#i fell out of game dev and have no inspiration to work on it cause i dont have much else to spark joy

[valla-chan]

grgrrggrhgkrhkaukerhgjherkajg/..... GRRGRGRGRRGTFHFHFFHGGTFTFTGFGFG

[felassan]

Mass Effect development insights and highlights from Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

This is the Mass Effect version of this post.

[In case you can’t read it the subtitle in the bottom left logo above is “Guardians of the Citadel”]

Note: Drug use is mentioned.

Cut for length.

Mass Effect 1

ME began its life in a vision document in fall 2003

Codenamed “SFX”

Conceived of by Casey Hudson and a core team from KotOR. Its genesis was the intention to create an epic sci-fi RPG in an original setting that BioWare owned (so they could have full creative control), and in a setting that was conceived of first and foremost as a video game

Initially players could control any squadmate, but they wanted it to be about Shep and for players to be focused on Shep being a battlefield commander, rather than on switching bodies

By the start of 2004 its story was shaping up. Initially humans landed on Mars in 2250 and discovered evidence of an ancient alien race and a powerful substance, Black Sand, which rapidly advanced tech to the point that FTL travel was possible. (My note: obviously now the Prothean artifacts on Mars & associated mass effect force tech enabled this in the final canon, but I wonder if aspects of the ‘Black Sand’ naming-type & powerful substance stuff was rolled into red sand from final canon) Humans were suddenly capable of travel to multiple star systems and made contact with a multitude of other species. At the start of the first game, these species together with humans had a fragile peace, with focus placed on the political center of the galaxy, a hub known as Star City, later renamed the Citadel

Multiplayer was a vision for the series as far back as 2003. The plan was for ME1, an Xbox exclusive at launch, to take advantage of the platform’s online components. Early designs saw players meeting in one of the central hubs to interact and trade items in their otherwise SP adventures

By 2006 it had the name ME and the story was more specific, with the theme of conflict between organic and synthetic lifeforms. The story’s scope now stretched across 3 games and included scope for full co-op MP

They tried to do MP in every game, discussing it from the get-go, but it always just fell by the wayside. “When you’re trying to build something that is a new IP, on a new platform, with a new engine, you’ve got to really focus on the core elements of the game.” 

The conversation system prototype was made in Jade Empire, and some of ME’s earliest writing was done in an old JE build. At first there was no conversation wheel. Paragon was “Friendly” and Renegade “Hostile”. In the prototype Shep was a silent unnamed Spectre. Many conversations in the prototype about the player’s choice in smuggling a weapon through Noveria made it into the game

In said prototype a merchant referred to themselves as “this one”, though the word hanar never appeared. The PC in it also had the option to end a conversation with “I should go”. In the prototype also, Harkin was voiced by Mark Meer

An early version of the Mako got used as the krogan truck in ME2

Early concepts of the Citadel were drawn in pencil by CH. A piece of concept art of its final design was painted based on a photo of a sculpture near Aswan, Egypt

As with any new IP naming it was a struggle. They put out a call to all staff for ideas, did polls, made a name generator that combined words that they liked in random ways and made pretend logos of ones they liked in Photoshop to see if they could make themselves love the name or find visual potential in it. (Some of these names are in the pic at the top of this post.) CH liked “Unearthed” as it was a reference to Prothean ruins dug up on Mars and humanity’s ascendance going away from Earth. They knew the game would have a central space station featuring prominently so some of the ideas were based on that - “The Citadel”, “The Optigon”, “The Oculon”. “Element” was another one they had in mind due to the rare substance in the game 

CH: “I was a big fan of John Harris’ book Mass, which had epic-scaled sci-fi ideas, so that was a word that came up often. Many of the names came from the idea that the IP featured a fifth fundamental physical force (in addition to the known four of gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear) so the word ‘effect’ came up pretty often.” Ultimately none of the ideas really felt right. One Monday morning they were going over the names and Greg Zeschuk said he had an idea on the weekend: “Mass Effect!” CH: “I said, ‘I don’t hate it’, which in the naming process is a high compliment. And it stuck!”

CH on Shep’s Prothean vision from the beacon: “It was hard to imagine how we would do this. CG was - and is - really expensive. Instead I wanted to try doing it through photography and video editing. So I went to a local grocery store and bought a few packages of the weirdest looking meat that I could find. Then I set up a little photoshoot in my basement, complete with some electronics parts and some red wine for juicyness.” He used these props to create a video sequence where the photos were rapidly cycled and blurred, along with production paintings, to create the scary vision an organic/machine experiment on the Protheans. These mashups were also used as inspiration for concept artists and level designers who were working on these themes

Tali used to be called Talsi

On the licensing side they often joke that they’re licensing N7 not “Mass Effect” due to N7′s popularity

There was a confidential internal guide to the IP in 2007 to help devs along and summarize/synthesize the vision etc. Some excerpts from it are shown in the book and this is the first time the public have ever seen them

Early versions of Asari had hair

Asari were designed as a nod to classic TV sci-fi (with human actors wearing obvious makeup and prosthetics to play aliens)

The turian design guideline was “we want them to be birds of prey”. They also wanted a range of alien types, some close to human like Asari, while others were to be a lot further away, like turians

BioWare patented the conversation wheel, which was a first for them. CH had been frustrated with reviews of Jade Empire that said that the actioncentric game was too wordy [with its list dialogue]. “I’m like, story is words. [...] What is it about our games that is making people feel like they’re wordy?” Then he thought “In a game you kind of need to feel like you’re continuing to play it. Maybe you should continue feeling like you’re playing it actively into the dialogue.” “[The wheel] kind of gave a new experience with dialogue when you did start to react based on emotion, and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to bring out in our games”

The original krogan concept was based on a bat “with a really wide squidgy face. We just used its face on top of this weird body and it kinda worked”

Geth musculature was based on fiber-optic cables, with flexible plates of armor attached

The vision for the IP was 80s sci-fi inspired space opera

The concept art of Saren lifting Shep by the throat inspired a similar scene in-game. The staging wasn’t planned til designers saw that art

A squadmate with Shepard on the way to meet Ash in an old storyboard was called Carter. Early name of Kaidan or Jenkins?

Bono from U2 was kinda instrumental in bringing us ME lol

Finding the right cover art for ME1 was notably tricky

Matt Rhodes got his start drawing helmets for ME1, including one which would become Shep’s “second face”. He estimates he drew between 250-270 different ones

Some of the sounds in-game were people smashing watermelons with sledgehammers and sticking fists into various goos

The audio team had fun trying to slip the iconic main theme into unexpected places throughout the MET. “We were very aware of how powerful that track was for the fans and it was tempting to overuse it for any moment we wanted to make really emotional”.

