's interesting to see, and it's honestly just a nice little game.

The game's in Early Access, so this is all subject to change. The game might add microtransactions or ads in a later update, and if they do then just ignore everything I've said.

SLAP CITY

I've been a big fan of Ludosity for a good few years now, and a fan of their cofounder Daniel Remar for even longer. The guys at Ludosity have been improving at making games for a while, -- I think Ittle Dew was the turning point where their output started becoming pretty consistently good -- and Slap City is the point where people have finally started to take notice.

Slap City is a platform fighter in the mold of Super Smash Brothers. Where other games in the genre tried to focus on elements like 'big franchise characters' (Playstation All Stars) or 'the technical fighting of Melee' (Rivals of Aether, Icons: Combat Arena), Slap City focuses on the silly party aspect of Smash, and the part where characters who normally don't fight are given a bigger moveset to fight with everyone else. Slap City captures the essence of what makes platform fighters fun, adds its own twists, and has clearly seen a lot of success because of it. I'm very happy that Ludosity's finally getting the credit and acclaim that they've deserved for years.

VALKYRIA CHRONICLES 4

Valkyria Chronicles 4 is, at present, the best game in the Valkyria series. I was really hesitant to buy this one after the absolute disaster that was Valkyria Revolution, but was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was it not a dumpster fire, it was actually pretty good!

Valkyria Chronicles 4 doesn't do anything especially grand by the standards of the series, but it's refined a lot of the rougher parts of VC1 and goes through a lot of the same ideas. Essentially, it's just Valkyria Chronicles 1 again, but way more polished at the gameplay level and with different characters at a different place at a different point in time. Frankly, that's what the series needed, and I'm going to be really interested to see where they go with Valkyria Chronicles 5. VC4 establishes Valkyria Chronicles as an anthology series, has really started polishing the core mechanics, and the designers are getting better at crafting levels with these systems. If Valkyria Chronicles 5 continues along this path and the designers are given more creative leeway to explore war from a different part of the army, we'll have a genuine classic on our hands.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 wipes the slate clean for the series, but does so in the way that soft reboots ought to. That is, it panders to the existing fans by sticking to the core ideas that made the original good and polishing them. It establishes its own identity, and is worthwhile in its own right, and doesn't lean on the original for a cheap sell. It's a really good game, though they need to distill the experience a bit further for it to be a truly great game.

SUPER CLOUDBUILT

I don't have that much to say about Super Cloudbuilt, but it's still the best 3D platformer out there if you can get past the initial learning curve and avoid the Defiance levels like the plague. I think the designers have learned from some of the weaker parts of their design and I'm really looking forward to seeing what Coilworks does with Sky Tracers. Guys, please buy Sky Tracers when it's released. The guys at Coilworks are getting really good at making 3D platformers but nobody's buying their games. Please buy their games so that they can keep making the best 3D parkour-platformers out there.

GRADIENT ADDICTION I don't know what primordial creative ooze this game came out of, but it’s absolutely delightful. There's a sheer joy of creation underpinning this game that's really hard to dislike.

GLOGWILLETTE Everything I said about Gradient Addiction applies here.

VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE: BLOODLINES Everyone was comparing Vampyr to Bloodlines and it's really difficult to see why they were doing that. I mean, yeah they're both vampire games but Bloodlines is really good and Vampyr is really bad.

Bloodlines is a game that's edgy in the sense that the word was used back around the time of its release. It's incisive. It's biting. It's cutting. They doubled down on the mid-2000s goth aesthetic, and it permeates this game. That's good, because the goth aesthetic absolutely rules.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines has a lot of charm to it. The writing's excellent and the gameplay feels pretty good. It's one of those classics that everyone's heard about, so I'll spare you any more words about it.

Ni no Kuni 2 The United States gets nuked and the President is transported to a fantasy world where a young king is about to get overthrown. He caps a few fantasy assassins with his pistol and decides to help the young king conquer the world.

Ni no Kuni 2 is absolutely delightful, go play it.

LESS WHOLEHEARTED RECOMMENDATIONS, BUT STILL REALLY NEAT

XENOBLADE 2: TORNA THE GOLDEN COUNTRY This is going to be the cult classic of the Xenoblade series, I can feel it in my bones. I didn't play much of Torna because I was burnt out on Xenoblade 2's systems after playing 110 hours of Xenoblade 2 and seeing the writing just getting stupider and stupider and the game not ending.

Torna the Golden Country is a prequel to Xenoblade 2. From what little of it I've seen in ten hours, it looks to be focused on all the most interesting characters of Xenoblade 2 at a more interesting point in the game's history. It's not really my thing right now, but I feel like I'm seeing a lot of the elements that people who are a bit more forgiving in their entertainment consumption than I am tend to really love. There's something here, but it's buried. The quality of writing seems much higher than in Xenoblade 2 and we've got a better protagonist than Rex in Laura and the character designs are much more grounded than the main game, and everyone's got clear motivations. These are the sorts of things you see in cult classics.

It's probably relevant to note that, while Torna the Golden Country is described as an expansion pack, it is standalone. You do not need to own Xenoblade 2 to play Torna the Golden Country. I bring this up because the marketing was really unclear on this.

I should really play more of this one.

CROSS CODE It's absolutely delightful, but I don't have much else to say about it. Starts dragging around the 14 hour mark.

YAKUZA (6, Kiwami, Kiwami 2) The Yakuza games are genuinely pretty great, but none of the ones that came out in 2018 really hit home for me. I'd recommend them to people in a heartbeat if they've never tried 'em before, but I don't have anything much to say about the ones that came out this year.

