#gamedev reflection didireallyjustypereflection? iamawanker

[ghostsonabiketonowhere]

Ghostman: The council calamity retrospective

Well christ, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I know literally nobody follows this blog, but as of this writing, i’m waiting on the steam direct fee i paid to be fully processed (Basically, in a week i’ll be able to publish the game)

I’d like to take a second and stroll down memory lane for a little bit, and why it took so fucking long to make this game, this is basically going to be a list of every time i tried and failed to make a game, so strap in, these aren’t in chronological order either, and i’ve kinda forgotten the proper order.

Bill’s excellent adventure:

There’s incredibly little to say on this one, after reading a 4chan thread on games development i downloaded GM:S, tried making a platformer, saw my art, didn’t see any progress after trying a little bit, and gave up.

Mugman:

Mugman was the first time i tried making an adventure game, other than the main character, i had no ideas for the game and dropped it like a rock.

Radiation Seat:

Radiation Seat, for the more dedicated gamers in the audience, is just a synonym for nuclear throne, i tried messing around with random generation in GM:S, realised i’m not very good at coding and gave up, the game actually kinda works though, so theoretically if i’m a moron/psychopath i could try working on it again.

Asterodis:

First real game i ever made, it’s an asteroids clone, but with a bunch of the stuff i saw in Vlambeer’s game feel talks crammed in, it’s essentially idenitcal to a tutorial on youtube except shooting takes away points and there’s a limit to the number of bullets on screen.

Poltergeist (Aka: Ghostman when he was a person)

I posted a lot about Poltergeist (the version of ghostman with good art and a completely different setting), the secret to this was having a good artist, Robert Thomas helping me out, we never finished it, and Bobby got caught up in school work, but that’s almost over so if he’s willing to pick up the pen again, i’m willing to do the coding and fix the reall weird bugs (randomly the game would massively lag for a reason i never figured out, i assume it had something to do with the way AGS handles characters over non walkable areas)

Grall and Foegart goto whitecastle:

I’d had the idea of wanting to make a high fantasy adventure game after reading a couple of discworld novels, these games didn’t get far, but it did have an interesting character switching mechnic similar to DOTT, this also appeared in a couple of other half finished games i’d made, why i thought it’d be funny to make a game based on it when i’d never seen Harold and Kumar go to whitecastle? Iunno.

H.E.L.L:

H.E.L.L (Hyper Energetive Love Lab) was a shot at making a VN, i’m probably going to still do this, so i don’t know if putting here’s sensible but eh, fuck it, i’d had the idea of a reality show crossed with a death game for ages, and tried writing a short story about it, which went nowhere.

Gender Girl:

Gender Girl was the first video game i ever made, it was a scratch program with the cat repainted to be pink, moving left killed you by a spike, moving right displayed a message that gender girl had liberated herself (Hohoho, very ludonarratively insync, 12 year old me), i uploaded it to the scratch website, and it, containing swear words(such a rebel was i) it was deleted 5 seconds after publication, truly, a light gone from the world, what did it have to do with gender? If i remember literally nothing, or you were supposed to cut your dick off with the spikes.

Yeah.

PAGAN:

Pagan was a pokemon rip off i was making, i didn’t get far beyond changing sprites and types, world design is hard, as of writing it’s still on my site, i ought to take it down buti just don’t have the heart, poor Pagan.

BORB (Ghostman 1)

Borb, as it’s affectionatly called in the files, is ghostman 1, it’s the source of the Alien King sprite, and the Ghostman sprite used in Ghostman: The council calamity, and was distributed amongst my friends for like, 5 seconds, it’s 4 screens and one “Puzzle”, which doesn’t actually work because the last time i did work on it, it’s fun to see how my humour changed, in GM1 we’ve got the classic line “It’s locked up tighter than a jewish bank” and a character named Snil, whose ribbing snarky asshole persona was basically every persona i used to write until i started playing dnd with my friends, and had to make more than 1 character, i don’t really like anything about GM1, but i find it oddly charming, it’s terrible perspective and total lack of story or theme (You’re kidnapped by bandits and the game ends in leaving on a spaceship having never seen a single bandit.) just makes it like lenny from of mice and men, it probably should die, but i can’t help shooting a game that thought the way to add taste was to remove the words “Fuck off” from a wall.