The theme was creatively repurposed in ME3: slowed down and reworked as the ambient sound for the SR-2. “If you listen to it for a really long time, just stand in the Normandy and listen, you’ll actually hear the notes change slowly. It doesn’t sound like music, it sounds like a background ambiance, but it’s there.” (My note: Well no wonder the Normandy feels so much like home?? 😭 sneaky..)

Bug report: “Mako Tornado”. There wasn’t enough friction between the tires and the ground, causing testers to lose control of the vehicle and send it spinning into the air like a tornado. “As it turns, the front end comes up, and then it starts spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning faster and faster and faster until it just flies up in the sky” (My note: Sounds like a regular day in the Mako to me)

Cerberus originally had a bigger role in this game. It was cut but they had a whole explorable outpost. “I called it Misery,” says Mac Walters, “It was this planet with a little outpost that said ‘Welcome to Misery’”. Everything on the outpost was shit - dirty worn stuff, no windows, no kitchen, the vehicle bay was open to the elements etc

The Reaper sound is literal garbage. Some audio designers went on a recording trip to a national park. One of them got fixated on a garbage can, “a metal bear-proof receptacle with a heavy lid that creaked horribly when opened”. “It was like, ominous, spooky, tonal and almost musical. I decided to throw a mic into the garbage and record it moving. I didn’t know what it was going to be until later”

They were making lots of noises to record like throwing logs and rocks around. An old couple peered at them through the window of their camper van in the woods and must have called the cops because then the cops showed up, pulled them over and told them to stop. The cops towed their car (the driver’s plates were Cali plates and expired), drove them to Edmonton outskirts and then the audio producer Shauna got a call and had to go pick them up “like three little boys”. “We got a stern talking to”. Once back they were playing around with the garbage sound, editing it etc. Casey heard it and proclaimed “That’s the sound of the Reapers”

Preston Watamaniuk: “There are things I could have done to Mass 1 to make it an infinitely better game with better UIs” and some simple cuts and changes. “But when you’re living with it, it’s very hard to see those things”

BioWare Labs

As social media and smartphone games exploded, BioWare dedicated a small team dedicated to exploring opportunities here - BioWare Labs

Mass Effect: Galaxy used a unique graphic art style and static visual presentation common in visual novels. It has the distinction of being the only iOS game BW have made during their first 25 years

Scrapped ideas were a 3rd person space shooter called Mass Effect: Corsair and 2 DA titles - a strategy game and a top-down dungeon crawler starring young Wynne. (My note: Maybe the corsairs stuff was rolled into Jacob’s backstory in 2, the Alliance Corsairs)

Corsair was a very short-lived project that never got its feet under it. It was a spin-off on Nintendo DS featuring a behind-the-ship perspective and branching dialogue. At one point it had MP. The idea behind it was basically “ME: Freelancer” - fly your ship around, do missions, get credits. It had a limited branching story but was a gameplay-centered experience intended to fill the gap between ME1 and 2. That gap ended up being filled by Galaxy

Galaxy and Corsair’s smaller screen allowed concept artists to use bold colors and a simplistic character design style to help those games stand out from Shep’s story

Nick Thornborrow did some art for Corsair but was worried his art style didn’t fit ME. He moved to DA where he feels his art style fits better

Lots of BioWare VAs and even a lead writer and the VO director are drawn from Edmonton’s local community theater scene, which is vibrant. Think this is how Mark Meer got involved

Mass Effect 2

Player choices carrying over was a first for BW

Dirty Dozen-inspired plot

Its plot is a web of conditionals (see Suicide Mission)

Was more of a shooter than anything BW had made since Shattered Steel

There was 2 camps on the team, those who wanted to push combat and systems forward and redefine the ME experience and those who wanted to make a true sequel, with the same gameplay and systems but a new story. Karin Weekes: “I think it ended up being a good push-pull. It felt like a pretty healthy creative conflict”

“ME2 was a game you could hold up to someone who argues that games aren’t a serious medium and go ‘Oh yeah, then why is Martin Sheen in this?’” Sheen was their first pick for TIM

The idea for TIM came from a mash-up of concepts CH had collected over the years. The name “Illusive” originally came from his pitch for naming DAO’s Eclipse engine, a word inspired by Obi-Wan’s line “It’s not about the mission, Master. It’s something... elsewhere. Elusive”. “I thought, what if we called our next engine 'Elusive', but used an ‘I’, and then it’s like ‘Illusion’. [...] I still really like the word with an ‘I’ and what it conjures”

When ME1 DLC was in production, CH had been watching a lot of CNN, specifically Anderson Cooper. “How is one guy travelling to all these places and never looking tired and always being able to speak with clarity?” CH says it seemed almost superhuman. “What if there was someone who is the absolute maximum of the things you would aspire to be, but also the worst of humanity?” Cooper, though not evil, became an inspiration for TIM down to the gray hair and piercing blue eyes

Inspiration for TIM’s behind-the-scenes role pulling political strings came from Jack Bauer’s brother Graem in 24. Graem “can call up the president and tell him what to do and hang up, because he’s so connected and so influential”. Sheen had played a president and his performance brought gravitas and wisdom to the role. He had quit smoking, but the character smokes. He didn’t want to fake it, but he also didn’t want to smoke, “so he actually asked for a cigarette” to hold so he could stop his words to take drags with natural cadence

Writing was still pushing to write and revise lines hours before VO started. A series of problems like injury and some writers leaving for other opportunities left it so that Karin, Lukas Kristjanson and editor Cookie Everman hand to land the story safely, with PW helping where they could. Lukas: “We took over the writing bug and task list, and I can’t stress enough how much [Karin and Cookie] did to get ME2 out the door. There’s no part of that thing we didn’t touch”. Karin: “That was the most dramatic 2 weeks of my life”

Initial fan reaction when they started promo-ing ME2 was very negative because people didn’t want to know about new chars like Jack and Mordin. “[fans were like] ‘Get them out of here. We want our characters from the first game’. But then when they played them, those became some of the most popular chars [of the series]”

Concept art of Thane has an idea annotation saying “Face can shapeshift?”