LABYRINTH OF REFRAIN: COVEN OF DUSK NIS put the cool bits of Hundred Knight's aesthetic into a game that doesn't suck ass.

MARY SKELTER: NIGHTMARES It's been like 8 months since I've played this and I don't remember much but I remember that the art style's neat and that it's one of Compile Heart's better dungeon crawlers. Need to get back around to this one.

GO VACATION An absolutely delightful family party game. The minigames are pretty decent and all the different vehicles makes traveling around the resorts reasonably interesting. I get strong MySims vibes off of this, and the MySims games were great.

There's something delightfully video-gamey about the way that you can initiate a cutscene with an NPC by pressing the A button while your car's hurtling towards them at 60 miles an hour.

B+, would recommend.

ALL OF THE KATAMARI GAMES We heart Katamari.

GAMES THAT EVERYONE ELSE REALLY LIKES THAT NEED TO BE ADDRESSED OUT OF OBLIGATION BECAUSE OF THEIR UBIQUITY

CELESTE Celeste is a neat little platformer that's kind of hollow and empty. It's technically competent and fun enough, but kinda bland. It's easy to recommend, but hard to find anything much to say about it. It's alright, but I don't really understand why it won the indie game lottery this year.

ASSASSIN'S CREED ODYSSEY god I just don't care about assassin's creed

RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 I haven't liked any of the other Rockstar games I've played and see no reason to play this one. Looking forward to the games industry unionizing so that Rockstar and other major studios stop exploiting their employees.

INTO THE BREACH I'm not into roguelites and this one hasn't changed my mind.

HOLLOW KNIGHT Hollow Knight's got a really neat art style and feels pretty good to play, but the Metroid and Souls styles are getting extremely tiresome.

THE MISSING: J.J. MACFIELD AND THE ISLAND OF DREAMS Didn't quite grab me.

VAMPYR Sucks! har har i did a pun

THE MESSENGER I mean yeah it's a ninja platformer. Seems competent enough, plays fine, has decent melodies.

BLOODSTAINED: CURSE OF THE MOON It's neat, but didn't quite grab me.

GOD OF WAR (2018) I don't want to play God of War.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN I'm burned out on superheroes.

SUPER SMASH BROS ULTIMATE It's fine, and I like it more than Smash 4, but it's missing the creative excitement of Brawl and 64 and Melee.

MONSTER HUNTER WORLD I played it to the start of the high ranks and I still don't get it. It’s fine.

SOUTH PARK: THE FRACTURED BUT WHOLE It's competently made and probably worth a look, but kind of a step down from Stick of Truth.

SUBNAUTICA Really good, but I didn't see much reason to continue after I'd gotten the big submarine. Just kind of fell off of it.

RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN Haven't gotten around to it yet.

OCTOPATH TRAVELER it's a really bland jrpg that does nothing new and nothing exceptionally well. h’aanit sucks and her speech quirk drives me up the wall.

DRAGON QUEST XI it's a really bland jrpg that does nothing new and nothing exceptionally well. does not take any creative risks. dragon quest 5 remains the only really good dragon quest title.

POKEMON LET'S GO eh.

MARIO TENNIS ACES It's fine.

PATO BOX It's really neat. I should play more of it one of these days.

DELTARUNE CHAPTER 1 Toby Fox remains quite good at making video games.

BEAT SABER It's good.

SPLATOON 2 OCTOLING EXPANSION in the splatfest, the octolings had black shirts and the inklings had white shirts

the octolings are trapped and the only way out is to ride a train under the city. the octolings are on an underground railroad, as it were HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

FORTNITE haven’t played it.

[schirdotblog]

Re-examining Everblue 2

The other week, I picked up a copy of Everblue 2. I was in the used game shop looking for games that my eye was glossing over near the middle of the shelf. Previous excursions had led to me finding such classics as: Front Mission 4, Crimson Tears, Mojo, Goblin Commander, and of course, Ford Mustang (it's genuinely hilarious for exactly five minutes) ("SELECT YOUR MUSTANG!"). I picked up Everblue 2 because I half-remembered Zorak's LP of Endless Ocean from back in the day, and him saying those games were pretty good. Endless Ocean is the spiritual successor to Everblue, both by Arika Corporation Limited. Diving games aside, Arika's known for Street Fighter EX, Fighting EX Layer, and Tetris The Grand Master 3: Terror Instinct. I bring this up mainly because I enjoy saying Tetris The Grand Master 3: Terror Instinct.

Anyway, Everblue 2. I really like it.

In Everblue 2, gameplay is divided into three discrete sections: Going around town, looking for things in the open ocean, and exploring old wrecks and ruins. The town is point-and-click, the wrecks are free-roam, and the ocean floor exploration has your character locked to the X-Y plane a few meters above the ocean floor. I was going to talk about how critics at the time criticized the game for that, but I think I'm giving the game reviewers of 2003 a bit too much credit. The reviewers that I'm seeing on Metacritic range from "it's middling but really nice" to "oh those wacky Japs" to "I was so fucking bored" to "Ew, helping grandma, gross". Thanks guys, I'll be sure to visit you in the fourth circle of gamer hell, the one where early game reviewers who were unwilling to go outside of their comfort zone end up. In a curiously ironic twist, everyone in that circle of gamer hell is playing Dante's Inferno. Couldn't tell you why. Guess they must really like it.

Anyway, the core gameplay loop of Everblue 2 goes like this: Get quest from people in town, go out exploring in the ocean, find ruins, explore ruins, get treasure, return to town, sell treasure, upgrade gear, repeat. Alternately: ignore the town, go diving, find treasure, get money. It's very straightforward and quite good if you're in the mood for a chill game.