Rebet:

Rebet’s the first time we see the actual character “Rebut” appear, in some weird tron like backround, i remember wanting to make something that looked like tron, and failing, other than that Rebet remains a total mystery, even to me, andi made the fucking thing, looking at the code, i remember a little bit more about the game, the main gimmick was having a variety of ray guns that could effect peoples emotion, the example in the tutorial was a “calming ray” to prevent a drill seargeant from screaming at you, this didn’t go anywhere.

Wing Wang:

This is literally an empty ags game, there’s nothing in it, i don’t know why i haven’t deleted it.

Ye Men of Valour:

Ye Men of Valour was a weird idea, i’d read a book called “The decline and fall of the British Empire” (Based upon the work, the decline and fall of the roman empire) and decided to make a game based upon a variety of British figures from across time entering into a house they must escape, only to be killed by Aliens, the goal of the game was to get players to reload the game with the knowledge that following the puzzles as they were laid out would kill them, and use a different method to escape, Ye Men of Valour really ended up going nowhere because i was in a pretty dark place and wasn’t motivated, like at all, i’m gonna put this in the “Might come back to it” pile.

Ghostman 2:

Ghostman 2, like Grall and Foegart, had a character switching thing, this ended up breaking the game, so i scrapped it, Ghostman 2 was when the idea of Ghostman being a space adventure comes from, following from Ghostman 1, where you leave on a ufo with an alien, it’s what i thought would happen next, if i remember there was literally no story, just the characters, and switching gimmick.

I.A.C.M

I.A.C.M was a project i worked on with Bobby very breifly, the idea was to make an adventure game set inside a mentally disturbed girls mind, this basically didn’t pan out due to AGS engine limitations, the sprites sent in were too big and ended up looking kind of lame squashed down.

You cannot name this file, insect.:

This wasn’t a game, this was shit poetry at a time in my life where i knew my poetry was godawful, there was no story here, just a Shodan like figure who’d insult me, like personally, i’d write insults about myself into a script and then play it.

Robot Initation:

Adventure game, starring “some random guy named mike”, drew the first character sprites, hated them, didn’t want to improve them, gave up.

Assault and Battery/BatteryMan:

This was a go at 3d platformers made in unity, fell apart because the models i’d made in blender weren’t done properly at all, breaking practically everything.

PirateTextAdventure(ActualTitle):

Sounds exactly like what it is, never got a single line down for this.

Shield Slide:

A rip off of free ski based on the idea of riding a shield i think i saw i a lotr movie? Never got to prototype.

AAAH!

AAAH (Aimless aeronautical adveture, huzzah!) was an experiment i wanted to make, an adventure game that was procedudrely generated, every game would involve a one minute timer, which upon reaching zero, would result in the player dying, the story was the player had just survived a plane colliding with another plane in midair, and had to find a way to live without a parachute just using debris, lessons learned: Random generation is hard, i also ripped off the title from AAAAAAAAAAAAh for the awesome.

Sweet Goodnight:

Sweet goodnight was an rpg i planned to make about dying alone in a spaceship, it never got far beyond idle doodles and some game design docs that i’ve since lost, may go back to this in future.

Spaceman and Woodboy:

A mario and luigi superstar saga ripoff, never got to properly playable state, GM:S is hard.

Quest of Halden:

Shit rpg.

Ghostman: CNC :

Ghostman: CNC (Caverns and creatures) was a weird idea, i wanted to make an Rpg based on my dnd campaign, but for some reason i felt the need to justify it with a weird ghostman shell, may go back to this one.

Legend of Negro:

I don’t know why the fuck this is on my computer, i tried pissing around with a legend of zelda game maker thing.

Generic Units:

Supposed to be an xcom like, fell apart.

Airman/Pacifist run:

Something i still want to do, an fps with non violent weapons and stage hazards that you have to use to defeat enemies, got as far as modeling a single gun.

Sepsis man:

A 3d platformer starring a drinks machine, modeled main character, gave up.

Slime Game (actual title, again.)

Slime game (Or Slime Quest) was going to be an incredibly clever subversive take on the Rpg genre by having the grand villain actually be a low level mook, think cave rats and dungeon bosses, that kind of thing, stopped making it because i thought “Woah, that’s dumb, and lame, and i really don’t like making art for ideas that are dumb and lame!”

Zug’s Glorious road trip for the glory of the party and wealth of the nation:

ZGRTFTGOTPAWOTN for short, this was a text adventure based on wormhole shenanigans and Soviet propaganda films, never really got that far, fun little fact, Zug’s the name of the alien in my twitter profile pic.

Ghostman: The council calamity:

I didn’t quit, i made the game.

THANK GOD FOR THAT.