At one point when designing Thane concept artists sent multiple variations of him to the team asking them to vote on which was the most attractive

Most of the Normandy crew was written by lead level designer Dusty Everman. Lukas gave him advice in the evenings between bugs

BioWare Montreal made ME2 and 3 cinematics

CC for Shep was based on tools used by char designers to create in-game chars. Under the hood similar tools existed to create aliens

Aliens were much easier to animate than humans. When something is human it’s very difficult to make it look realistic and you can see all the mistakes and everything

Over the holiday period in 2007 CH worked out a diagram on a single piece of paper that would define the entire scope and structure of the game. The diagram is included in the book

Bug report: “I shot a krogan so hard that his textures fell off”. At one point shotgun blast damage was applied to each of the pellets fired, and shot enemies ended up with just the default checkerboard Unreal texture on them after their textures got blown off

Blasto was meant to be 1 step above an Easter egg but his fan popularity prompted them to bring him back in ME3

They rewrote chunks of Jack 2 days before she went to VO. She was the only one they could change because all the other NPCs were recorded. They redesigned her mission by juggling locked NPC lines and changing Shep’s reactions by rewriting text paraphrases to change the context of the already-recorded VO

Lukas snuck obscure nods ito ME2′s distress calls. In the general distress call for the Hugo Gernsback, there’s BW’s initial’s and Edmonton’s phone number backwards. In a fault in a beacon protocol there’s the initials and backward phone number from Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny”. In 2 other general distress calls there’s initials and numbers from Glenn Miller Orchestra’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000″ and initials and numbers from Geddy Lee and Rush’s “2112″ respectively 

Mass Effect 3

“The end of an era marks the beginning of another”

ME3 “marked the end of Shep’s story”

Saying bye to Shep was as difficult for devs as it was for players

JHale’s final VO session included Anderson’s death and romanced Garrus’ goodbye. “We were in the session and we both just started crying”, Caroline says. “I couldn’t come on the line to give her notes because I was crying, and she was crying. And so there was just this minute-long pause of like, nothing, nothing, nothing - just silence through the airwaves. And then I came on and just told her that I was crying and she said ‘I’m crying!’” They talked about these anecdotes also here on the N7 Day reunion panel

The Microsoft Kinect voice support required devs to teach Kinect hundreds of commands in a variety of accents across multiple languages. The result was useful but made for some awkward moments. Numerous players accidentally said “geth” or “quarian” while making a particular decision and accidentally killed Tali

MP chars were voiced by cops and military people

The helmet on one of the MP chars was originally designed for cancelled project Revolver

The payload device at the end needed to attach to the Citadel while essentially serving as a giant trigger. “It ended up becoming quite the engineering feet just to visualize how this thing would move and connect to the Citadel”

Concept artists explored creating an anti-team, where Kai Leng was almost an anti-Shepard essentially, with an elite squad to counteract your team. This idea never went beyond concept phase

ME3 Special Edition was released on Nintendo Wii U exclusively. This exclusive version of the game includes Genesis 2 (a sequel to the original Genesis comic) and unique gameplay features that took advantage of the touchscreen GamePad. For years Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood had had the honor of being BW’s only game made for a Nintendo console

FemShep regrettably didn’t feature in major ME marketing til ME3. Later releases like DAI, MEA and Anthem have taken increasing care not to gender their protagonists in cover art

To capture combat sounds they took a trip to CFB Wainwright, a military base southeast of Edmonton. They got a big tour of it and were allowed to record anything they could find. The tour ended with them getting to drive and shoot tanks (real shells). The force of doing that sent waves through Joel Green, he felt his whole chest compress when it went off; the perfect sound for the Black Widow! After the trip the soldiers let him keep the shell he fired and it’s been passed on like a torch to various devs since

Kakliosaurs began life as a joke in the writers’ room after John Dombrow placed a Grunt figure on a t-rex toy he had on his desk. Lore was brainstormed to justify the mash-up before someone asked, “Why don’t we put this in the game?” They loved it so much Karin had custom coffee mugs made

Bug report: For a while Tali’s final romance scene would fire when she was supposed to be dead

“Balancing combat: how designers in ME3 entered an ‘arms race’” - the solution to players feeling OP vs players feeling frustrated by really strong enemies is to find a good middle ground, but for designers Corey Gaspur and Brenon Holmes, it was war. Brenon designed enemies, Corey designed guns. Corey “was obsessed with bigger, heavier guns. We had this sort of informal competition where he’d make this crazy overturned gun that would just murder all the enemies, and then I tuned some stuff up to compensate”

Brenon had to invent new ways to “stop Corey” and this led to the Phantoms. Corey had in turn designed consumable rockets that could wipe out entire waves of enemies. He must’ve figured this would make short work of Brenon’s space ninjas, but Brenon had other plans: “I had just added the ability for her to cut rockets [when Corey was playing MP and he was watching]. She cut the rocket in half... Corey just turns and looks at me and is like: ‘Really dude? I just shot a rocket at this Phantom and she’s fine? Not even damaged? Zero damage?’” 

This friendly rivalry helped elevate ME3′s gameplay. Corey had a knack for making a gun feel so good to fire it had his fellow designers scrambling to keep up. It was his version of balancing. Before Corey sadly passed away he mentored Boldwin Li in all things weapon design and the arms race continued

Corey designed the Arc Pistol. It was causing problems for enemies because it was too powerful. It seemed hell bent on staying that way, Boldwin would tune down all its stats and it was still doing 3x the damage it should have been doing. “I was like ‘What the hell?’, and then I looked closer. It secretly fired 3 bullets for every pull of the trigger! Corey, you sneaky jerk”

The day it launched there were midnight launch parties across North America including one near the BW building. Numerous devs sat at long tables greeting fans and signing autographs as the fans picked up preorders. When midnight struck the line was long enough that it took several hours for some fans to get their game. One particular fan is remembered: “It was 3am. Some guy drove up from Calgary with his friends. He was like one of the last people in line. I think he was sort of tired-drunk. He threw himself across the tables, pulled up his shirt and shouted ‘Guys, sign my abs!’ And like I did, because he waited so long. It felt impolite not to. So I hope he enjoyed his copy of ME3″

For designing Protheans concept artists had free reign to design something that read as ancient

Before the concept art team had the story of the game to work toward, they explored wild ideas of their own including an image of the crew stealing back the Normandy to go after the Reapers

Jen Cheverie was testing scenes and was initially excited to be testing Mordin scenes, til she saw she was testing the Renegade version of his death. “This is even before like all of the audio and everything was in, so you didn’t even have the sad music. I remember sitting at my desk and my hands just went to my face when I saw that the gun Shep pulls on Mordin is the gun he gives Shep in ME2. I burst into tears and was crying for the rest of the day. People are waving to me as they walk by and I’m like, ‘It’s ok, I’m just killing my best friend’” 

There’s a segment called “Shepard’s story ends”. Casey on the ending: “There’s a whole bunch of things that come together to make it incredibly tense and emotional for players. I think the biggest one was the sense of finality, that whatever it was that happened in that very last moment... was it.” 