However, the part of this game that interests me the most is the same part that makes me go searching for middling, mostly forgotten games in the first place. Namely: games of middling quality lay the process of game-making out more clearly than major releases do. Everblue 2 is structured as a game, and is subdivided into smaller games. This is a bit different from games that try to create "a world" for the player to "inhabit". For a point of comparison, Subnautica is an example of a game that creates a world for the player to inhabit. Everblue 2 is a game for the player to play. You'll play the game of "see how deep I can go before I run out of HP and have to ascend". You'll play the game of "how many items can I pick up before I need to run back". You'll play the game of "How fast can I run this obstacle course". It systematizes the sorts of little "games" in life that we make up to break up the monotony. That might sound bad, but here's the thing: You're not forced to do it. The games that people make up to break up the monotony are enjoyable purely because they're not being forced to play them. Everblue understands this and systematizes that bit of it. There are little record books showing the deepest dive, longest travel distance, longest dive, heaviest item found, and most of the sidequests are about making a game of finding specific sorts of items. These sorts of mini-games are understated because Everblue is an understated sort of game. It doesn't have huge ambitions, but it knows what it wants to do and does it well.

I really like the way that the ocean segment was designed, at the game design level. There's a view of game design that sees the point of games as being the systemization of a particular subset of real life. Not a massive part of it, just a small part. The ocean segment drills down to the core of diving and decides that there are about 7 things that are important for diving: swimming around, looking at the fish, avoiding dangerous fish, maintaining your position, finding treasure, avoiding the areas where the pressure's too much for your gear to handle, and fighting currents. It's a really minimalist approach that captures the essence of the experience without taxing the machine running it too much. The ocean floor remains at the same point on the Z-axis as you explore, but the game's assigned each tile of the floor to a different height, so you can feel like the height's changing by looking at a gauge on the left side of the screen. It's a clever trick that I'd love to steal for my own games should the situation arise. Now, there are sections of the game where your character isn't locked to a fixed point on the Z-axis, so I'd have to assume that it’s a deliberate design choice. If the focus is on getting things that are hidden on the ocean floor, is there a reason for your character to ever be higher than a little bit above the floor? No, not really. It'd increase the design burden for no major gain. Now, when you make games, a situation like this is a joy to find. It means you get to spend less time making the backend complicated and less things need to be tested, which gives you more room to focus on polishing the game to feel good and be fun. In Everblue 2's case, it meant that the designers could assume that the player would always be in a particular sort of situation, so they focused on making the ocean floor reasonably interesting.

Though, that said, I'd bet the reason for making the ocean segments the way they are is because the designers sat down, tried making a free-roaming ocean, saw that it wasn't fun with the code they had, and scrapped it. Considering how the free-roaming segments in the wrecks and ruins feel, I'd guess that it just wasn't fun when the player wasn't constantly moving and turning. That or it was too taxing for the early PS2. There are literally five different potential explanations here.

Everblue 2 has a 59 on Metacritic. If I were a reviewer I'd be uncomfortable giving the game a score above, say, a 70. But when I sit down and think about the game, I find it stands out in my memory more strongly than a 7/10 would warrant. It's a genuinely good game. There are some points in the game where I was a bit frustrated -- getting the extra large bag to get through the fourth ship when some of the auction mechanics weren't made clear was one -- but my overall experience was positive. The language of scores that reviewers use doesn't quite square with the way I feel about Everblue 2. It's a good game, and one I'm likely to revisit. It's a mellow game made by game designers that want the player to get a decent value for their money, and assume that the people buying it will finish it. That's a feeling I don't get from a lot of games in the Steam era. But that's a rant for another time.

[schirdotblog]

Some thoughts on game difficulty

Recently, I watched BestGuyEver's video on game difficulty. He released it around the time of the discussion surrounding Cuphead and difficulty in games that happened a year or so back. In the video, he used a bunch of high-falootin' rhetoric about the nature of games and the feeling of accomplishment from conquering a game and so on. His position is pretty common, so I want to use it as an example.

Now, I'm a semantic, nitpicky sort, and I want to hone in on some of these verbs being used here. BestGuyEver and a lot of other people talk of 'beating' games. Of 'conquering' them. Personally, I don't want to 'beat' my games. I want to 'finish' them. I want to 'get through' a game, not 'conquer' it. I enjoy a good bit of challenge once in a while, but that's not what I'm there for. If I enjoy the act of playing a game, key word there being 'play', I may very well push myself to do better. To complete something more efficiently, or to a higher standard.

For an example, I played Katamari Forever pretty recently. Levels in that game are easy, but you're scored at the end of them. Often, I'll finish a level with a terrible score and go, "Alright, how can I do that again, but better?" The game doesn't punish me for doing a bad job of things, but it does say "Yeah, you could do that a lot better." For me, that's the ideal sort of difficulty. You're graded, but not penalized, and there's a lot of ways to get to the end of the level. If the game's systems both graded me and penalized my lack of skill, I would hate it and be turned away. To grade is fine. To pass judgements on grades is dumb.

Anyone can become good at a skill or task with time, effort, and some sort of feedback. In art, that feedback is whether you like looking at something you made. In music, that feedback is how clearly you hit those notes, and how much less frequently you hit the wrong ones. In games, that feedback is how often you die or fail to finish a level. Progress is measured by getting just a little bit further than the last time.

Now you might notice that I'm making a very different point here than BestGuyEver did. I'm not talking about the enjoyment of conquering a challenge or being a legend for doing something difficult. I suspect this is because he and I have a fundamentally different view of what motivates us intrinsically. It's a difference in perception and worldview.

At the core of this is that I simply do not enjoy the feeling I get when I've spent a bunch of time on something difficult and come out on top of it. It's not rewarding to me. I've done that in the past. I know that when I do, I'll still feel just as annoyed and miserable as I did while I was pushing through it. I plainly do not experience whatever feeling that BestGuyEver and people like him do from 'conquering' a challenge under intense pressure.

Now, a lot of the talk of difficulty in games centers around the question of what to do for less-skilled players. Should they add an easy mode to Dark Souls? Should they add the golden Tanuki suit or the Super Guide? I think this part of the discussion misses the point. A lot of easy and hard modes are poorly implemented. Easy modes tend to condescend to the player. "Oh, you're just here to enjoy the story". Or, "Oh, you're on baby mode? You shouldn't get to see the same things as the big boys playing on hard mode." No, you just messed up the balance on normal mode and made the challenge tedious and boring.

Meanwhile, most hard modes are all like "oh, you like punishment and things being hard? Well guess what, we're going to make it hard by making the game BOOOOOOORING." Both of these are wrong.

Like, the obvious answer here is that you just add more ways to approach a challenge. Let's take Dark Souls as an example because people won't shut up about it. You shouldn't add an easy mode to Dark Souls. But let's take the Iron Golem fight as an easy example. You can fight it regularly, but what if you had the option to roll a couple of the iron balls from earlier in Sen's Fortress at it to deal a good chunk of damage to it before you start the fight? It'd be the "easy mode" version of the fight, but I don't think anyone would have much of a problem with it because it's made easier within the context of the game's mechanics. How about Ornstein and Smaugh? Well, they can break pillars on you. What if that were an option for the player as well? It'd make the fight easier, but it would be in a way that adds tactical depth to the combat.

This is what people don't seem to grasp in the discussion about difficulty modes. Usually, games create difficulty by asking the player to do something in a very specific way in a restricted timeframe with a limited number of mistakes. The problem with easy and hard modes is that they usually just change the timeframe or number of allowable mistakes without addressing the fact that the problem is that there's only one way to approach the situation.

My point is that making a game easier or more accessible doesn't necessarily mean removing the core of the game's experience. Making a game easier can make the game deeper and more interesting for more highly-skilled players.

[schirdotblog]

Looking at Disgaea’s last tutorial level

I want to look at the last tutorial level of Disgaea 1. Partly, this is because Disgaea 1 Complete just came out, partly because I'm incapable of forming halfway coherent thoughts about anything that isn't Disgaea, and partly because I feel that there's a sense of narrative inherent in the level design that draws me into wanting to examine it. Not a lot of games have done that recently. See, and this is my working hypothesis here, Dark Souls confused a lot of people into thinking that world building is just as good as a solid narrative, and some idiocy around a critique of Bioshock about a decade back has scared a lot of people making games into avoiding ludonarrative. This combination of people meme-ing on ludonarrative for being too think-y, and writers shifting the bulk of their focus from narrative to "world-building" has caused a lot of games to be enjoyable, but ultimately lacking the sort of spark that drives a creative work into classic status. They lack the spark that drives a critic into thinking about the game beyond a surface level. This isn't to say that Disgaea's a perfect game or anything, but it stands out starkly when compared to its peers.

I mean, what was the last game that was a genuine, bona fide, classic? Celeste? Divinity: Original Sin 2? Undertale? Super Meat Boy? Braid? Bioshock? Fallout: New Vegas? Planescape: Torment? I don't know about you, but I can feel differences of magnitude, differences in tier, when I list those games. They're all great, sure. But they're all great at different orders of magnitude. Like, Celeste feels like a 10/10 of rank C, Undertale feels like a 10/10 of rank B, Bioshock feels like an 8/10 in rank A and Fallout New Vegas feels like a 10/10 in rank SS. Meanwhile, on the flip side, a lot of the games coming out recently are either free-to-play, half-finished prototypes, Puzzlescript one-offs, and game jam games. It's a bit hard to sink your teeth into these games when the creators barely had time to do it themselves. Like, okay, what's there to analyze in free-to-play games? I mean, aside from all the touching, heartwarming stories about how to make friends in a casino. Ha ha, and indeed: ha, aaaaaahhh game workers need to unionize and the unions need to be willing to fight for artistic vision and creator recognition over casino tactics. Incidentally, Casino Tactics is the name of my upcoming free-to-play strategy RPG pachislot game. Use real money to purchase gems to buy pachinko balls to spin the wheels to have a chance of winning a given combat encounter! It's in pre-preproduction right now, but I plan on releasing it right before committing suicide by jamming myself into the mechanical bits of a pachinko parlor while skinning myself with a cheese grater! That'll show 'em how to make an artistic statement.

Anyway, Disgaea's tutorial level.

The first time you go through Disgaea 1's last tutorial level, you've just come off of two other fights. The game hasn't told the player where the hospital is yet, so they want to avoid giving Jimmy Jam-For-Brains a game over. The level's laid out in an alternating grid fashion, with a bunch of enemies. The blue tiles have a defense +50% attribute to them, while the red tiles have HL+50% and EXP+50% attributes to them. See, the blue tiles are good, and the red tiles are bad. Deep stuff here, really. If the player moves onto a blue tile, they'll have their character be surrounded by enemies. However, that won't matter too much because the player character will have a boost to defense. If the player just stays on blue tiles and kills enemies who are on red tiles, they'll get a corresponding boost to the amount of experience and money they gain. If the player stands on the red tiles, thinking they'll make a play for the extra money and XP, they'll quickly get surrounded by enemies with higher defense and get owned, necessitating a restart. I'd imagine that a clever designer would try to balance the EXP such that it levels up the enemy who kills a player character on a red square in the tutorial, to more clearly demonstrate how the system works, but I don't think that happens here.