Wrapping up the story was a massive feat. In a way all of ME3 is an ending. Its final moments were the players’ last with a char they’d been with all the way from Eden Prime

“And while the critical reception of the game was extremely positive, many fans were unsatisfied with the ending, which became one of the most controversial in the history of games.” CH: “We were, on one hand, at the end of a marathon trying to finish the game and the series. But as devs we also knew that there would be more. We knew that we would continue to tell the story. In retrospect, we didn’t fully appreciate the tremendous sense of finality that it would have for people”. He envisioned an ending that posed new questions, something in the tradition of high sci-fi that left players dreaming about what that particular galaxy’s future could hold. “Frankly, there’s a lot more that we could have and should have done to honor the work players put in, to give them a stronger sense of reward and closure”

AAA games are massive undertakings with a million moving parts. Somehow they come together but even the best-planned projects don’t turn out quite like devs hope. From start to end video game production is a series of compromises. It’s rare if not impossible for devs to ship a game they’re entirely happy with. “I think that people imagine that when you finish a game, it’s exactly the way you wanted it to be. But whether people end up loving or hating the final result, we work hard to finish it the best we can, knowing that there’s a lot we would have wanted to do better. I think that’s true of any creative work”

As the dust settled after the initial reaction to the ending and later its epilogue, meant to show the wide-reaching ripple effects of Shep’s final choice, “players emerged mostly asking for one thing”. CH: “Now, most of what we hear, after both ME3 and MEA, is ‘Hey, just go make more Mass Effect’. And that to me is the most important thing. Knowing that players want to return to the ME universe is what inspires us to press on and imagine what comes next”

Mass Effect: Andromeda

By creating a new ME in a new galaxy the team was challenged to put their own visual stamp on the game while keeping it true to the franchise

Being the first ME game on a new gen of consoles meant for more detail

“Massive transport ships called arks populated with salarians, turians, humans, asari and quarians” made the risky jump to the Cluster

MEA was the first time BW had truly codeveloped across 3 studios: Edmonton, Montreal and Austin. The bulk of the work especially early on was done in Montreal, which was composed of a handful of Edmonton expats and heaps of experienced devs who joined from elsewhere specifically to bring a new ME experience to life. Series vets in Edmonton then came on to contribute writing, cinematics, design and QA, along with leadership from creative director Mac Walters and the core Production team. Austin writers and level designers also joined the fray

“It took a new team to take ME beyond the Milky Way”

Mac: “A lot of people in Montreal joined BW as fans of the franchise, so they just had this passion, and it felt like it was more like the days of Jade Empire, where a smaller younger team gets to do something for the first time. Even though it wasn’t necessarily a new IP for me, it felt fresh and new because of that. The team was just super excited to be working on it”

Early plans had the player exploring hundreds of worlds, procedurally generated, allowing for a nearly infinite variety of experiences. But as development wore on, it became clear that the game narrative required more specific, hand-touched level design on each world to keep the story focused and the experience engaging. “The plan was to give players numerous uncharted worlds to explore. Designers worked hard to come up with procedural elements that would make such planets special. Eventually the team made the difficult decision to abandon procedural planets in favor of more memorable hand-touched alien worlds, each with a specific story to tell”

One challenge was defining what ME meant without Shep. Care was given to include many of the MET’s key species. “Ryder recruited turian, asari, krogan and salarian followers”. Like Shep Ryder represents humanity’s hope for a peaceful coexistence among aliens who had long operated without human contact

Beginning with MEA the team decided that with few exceptions vehicles in ME have 6 wheels. Early Nomad concepts were bulkier. Later ones focused on its ability to move over its ability to protect itself from hostile fire, underlining the themes of exploration

German concept designer and auto-motive futurist Daniel Simon was contracted to create the Nomad and Tempest. The Tempest’s final design took inspo from the Concorde 

Concepts for angaran fighter ships have the following notes: “Two doors swing open, wings rotate down to function as landing struts, the landing struts split open. It has a spinning turbine engine 

Despite being set a galaxy away and some 600 years after Mordin’s death, there was a time when he had a cameo. It wasn’t cut due to running out of time however, it was cut due to drug references. John Dombrow explains: “One day I had to write a small quest for Kadara. I thought it’d be amusing if these 2 guys living way out on the fringes in a shack were growing plants for uh, medicinal purposes, and needed Ryder’s help with it. It occurred to me, wouldn’t it be amusing if Ryder had the option of actually trying ‘the medicine’ to see what would happen? And I thought, what if it turned into some hallucination that somehow involved SAM - like maybe SAM would sing? But why? How could I motivate that? Then it hit me. Who else in the ME game sings unexpectedly? MORDIN. As a nod to him I wrote SAM singing Modern Major-General. It got even better when our cine designer John Ebenger wanted to take it even further. Bless him, he came in on a Saturday to do a special hallucination showing Mordin himself. It was great. Til the fateful day we were told MEA had already been submitted to the ratings board. That’s when you declare things like drug references in your game. Mordin fell under that category which meant it was a no-go. We were too late”

Ryder’s white AI armor contrasts Shep’s iconic dark armor (intentional design)

Concept art for Ryder involved experiments with cloth (cloaks, ponchos, capes - “Pull here to release cloak”) and asymmetrical design elements

For alien design, there’s a few exceptions but humanoid figures are the ME standard and this persisted into MEA

Kett and angara concepts explored striking lines and textures 

– From Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

[feralphoenix]

SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS: The Mechanics of the Infection

welcome back to feral’s essay tag where the hot takes don’t stop from keep being hot!

this particular meta has a Lot of citations from canon, and my plan is to have them as actual footnotes in the dreamwidth mirror when that goes up (as i always crosspost my meta there in case my layout text is too small for any folks accessing these from computer and not mobile).

CONTENT WARNING FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay contains discussion of body horror, cancer, and many of the darker aspects of Hallownest’s society.

ALSO, AS USUAL: I read Hollow Knight as anti-colonialist fiction and all of my meta approaches the text from that angle. This essay is strongly critical of the Pale King and Hallownest, and affords sympathy to pre-Hallownest societies & native characters, including Radiance. If you come from a Christian cultural background (regardless of whether you currently practice the religion or not), some of the concepts I am going to discuss may be challenging for you. Please be responsible in your choice whether to engage with this content, and also, be respectful here or wherever else you’re discussing this essay. Thanks.

SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS: The Mechanics of the Infection

If you’ve ever looked through my Hollow Knight tags, you have probably seen me joke about the Infection like a lot, usually along the lines of Radiance casting Level 9 Inflict Tang on Hallownest, or “(radi voice) the End of EVA will continue until you Let My People Go” or some such. In addition to being some of the most beautiful body horror I’ve yet seen in fiction, its appearance also makes it a veritable meme factory.