Now then, I mentioned ludonarrative. If you're a bit newer to games criticism, ludonarrative is the idea of telling a story through the actions you take while playing the game. It's the story made from what you can and cannot do. Most people heard about it back when Clint Hocking, the designer of Splinter Cell and Far Cry 2, wrote a critique of Bioshock back in 2007. That was the flash point where games criticism distinctly diverged from game reviews, but that's a story I'm not fit to tell.

Anyway, ludonarrative in Disgaea. Laharl lost a lot of his power while he was asleep, and the only demon left following him is Etna, who appears to be a phenomenally weak demon herself. The two of them are level 1, while everyone else in the castle has a level somewhere in the hundreds or thousands. This is intentional. I mean, it'd have to be. If the devs were just drag-and-dropping enemies into the castle, we'd probably see something like Disgaea 5, where the majority of NPCs you run into in the hub are default level. When you're playing through Disgaea 1, all the characters around Laharl are bigger than him, more imposing than him, and more powerful than him, in both visual, metaphorical, and statistical measures. Laharl wants to be a king of the demons, but demons accept rule from whoever's the strongest. Laharl, demonstrably, in all measures, isn't the strongest.

In an old video of mine, I tried to think about why Disgaea comes across as "funny", but struggled a bit since I was looking mostly at later games. In Disgaea 1, there's an answer. There's a comical absurdity in the contrast between Laharl's weak countenance and bearing and his bravado. Later games kept the comedy but ditched the meaning. Kind of like what happened with the transition between Ittle Dew 1 and 2. Now, see, Disgaea 1 is absurd, but it, like Laharl, mostly tries to take itself seriously. Disgaea 2 amps up the comedy a little, but keeps the serious core. Disgaea 3's basically the point where the seriousness breaks down and 4's the point where it loses the thread.

Anyway, the reason I talked about all of that is to set up why I'm analyzing the first level. If the player goes back to the first level after finishing it once, they'll find the EXP-boosting geo effect gone. If you want to prove your strength, the game seems to say, this isn't the place to do it. The enemies on the map give out 1 mana each, and you need at least 10 to get an incompetent soldier to follow you. It'll be a hellish grind for Laharl to prove himself if he's just fighting against chump demons with nothing else going on. This is why the first chapter after the tutorial is storming a castle. Narratively, it gives Laharl a foothold into his own bloody game of thrones. Mechanically, there's an XP+50% geo effect you can put on one of the first levels, making things a fair deal easier for the player. If you're going to make Laharl a king, the game seems to say again, don't just fight vagabonds in the wilderness. Be bold! Be kingly! Lay siege to a castle! If nothing else, do literally anything that isn't skirmishing on the plains like a two-bit highwayman!

[schirdotblog]

whoa, video games

Apologies for the radio silence here for the last, what, five months?

The video up top is super early, pre-pre-alpha prototype footage for a game I started working on a couple of weeks ago. Well, it’s more like I got it sort of functioning a couple weeks ago and then got terribly bad at continuing regular work on it at the pace I was working at in that first week. Lots of systems don’t quite work the way I want them to yet.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this (correction: I have, openly and regularly. I think I forgot this fact because I needed a transition statement more than I needed my memory to work properly.), but I make video games. Shocking, I’m sure. I’ve always wanted to do it, and I’ve started getting more serious about it.

Well, more serious than just hoping and dreaming about doing it. You can see the stuff I’ve made over on this page I’m linking here. It’s what I’ve been doing in my spare time instead of writing these days. I’m trying to push my technical abilities further with each one of those projects. Like, I’m totally down with the art games that push the boundaries of what we consider to be a video game and all, but I’d like that to be a choice for me, rather than a necessity born of compromise. I want my technical skills to get to a level where I can reasonably execute a majority of the ideas I have. To do that, I need to actually go and make video games. The only way to get good at any art form is to work in that art form, and video games aren’t especially special in that regard.

[schirdotblog]

THE VIRUS IS REACHING THE FINAL STAGES.

Journal Seekers Chapter 3: Resident Biohazard will be starting soon at 3PM EST.

https://www.twitch.tv/dragonqueen

[schirdotblog]

I’m gonna be in this tonight. I’ll be playing Abraham Stokes, a stockbroker in the middle of his pre-planned midlife crisis. I’ve been doing a little bit of light reading and research to better understand the character I’ll be playing. Here’s a bit of what that research looks like:

Obviously most of that won’t come up in the session as we’re doing something completely unrelated to stocks. However, I hope that extra knowledge (as well as some of the lessons I’ve learned about stocks mentioned in my previous posts) helps lend even a tiny bit more authenticity to the character.

My understanding is that everyone has been working very hard on this episode. This series is a labor of love, and we appreciate everyone who watches it quite a lot!

Please enjoy episode 3 of Journal Seekers!

The Virus is spreading…

Journal Seekers Chapter 3: Resident Biohazard will be streamed on April 15th, 5:30-6:00 PM EST.

Prepare yourselves, seekers…

https://www.twitch.tv/dragonqueen

[schirdotblog]

Examining Disgaea 5′s Writing

Okay I swear I write about things that aren't Disgaea sometimes. I mean, I was working on a script for a video about Super Cloudbuilt recently and I've been writing blog posts about the things I've learned by actually trying to making games over the last few weeks, and I might write a bit about some things I really like about thecatamites's philosophy on game design soon, and I've got other plans in the works too.

But no, instead today I have to write about Disgaea again. This time it's because I want to understand why it is I feel that Disgaea 5's writing is borderline insufferable while finding Disgaea 2 to be really nice and fun.

Now, to understand this feeling, I went and looked at a couple of random midgame cutscenes in Disgaea 5 and took screenshots and video of them. Then I went and re-read the dialogue with the perspective I've gotten from trying to write characters talking in my own games. With a full maybe 20 hours of dialogue writing under my belt, and a couple thousand character-talking hours from playing D&D, it's safe to say that Dunning-Krueger is in full effect here. You have been warned.

In the opening cutscene of Chapter 6, after the reveal that General Bloodis is actually Goldion, Killia reveals to the rest of the party that he used to be Goldion's apprentice. Zeroken is shocked. Killia says that he had fought his way to becoming the Overlord of Cryo Blood, and then had his first defeat at the hands of Goldion, who he then trained under. Seraphina says that Cryo Blood was ruled by Tyrant Overlord Killidia, and asks Killia if he's the same person. Killia responds in the affirmative.

Now, this is just some really rough exposition. It gets even worse in a minute, but this is just really fucking hamfisted. Setting up Killia as the former apprentice of the apparently now-turned-evil big bad is dumb. Killia's been a more-or-less willing participant in this shit without needing to have that established. It's setting up the endgame reveal that Killia and Void Dark trained together under Goldion and that Void Dark's doing this conquering nonsense to resurrect Lizerotte, who Killia liked I guess? But at the same time it doesn't really at any point feel like Killia wants to be involved in any of this. Usually I find that if I'm writing a character who has no desire to be involved in a story, it's better to just toss 'em out and write someone who does. It makes writing feel less like dragging a cat around, and usually winds up making a more likeable character who does things of their own volition, which tends to make the plot way more fun as a consequence. And how can I tell that Killia is the sort of character that has no real reason to be there? I can tell because Killia has to be forced into the plot against his will. He's kidnapped and put into Seraphina's pocket dimension at the start of the game because reasons. This is the sort of plotting I tend to run into in a GM's first tabletop game. Can't figure out how to make the party get together? Lock 'em in a cell together. Fuck it. It's lazy and, frankly, bad writing.

Now is it necessarily a bad thing to have a reluctant protagonist? No, not at all. You just have to give them a reason to be there. I think that's what the writers are trying to do in this scene, but they don't understand that 'giving someone a reason to be there' is writer speak for 'giving someone a reason to take action and do things'. They're suddenly revealing that oh, actually, the main character has a personal relationship with the villain because of his lengthy and tragic backstory. You know what'd be way easier and more effective than this weird set of interlocking personal relationships? Having the main character go "Hey, fuck that guy! We need to stop him!" That'd at least make it seem like the character has some kind of emotions, agency, volition, or investment in what's happening. As it stands though, our main character's involved because he was kidnapped and then revealed to have some kind of intertwining cosmic relationship with the events happening in the story. But again, that's a lot of things that would really help elevate the story if the protagonist, or really anyone else in Disgaea 5, had any amount of say in what things happen.

Like okay, let's rewrite the last few scenes real quick here, just at a broad level. Let's keep the plot beats too, why not. So maybe instead of having Seraphina serendipitously shoot the bad guy's one weak point to reveal that secretly he's also this other guy who secretly trained the protagonist in the past, he just fucking beats the party's collective asses and they book it the fuck outta there. Maybe a quick "shit this guy's too strong, we have to leave, now!" as we fade out.  We fade back in, with the party moping around talking about how they're too weak or some anime shit. Someone brings up needing to get stronger. Killia says that he knows a place they could train; his home world. The chapter would then be spent gradually revealing that Killia was the Overlord there and hinting at bits of backstory. Killia would show some initiative, and you could end the chapter with some Prinny saying they've heard a rumour of Bloodis's weakness and residence. The reveal is that Bloodis still lives on the old training grounds where Killia used to train, and the next chapter's spent there. Show the player cool things and don't just exposit at them. Wow! What an idea.

But no, we're leaving the fantasy land of halfway competent storytelling now. Back to the real game, what actually happens is that Usalia expresses shock and fear on hearing that Killia is Killidia, Red Magnus expresses shock and a desire to fight that immediately evaporates when Seraphina shoots him, Christo says Killia's not an ordinary demon after all with all that magic potential energy he's got, Usalia's surprised that Killidia and Killia are the same person again, and god this fucking cutscene has nothing happening and doesn't end jesus fu- oh good I guess Killia's expositing about some technique he learned and how he's betrayed his master again and fuuuuuuuuuuck this is so fucking boring I think I'm in hell.

So here's the thing that's getting my goose, alright? The story's saying these things and trying to create this tightly interwoven plot where the major players are all related in some way. But then the worlds you go to are just completely unrelated to all of that. General Bloodis's base is some random place, as are the five preceding worlds and the seven following ones, with maybe two exceptions that've been manhandled. They're video game worlds that have no story significance and do nothing besides serve as an irrelevant backdrop. Remember how the first world you went to in Disgaea 1 was the castle of a rebellious servant of the former Overlord? Remember how that showed how little of a fuck anyone gave for Laharl, while also showing how much the demons respected the previous Overlord, and how that set up things to come? Remember how Rozalin kept trying to lure Adell into deathtraps and actively tried to subvert the progression of the plot? Remember how that was the basis for the development of a trusting relationship between those two characters? Remember when the characters had clearly-defined motivations for taking action in the story, and personalities that had sensible reasons for being there?

Yeah, neither does Disgaea 5. None of these characters have any reason to be doing anything here. Their personalities are paper-thin, and all the dialogue comes across as a personality trait reacting to a plot point, rather than a person reacting to something that just happened.