It is also something that inspires a lot of very wild theorizing amongst fans, because canon tells us WHY the Infection exists but doesn’t ever directly explain WHAT it is. To name just a few of the guesses I’ve seen, people have posited that it could be some sort of pupa juice, or maybe some type of parasitic fungus.

I have my own guess, though, and it’s based on hints we can find in-game. I would like to share it with the class today, so let’s take a quick look through the sauce, starting with what we already know!

WHY

We learn why the Infection happened from Seer and Moss Prophet, and this is also summed up more directly in Team Cherry’s dev notes attached to Seer.

The Pale King wanted to be the only god of light in the crater,* so he tried to kill Radiance by thralling her children - attracting the moths with his light and making them forget about her,** assimilating them into Hallownest. Radiance survived because some moths still remembered and tried to preserve what they could of their original culture,*** and eventually she attempted to reassert her existence and communicate with the bugs of the crater by speaking to them through their dreams. However, the Pale King realized what was happening and ordered his worshippers to shut her out.****

Radiance did not give up, and continued to broadcast her message through dreams. This unstoppable force VS immovable object conflict could not last forever - something eventually had to give, and what gave was the mortals.***** The Infection was an accident that Radiance did not initially intend, but presumably chose to weaponize after the fact as a way to attempt to pressure TPK into releasing the moths and leaving her alone (or, barring that, a way to thoroughly destroy his kingdom at the very least).

SOURCES:

* “No blazing kin. Only one light shall shine against the dark.” - Lore tablet hidden beside the Pale King’s throne in the White Palace.

** “None of us can live forever, and so we ask those who survive to remember us. Hold something in your mind and it lives on with you, but forget it and you seal it away forever. That is the only death that matters.” - Seer’s 1200 Essence dialogue.

*** “But the memories of that ancient light still lingered, hush whispers of faith... Until all of Hallownest began to dream of that forgotten light.” - Seer’s 2400 Essence dialogue.

**** “The King and the bugs of hallownest resisted this memory/power and it started to manifest as the infection.” - from Team Cherry’s dev notes attached to Seer.

***** “Light is life, beaming, pure, brilliant. To stifle that light is to suppress nature. Nature suppressed distorts, plagues us.” - Moss Prophet's dialogue.

HOW

Now that we’ve recapped why the Infection exists, let’s examine the process of how the Infection works. We see some examples of this with various characters in-game, and the Hunter also shares his observations of the Infection’s mechanics in his commentary on the Infected Crossroads entries.

Since we’ll be bringing up the Hunter's Journal here, I want to first examine three entries to establish its dual authorship and how trustworthy it is: The Shade’s entry, the Lightseed’s, and Radiance’s.

We know that the bottom section of the Hunter’s Journal is the Hunter’s personal notes on each creature because the game itself tells us so. So who writes the notes on top that give a brief explanation of what each creature is? It’s a common fan theory that Ghost writes these, which I believe is indeed the case.

First let’s look at the Shade, which is automatically unlocked when we receive the Hunter's Journal in-game regardless of whether we have died and fought the Shade or not. Mechanically this is important because if the Shade weren’t unlocked by default it would be impossible to attain the Hunter achievements without dying at least once - this would REALLY suck for anybody who likes to suffer enough to try to complete the journal in Steel Soul mode.

The Shade’s entry reads:

Echo of a previous life. Defeat it to retake its power and become whole.

-

Each of us leaves an imprint of something when we die. A stain on the world. I don’t know how much longer this kingdom can bear the weight of so many past lives...

Notice that the top text knows exactly what the Shade is and how it works. In story terms, this would imply that Ghost has died and come back enough pre-game to understand the mechanics of how their revivals work.

The Lightseed’s entry reads:

A single-celled organism, completely infected. Scurries about simple-mindedly.

-

Strange air has been seeping down from above for years. Some of the air became liquid, and some of that liquid became flesh, and some of that flesh came to life. I don’t know what to make of it.

In this entry, the top text assumes that Lightseeds are a Lifeseed-like creature that has been infected, and the Hunter’s notes reveal that this is incorrect and the Lightseeds were actually born from the Infection itself. From this we learn that the top text isn’t omniscient and can be mistaken: It’s written from a limited perspective.

And here’s Radi’s entry:

The light,* forgotten.

-

The plague, the infection, the madness that haunts the corpses of Hallownest... the light that screams out from the eyes of this dead Kingdom. What is the source? I suppose mere mortals like myself will never understand.

Here, the top text has information that the Hunter doesn’t, and which only a handful of bugs are privy to anymore.

From these three examples, I believe it is safe to say that Ghost is in fact the author of the journal entries’ top segments.

It’s important to remember that the observations these characters make can be not wholly correct, and I’ll bring that up when I believe it to be relevant, but for now let’s build a picture of how a case of the Infection generally progresses by looking at the Hunter’s commentary on Infected Crossroads enemies, and at a handful of characters whose Infection we directly observe: Bretta, Sly, Myla, and Moss Prophet.

The Hunter describes the broad arc of Infection progression in the Violent Husk's entry: “First [the bugs of Hallownest] fell into deep slumber, then they awoke with broken minds, and then their bodies started to deform...”

The two NPCs who we can save from becoming Infected, Bretta and Sly, are initially found emitting orange fog and mumbling to themselves. In Bretta’s case, when listened to, she initially talks about being left behind and forgotten** as she assumes that all people will treat her this way even though she craves affection and attention; Dream Nailed either before or after being listened to, she mentions a “shining figure”.***

Meanwhile, Sly speaks about his pupil Oro and someone named Esmy, and when his symptoms subside he identifies that he was led to the Crossroads village ruins by a dream.****

Listening to Bretta and Sly completely brings them back to reality, after which they leave the underground area entirely to return to Dirtmouth. However, when the player encounters Myla after defeating Soul Master and obtaining Descending Dive, listening to her does not cause any change in her condition despite that she is not yet hostile.

During these encounters, Bretta is surrounded by orange fog, Sly is surrounded by orange fog and his eyes have also begun to turn orange, and Myla's eyes are glowing but there is no fog around her. So, we can deduce that for as long as the orange fog is present, a bug may still be awoken and cured (Bretta and Sly both show no signs of relapse over the course of the game), but once the fog disappears the bug can no longer be saved by external means.