So I guess to answer the question I started writing this for, I don't like Disgaea 5's story because it feels like the plot's happening at a bunch of cardboard cutouts with a single character quirk each. I dislike the story because it falls into the amateur mistake of confusing backstory with personality. It tells us about all of the things that happened to the characters in the past and says 'see? That's who they are' without showing us any of those things. The characters are apparently doing things in the story, but it never quite feels like any character's making the choice to do those things for reasons internal to them personally. It all feels bland and hollow because none of these characters seem like they have any sort of emotional investment in the things that are happening.

[schirdotblog]

rebranding

Yesterday it occurred to me that having some kind of stolen anime art as an online avatar might be just a little bit tacky. It further occurred to me that I really probably ought to rebrand my online presence to be more in line with the sorts of things people might expect to see from me.

I've been really into the 'eccentric, straightforward auteur' aesthetic for a while now, and figured I should probably have my online presence reflect that. Pretend to be what you want to be and all that. I figured I should have the brand remind people that there's a person at the other end, but I also wanted to maintain a degree of anonymity. Hence, the barcode with internet username covering my eyes. It's a visual reminder that what you see is a facade over the real person. Something like that. The real reason I did it is because I had the font lying around and thought the effect would be cool, and it is.

The art style is one that I've been developing recently. In working on my RPG Maker game, I looked at a few other RPG Maker games and didn't really like the style I saw in them. For some reason, it seems like just about every other RPG Maker game uses the same anime-esque, amateurish art style, where the proportions are all screwed up and everything's been done with the default Photoshop brush. And I mean, it's great that they're trying, and the level of creativity and earnestness I see in those RPG Maker games is genuinely wonderful. But they're almost always let down by some element not matching the quality of other, related elements. The easiest example is of, say, a character's portrait being of a considerably worse quality than the sprite it depicts, or vice versa.

What I did to counteract that problem feels a bit like I'm cheating, since it's so straightforward. Just don't draw people, and make everything in black and white with the 1px pencil tool. That way I get a consistent, visually striking aesthetic that easily transfers between sprite and portrait. As a bonus, everything feels a bit more imaginative and wild and I have more leeway to make the walk cycles fun. As an example of what I've done, here's the one character I have finished: Skully.

This is his portrait.

And here's his spritesheet for walking around. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but the aesthetic's consistent in a way that doesn't create a quality disconnect in the player's mind.

But this might just be coming from a difference in how I'm trying to approach development. I'm not trying to make the next Final Fantasy or Lost Odyssey or whatever grand sweeping epic RPG you might imagine. I'm trying to make a game that's about an hour long and drawing most of my inspiration from Space Funeral, with the sort of development process I've heard the KoL guys describe. Effectively, this ends up being whatever nonsense comes into my head mixed with a lot of phenomenally bad puns and snarky commentary.

What was I talking about again? Oh, right, rebranding. Yeah, I did that because I sent an email to some developers I like telling them that their games and podcasts were good to a point that influenced me into making games for myself, since that's always kind of cool to hear. Hours later, I realized that having an anime avatar on my email probably looks really bad. Well done, me.

[schirdotblog]

oh right, I started making a game.

The other week I sat down and said "okay, I'm going to make a video game now" and opened up Game Maker. Three hours later I said "no wait this would be better in RPG Maker". So I booted up VX Ace and started to work.

There are a lot of things about the creative process that don't really make sense until you've actually done them. Simple things, like why people say 'just do it' or 'write what you know' and what those things mean.

I've made maybe 10 minutes of gameplay so far. It's taken me 45 hours of work to do so. Basically nothing. But in those 45 hours I've learned a lot about writing, making games, stylistic evolution, and how stories are formed.

The other month, I saw Night Mind's excellent video on creativity. Prior to watching it, I'd been running on the creative advice of people like Digibro. Digibro's advice, as I poorly remember it, is something to the effect of "pick a niche, stick to that niche, and pump out content constantly. Sell out. Make money". It's good advice for getting people to see your stuff. It's bad advice if you want to make something that has a half-life of more than a week. The part of Night Mind's video that fundamentally changed how I approach making art was the bit where he talked about how creativity's like getting mailed pieces of a bunch of puzzles, one or two pieces at a time. Sometimes you get pieces that match, other times you don't. Night Mind was talking about creativity being a slow process that you figure out a tiny bit at a time. I found thinking about creativity like that to be immensely relieving, and it took a lot of pressure off. Which is good because the other part of that video that got to me was the bit where he said that creativity happens when you're relaxed but just mentally engaged enough to make connections in your mind. That felt like a much nicer approach than the relentless "put things out all the time constantly forever" approach.

Now these thoughts are kicking around my head for the better part of two months. At some point I start listening to the Kingdom of Loathing Podcast and hear these guys making video games in this really blunt, really open sort of way. They've made a good game with stick figures and solid writing and they look up how they even did that one thing that one time on-air. Hearing these experienced developers just kind of humbly saying "yeah I don't remember how I did that" changed my view on game development to be something that's in the realm of possibility for me, as a human. Hearing them, on a later episode, talk about how they had no plans when they went into it, and hearing them talk about figuring most of it out as they went along changed my opinion on game design a bit further. It drove home a point about not needing to know everything when starting that hadn't quite clicked.

So now I'm looking into "how to make a game" and stumble into r/gamedev. I can't remember how I got to it, but I find the page on "how to start making games." The advice it gives: just do it. "but I-" Just start. "yeah but-" Just start. If you can't figure out how to look up things for yourself at the start, you won't be able to finish a game of your own. Just start. Now that thought's kicking around my head too.