The "deformation" that the Hunter mentions in the Violent Husk entry refers to the large blobs of Infection that develop on the bodies of creatures that have been infected for a long period of time. We observe these upon the Infected Crossroads enemies, as well as on Hollow and the Moss Prophet. We also see that these Infection tumors can eventually kill bugs once they grow too large and impede bodily functions, just like real cancer: The Moss Prophet and Mossy Vagabonds are all discovered in this state after the Crossroads become infected, as are the Husk Guards in the Crossroads.

So, the progression we can see here is that bugs become infected through their dreams, and while they can initially be woken, if left alone they will fall into too deep a sleep to wake up. Some time after this they will start to move around again but will be hostile to any creatures that are not infected. And, if left in this state for a very long period of time, they will develop tumorous growths which are potentially fatal.

Potentially fatal. This is an interesting contradiction to a basic assumption that most players - and even Ghost and the Hunter - seem to hold about the Infection: That is, that the Infection functions like a pop-culture zombie plague, and infected creatures are all undead (reanimated dead things that can't be killed); thus that the enemies that respawn after resting or going offscreen are the same ones that Ghost just murdered, and have simply been reanimated by the Infection once again.

But infected creatures can die of the Infection. What’s more, bosses and unique instances of generic enemies (such as Myla and the Moss Knight at the pier of Unn’s lake) do not respawn once killed. And it’s definitely not that Ghost killed them that counts: Traitor Lord dies whether Ghost fights him solo or whether Cloth is brought along, in which case she always gets the final blow. This creates the argument that the respawning generics are NOT in fact the same individuals reanimated over and over, but different individuals of the same enemy class, and that their different respawn rates speak to how plentiful those creatures are - small animals respawning faster because a new one will arrive in the recently killed one’s territory sooner, for instance.

Ghost and the Hunter both seem to assume that infected enemies are all undead - many creatures are identified as “husks” or “the remains of [whatever specific bug]” in the Hunter's Journal. But we’ve already established that sometimes Ghost and the Hunter are wrong.

So, if infected creatures aren’t undead, then what are they?

SOURCES:

* I find it a very interesting tidbit of characterization for Ghost that they refer to Radiance as the Light, as native bugs do, rather than calling her the Old Light, as Hallownest bugs did. This has some fascinating implications for where Ghost feels their allegiances to be, but that's neither here nor there right now lol.

** “Ohhh... please... don’t leave me behind! You... forgot about me...? I knew you would... everyone always forgets about me...” - Bretta’s dialogue, Fungal Wastes encounter

*** “...Shining figure...So bright...” - Bretta’s Dream Nail dialogue, Fungal Wastes encounter

**** “...ugghh, Oro you oaf.... You wield your nail... like a club... ...Esmy... how much deeper do we have to go... Oh! What?! Who are you?! ...I see. This old village. What a strange dream, to have led me down here! If you hadn’t found me, I don’t think I would’ve ever woken.” - Sly’s dialogue, Crossroads village encounter

WHAT

In a move very on-brand for Hollow Knight, there’s actually a line from Seer that gives the whole game away - and I mean this incredibly literally, she declares her loyalty to Radiance and says Fuck Hallownest and also hints at what she hopes for from Ghost all in two breaths!! - except that most players are never going to see this line because Seer only says this if you screw up platforming in the Forgotten Dream and yeet yourself off a platform before picking up the Dream Nail.

I do not doubt that I could wring a whole essay out of this one line by itself (and Seer deserves an essay from me so maybe I will), but today the part we’re concerned with is the third line of this dialogue, i.e. how she describes the Dream Nail to Ghost: “The power to wake this world from its slumber[.]”

Its slumber.

The Infection doesn’t only spread through dreams. It is a dream.

To put it in a more meta/video game mechanics sort of way, the Infection is a status ailment. Sleep exists as a common status ailment in RPGs, strategy games, and even some adventure games and platformers. Usually the status ailment of sleep is a mild nuisance that wears off after time, when a character is struck, or if the requisite curative is used; in comparison the Infection is Sleep But Bass Boosted. Appropriate, for a glorified status ailment that’s inflicted by the literal actual god of dreams.

The Infection can only be cured in the very early stages. Once an infected creature has fallen into a coma, there’s no longer any hope of a third party breaking the curse... and also, infected creatures sleepwalk. Violently.

This may also provide an explanation for why mummified bugs in the catacombs have been infected, too: If they were freshly dead and their lingering spirit was still attached enough to their corpses, and that lingering spirit retained enough of a mind to dream...

Aside from those mummified bugs, though, I believe it likely that most if not all of the infected enemies in-game are very, very much alive.

Beyond all the dialogue and lore crumbs pointing to the Infection simply being a cursed sleep, this explanation makes the most sense when thinking about Radiance as a character. She is the literal embodiment of dreams as well as the sun, so inflicting eternal slumber with bonus malignant sleepwalking is a natural extension of her power and a way to use it offensively without being directly violent.

(I've written about this at length elsewhere, but signs point to Radiance having been a pacifist prior to the Pale King’s invasion. Short version: The Moth Tribe were pacifists and Radiance was the center of their culture so it would be odd if she were an exception; she is incapable of inflicting any physical harm whatsoever in a game where lack of contact damage from an active enemy indicates helplessness and such enemies always flee from Ghost unless they have a tool they can use to fight with; her behavior in her boss battles indicates a lack of combat experience, and her nail-generating spells seem to be based on Hollow’s abilities. Real-life adult moths cannot fight - they defend themselves with flight, camouflage, mimicry, and I’m Poisonous So Fuck Off coloring.)

Now, I don’t want to downplay the harm the Infection causes - it doesn’t have to turn bugs into literal undead zombies to be devastating. What we can glean of Hallownest’s ruins suggests that as a state it was heavily dependent on labor to run its industry, so incapacitating the laborers would have turned the whole country on its head, especially because those laborers cannot be woken. The Infection also created an intense atmosphere of terror throughout Hallownest as bugs tried to discover ways to cure it or at least protect themselves. And as the Hunter observes,* because of how the Infection is caused, the harder you try to block Radiance out, the worse the Infection will get.

(A sidebar: Interestingly, the Infection's progress seems to be very slow when a creature willingly accepts it; Moss Prophet has Infection tumors when met but doesn’t die of them until the Crossroads is infected, though many Crossroads bugs are found dead of tumors immediately. Traitor Lord and his followers opted in to the Infection long ago, but Traitor Lord is still at the “orange fog” stage and could theoretically be cured, if he wanted to be. Both Traitor Lord and Moss Prophet are still completely lucid, too.)

Radiance may not have committed any direct violence against Hallownest, but the Infection does incite violence: infected creatures become hostile to and will attack the uninfected. And as we’ve discussed, the Infection itself can become fatal once it’s progressed far enough for tumorous growths to form.

A god smiting the shit out of her people’s oppressors by nonviolently but thoroughly disrupting their kingdom, Especially if that kingdom is a genocidal colonialist slave state,** as a Let My People Go And Leave Me Alone :) ultimatum is not unreasonable. (And Moss Prophet tells us point-blank that literally just listening to Radiance in the first place would have prevented the Infection before it began!) But despite that Hallownest as an institution is unambiguously awful, Hallownest bugs victimized by their own state (such as the maggot slaves and other menial workers) probably saw much less benefit from Hallownest’s genocides than the rich and nobility, and likely deserved the smiting way less than said rich and nobility.

Meanwhile Hallownest’s neighbors - all native nations who are just as much victims of TPK’s bullshit as the Moth Tribe - did not deserve to get caught up in the smiting at all.

Lateral harm in Hollow Knight is another topic that deserves its own essay - and more than that, lots of in-depth conversation! - but, again, that’s not the topic we want to focus on today. I do want to make it clear, though, that infected creatures being alive and theoretically wakeable if the curse should end doesn’t suddenly mean the Infection was actually no big deal. If you want your jimmies rustled, try Dream Nailing enemies that pull from the generic Dream Nail dialogue pool: They are on some level aware that they’re dreaming and can’t wake.***

Clues that the Infection is literally a dream are littered all over the game, from Elderbug’s initial dialogue**** to the name of ending 3, Dream No More - not only named that because that’s the ending where Ghost sacrifices Radiance’s life as well as their own to end Hollow’s suffering rather than only sacrificing their freedom.

Some of what Bardoon and Moss Prophet have to say about the Infection is suggestive of the nature of this dream, though. Moss Prophet appeals to their audience to find unity through the Infection,***** and Bardoon also remarks on this, though he cautions that this comes at the cost of being reduced to instinct.****** Dreaming does tend to come hand in hand with lack of inhibition and suggestibility, but I’m more interested in what Moss Prophet and Bardoon mean by unity, since infected creatures’ thoughts are different depending on what they are and what they were already doing while awake.

There's less specific hard evidence for this aside from how we can observe that Infection blobs are connected to Radiance, transmitting her heartbeat and birthing the Lightseeds, her unintended creations. But given that those blobs do originate from Infection fluid according to the Hunter... Radiance is not just the embodiment of dreams but the heart of THE Dream. So could the Infection be a forcible pseudo-immersion into that capital-D Dream, the Dream Realm itself?

Whether my hunch here is right or not, I can’t in good faith end this essay without bringing all y’all’s attention to absolutely my favorite bit of The Infection Is A Dream foreshadowing: The way multiple parties mention the fact that the Infection smells and tastes sweet.*******

You know... it’s sweet... it’s a sweet dream... get it.........

And now that you can no longer unsee that brilliantly awful pun, I think I'll see myself out!

SOURCES:

* “The infection that swept through Hallownest so long ago... they say that the harder you struggled against it, the more it consumed you.” - Hunter’s commentary, Slobbering Husk Hunter’s Journal entry.

** I’m referring, of course, to the maggots. See: “Weakest members of the kingdom of Hallownest. Generally looked down upon and forced to do menial labour.” (Ghost’s commentary) and “If they try to bargain for their life, just ignore them. They have nothing to offer.” (Hunter’s commentary) from the Maggot Hunter's Journal entry as well as False Knight/Failed Champion’s backstory. Remember also that maggots are the larval form of flies like Sly (you’ll see the resemblance if you compare Sly’s features to the maggot siblings’), meaning Hallownest employs child slavery. In more cheerful news Sly’s backstory must be absolutely goddamn wild.

*** “I’m not...Dead..” “Am I...Sleeping?” “I can’t....Wake up...” - Dream Nail dialogue from generic Hallownest bugs (Wandering Husk, Leaping Husk, Horned Husk, Husk Bully, Husk Warrior) and from God Tamer for some reason

**** “Perhaps dreams aren't such great things after all...” - Elderbug’s initial dialogue

***** “Embrace light! Achieve union!” - Moss Prophet’s dialogue

****** “Theirs is a different kind of unity. Rejection of the Wyrm’s attempt at order. I resist the light’s allure. Union it may offer, but also a mind bereft of thought... To instinct alone a bug is reduced...Hrrm...” - Bardoon’s dialogue (Listen four times, not counting other dialogue flags)

******* “A thick orange mist fills these walking corpses. It has a sweet, sickly taste to it. I find it foul. After you kill these creatures, I suggest you do not eat them.” - Hunter’s commentary, Husk Bully Hunter’s Journal entry, just for one example.

[thesteadydietofeverything]

Top 10 Games of 2019

This was an extremely good year for games. I don’t know if I played as many that will stick with me as I did last year, but the ones on the bottom half of this list in particular constitute some of my favorite games of the decade, and probably all-time. If I’ve got a gaming-related resolution for next year, it’s to put my playtime into supporting even smaller indie devs. My absolute favorite experiences in games this year came from seemingly out of nowhere games from teams I’ve previously never heard of before. That said, there are some big games coming up in spring I doubt I’ll be able to keep myself away from. Some quick notes/shoutouts before I get started:

-The game I put maybe the most time into this year was Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I finally made the plunge into neverending FF MMO content, and I’m as happy as I am overwhelmed. This was a big year for the game, between the release of the Shadowbringers expansion and the Nier: Automata raid, and it very well may have made it onto my list if I had managed to actually get to any of it. At the time of this writing, though, I’ve only just finished 2015’s Heavensward, so I’ve got...a long way to go. 

-One quick shoutout to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy that came out on Switch this year, a remaster of some DS classics I never played. An absolutely delightful visual novel series that I fell in love with throughout this year.

-I originally included a couple games currently in early access that I’ve enjoyed immensely. I removed them not because of arbitrary rules about what technically “came out” this year, but just to make room for some other games I liked, out of the assumption that I’ll still love these games in their 1.0 formats when they’re released next year to include them on my 2020 list. So shoutout to Hades, probably the best rogue-like/lite/whatever I’ve ever played, and Spin Rhythm XD, which reignited my love for rhythm games.

-Disco Elysium isn’t on this list, because I’ve played about an hour of it and haven’t yet been hooked by it. But I’ve heard enough about it to be convinced that it is 1000% a game for me and something I need to get to immediately. They shouted out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards! They look so cool! I want to be their friend! And hopefully, a few weeks from now, I’ll desperately want to redact this list to squeeze this game somewhere in here.