It's now November. I'm listening to the podcast the KoL guys do with the Frog Fractions guy. They're talking about a talk that the guy who made Space Funeral gave at Fantastic Arcade this year. While I listen to them talk about the talk, I'm remembering that advice I read on r/gamedev and remembering the page on Mr. Thecatamite's website about game-making resources, and noting how it's just a list of free game engines. Later that month, I read a post by Mr. Thecatamites about pacing in games. The third paragraph, about the aesthetic of the practicing beginner, grabs my attention. The idea of trying to sustain a simple feeling appeals to me.

While the above was going on, I've written a 'top games of 2017' list for myself. While writing about West of Loathing, I realize that it introduced me to basically everything I talked about from the sixth paragraph onward. I come to the realization that West of Loathing has all but actually inspired me to actually make a game for myself. I bump West of Loathing up a couple places on the list and call it my Game of the Year for 2017, since fundamentally changing the way I view games to a point that actually gets me to make a game is a hell of an achievement.

This brings us back to where I started this post. I've made the decision to finish a game in six months. I have a decent idea of my strengths and weaknesses. I'll use RPG Maker since my coding experience is a handful of classes I took in high school and my freshman year of college. I'll run with an MS Paint aesthetic to streamline the art pipeline. I don't want to spend a ton of time learning to make music, and I can't really afford hire anyone, so I'll trawl through public domain music and sound recordings to make a decent soundtrack. I'll put most of the development time into writing since I'm good at that, and then next into level design since I've got a bit of experience there from playing D&D. I'll aim for a game that's maybe an hour or two long, but densely-packed within those two hours. That's where I started. In the 45 hours I've put into working on it since, I've watched the story gradually shake into being set on the 19XX internet with motifs of baseball, death, and the internet emerging right now. The art style's started developing from 'MS Paint' to 'cartoony Geocities'.

(Pictured: an art style beginning to develop. The bottom-rightmost image is a prototype for what I want the stat menu to look like. Implementing it into RPG Maker is going to be a pain.)

Meanwhile, the gameplay ended up really different to my initial expectations about 30 minutes into development. I was writing a brief scene and then went "hey, wouldn't it be funny if the game just cut straight to a first-person dungeon?" So I spent a few minutes googling that, found a plugin, and threw it into the game. Now that's a thing that's in there and it's cool.

But I'm digressing. The sorts of things I've learned from actually sitting down and trying to make a game are things about how and why creative decisions happen. That bit in thecatamites's post about the practicing beginner trying to capture a feeling that works for as long as possible makes more sense by the minute. I found a couple of things that seem like they work and trying to keep those things working has started to lead me down some crazy paths.

As an example from the artistic end: I made the first monster a photoshopped box because I didn't trust my artistic abilities. I made the black-and-white version of the first monster that you see in the above screenshot because I wanted the sprite to be different in the wireframe first-person dungeon. I added a white outline because it looked better on a black background. Tracing looked pretty good, as does white on black. Next I traced a photo or two of Kurt Cobain because real photos look bad. That turned out well so I did it again elsewhere. I got a bit worried about copyright and being a thief so I tried drawing something by looking at a photo. That turned out well, and the outline was a bit thicker than before. So I drew something else in the same style. Also good. Okay, let's try doing the same thing for a sprite, and then also apply those animation principles I learned in school once- hey that looks really good. And that's about where I am now. As this goes on I'll probably keep the aliased look, but gradually add in a shade of grey, then color, and so on. This is how an art style develops, and that's cool.

On the writing end of things, I've mostly just written a bunch of snide jokes and bad puns, but one thing I found is that people sort of liked the boss fight that was just a scrolling wall of madness I found on the internet. So I went "okay, scrolling wall of text is fun. Let's try that elsewhere." That seems to work. I'll need to do that again, but not too much more. Thinking on it now, the writing hasn't gone through the same level of iterative "let's do the thing that works as much as possible" thought as the art has. I'll need to work on that more as I go along.

Anyway, that's what's led me to make a game, along with what I've learned by starting to do so. Thanks for reading.

[schirdotblog]

Hi, yes, i make video games. I understand game design. Today I implemented the most difficult boss in RPG history. Please enjoy. Did I mention that I understand game design? Because I do.

[schirdotblog]

Hey I was in a thing

I was in Journal Seekers: Liminal Space Oddity, a one-off session set in the universe of a tabletop campaign I'm in. In this campaign, I played a character named Bebe Enneas, and she's pretty fun. I didn't get a ton of a chances to show off her better side, but bits of it come through whenever the party runs into anything decently mechanical or to do with late-2000s/2010s internet culture. Man, that makes her sound like she's just a meme character. She isn't, though. It's just that, as a quirk of the game being set in the mid-2020s, it happens that Bebe would've been a teenager around now and would probably have nostalgia for today's dumb nonsense. Shrug. I've been trying to get better at running with serious moments, though my performance this session wasn't helped by me playing a character who would've grown up watching a bunch of youtube reviews, let's plays and abridged series. Ah well, I'll do better next time. Anyway, the session went well. All of the other players had good characters that they played really well. The story, progression, maps, and NPCs were excellent, as ever, and everything played out really nicely. Go check it out! It's a fun time. man i'm really bad at the proper tumblr thing of just promoting a thing with pretty art. sorry, all I really know how to do is write.

[schirdotblog]

More video game streaming.

I streamed a couple more video games.

First off: I finished playing Tacoma, which was a fun time.

Next: I played through a game called kuso. It’s a follow-up to Fred Wood’s earlier game Love. Very minimalist, really well-crafted, solid all around.

After that, I played a bit of Super Cloudbuilt to get some live footage for a video project I’m working on. 

Just a heads-up though, I’m not too fond of the over-the-top reaction style that’s pretty popular in LPs these days, so my commentary’s subdued and relatively sparse.