Alright, he’s the actual list:

10. Amid Evil

The 90’s FPS renaissance continues! As opposed to last year’s Dusk, a game I adored, this one takes its cues less from Quake and more from Heretic/Hexen, placing a greater emphasis on melee combat and magic-fuelled projectiles than more traditional weapons. Also, rather than that game’s intentionally ugly aesthetic, this one opts for graphics that at times feel lush, detailed, and pretty, while still probably mostly fitting the description of lo-fi. In fact, they just added RTX to the game, something I’m extremely curious to check out. This game continued to fuel my excitement about the possibilities of embracing out-of-style gameplay mechanics to discover new and fresh possibilities from a genre I’ve never been able to stop yearning for more of.

9. Ape Out

If this were a “coolest games” list, Ape Out would win it, easily. It’s a simple game whose mechanics don’t particularly evolve throughout the course of its handful of hours, but it leaves a hell of an impression with its minimalist cut-out graphics, stylish title cards, and percussive soundtrack. Smashing guards into each other and walls and causing them to shoot each other in a mad-dash for the exit is a fun as hell take on Hotline Miami-esque top down hyper violence, even if it’s a thin enough concept that it starts to feel a bit old before the end of the game.

8. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I had a lot of problems with this game, probably most stemming from just how damn long it is - I still haven’t finished my first, and likely only, playthrough. This length seems to have motivated the developers to make battles more simple and easy, and to be fair, I would get frustrated if I were getting stuck on individual battles if I couldn’t stop thinking about how much longer I have to go, but as it is, I’ve just found them to be mostly boring. This is particularly problematic for a game that seems to require you to play through it at least...three times to really get the full picture? I couldn’t help but admire everything this game got right, though, and that mostly comes down to building a massive cast of extremely well realized and likable characters whose complex relationships with each other and with the structures they pledge loyalty to fuels harrowing drama once the plot really sets into motion. There’s a reason no other game inspired such a deluge of memes and fan fiction and art into my Twitter feed this year. It’s an impressive feat to convince every player they’ve unquestionably picked the right house and defend their problem children till the bitter end. After the success of this game, I’d love to see what this team can do next with a narrower focus and a bigger budget.

7. Resident Evil 2

It’s been a long time since I played the original Resident Evil 2, but I still consider it to be one of my favorite games of all time. I was highly skeptical of this remake at first, holding my stubborn ground that changing the fixed camera to a RE4-style behind the back perspective would turn this game more into an action game and less of a survival horror game where feeling a lack of control is part of the experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much they were able to modernize this game while maintaining its original feel and atmosphere. The fumbly, drifting aim-down sights effectively sell the feeling of being a rookie scared out of your wits. Being chased by Mr. X is wildly anxiety-inducing. But even more surprisingly, perhaps the greatest upgrade this game received was its map, which does you the generous service of actually marking down automatically where puzzles and items are, which rooms you’ve yet to enter, which ones you’ve searched entirely, and which ones still have more to discover. Arguably, this disrupts the feeling of being lost in a labyrinthine space that the original inspired, but in practice, it’s a remarkably satisfying and addicting video game system to engage with.

6. Judgment

No big surprise here - Ryu ga Gotoku put out another Yakuza-style game set in Kamurocho, and once again, it’s sitting somewhere on my top 10. This time, they finally put Kazuma Kiryu’s story to bed and focused on a new protagonist, down on his luck lawyer-turned-detective Takayuki Yagami. The new direction doesn’t always pay off - the added mechanics of following and chasing suspects gets a bit tedious. The game makes up for it, though, by absolutely nailing a fun, engrossing J-Drama of a plot entirely divorced from the Yakuza lore. The narrative takes several head-spinning turns through its several dozen hours, and they all feel earned, with a fresh sense of focus. The side stories in this one do even more to make you feel connected to the community of Kamurocho by befriending people from across the neighborhood. I’d love to see this team take even bigger swings in the future - and from what I’ve seen from Yakuza 7, that seems exactly like what they’re doing - but even if this game shares maybe a bit too much DNA with its predecessors, it’s hard to complain when the writing and acting are this enjoyable.

5. Control

Control feels like the kind of game that almost never gets made anymore. It’s a AAA game that isn’t connected to any larger franchises and doesn’t demand your attention for longer than a dozen hours. It doesn’t shoehorn needless RPG or MMO mechanics into its third-person action game formula to hold your attention. It introduces a wildly clever idea, tells a concise story with it, and then its over. And there’s something so refreshing about all of that. The setting of The Oldest House has a lot to do with it. I think it stands toe-to-toe with Rapture or Black Mesa as an instantly iconic game world. Its aesthetic blend of paranormal horror and banal government bureaucracy gripped my inner X-Files fan instantly, and kept him satisfied not only with its central characters and mystery but with a generous bounty of redacted documents full of worldbuilding both spine-tingling and hilarious. More will undoubtedly come from this game, in the form of DLC and possibly even more, with the way it ties itself into other Remedy universes, and as much as I expect I will love it, the refreshing experience this base game offered me likely can’t be beat.

4. Anodyne 2

I awaited Sean Han Tani and Marina Kittaka’s new game more anxiously than almost any game that came out this year, despite never having played the first one, exclusively on my love for last year’s singular All Our Asias and the promise that this game would greatly expand on that one’s Saturn/PS1-esque early 3D graphics and personal, heartfelt storytelling. Not only was I not disappointed, I was regularly pleasantly surprised by the depth of narrative and themes the game navigates. This game takes the ‘legendary hero’ tropes of a Zelda game and flips them to tell a story about the importance of community and taking care of loved ones over duty to governments or organizations. The dungeons that similarly reflect a Link to the Past-era Zelda game reduce the maps to bite-sized, funny, clever designs that ask you to internalize unique mechanics that result in affecting conclusions. Plus, it’s gorgeously idiosyncratic in its blend of 3D and 2D environments and its pretty but off-kilter score. It’s hard to believe something this full and well realized came from two people. 

3. Eliza

Eliza is a work of dystopian fiction so closely resembling the state of the world in 2019 it’s hard to even want to call it sci-fi. As a proxy for the Eliza app, you speak the words of an AI therapist that offers meager, generic suggestions as a catch-all for desperate people facing any number of the nightmares of our time. The first session you get is a man reckoning with the state the world is in - we’ve only got a few more years left to save ourselves from impending climate crisis, destructive development is rendering cities unlivable for anyone but the super-rich, and the people who hold all the power are just making it all worse. The only thing you offer to him is to use a meditation app and take some medication. It doesn’t take long for you to realize that this whole structure is much less about helping struggling people and more about mining personal data.

There’s much more to this story than the grim state of mental health under late capitalism, though. It’s revealed that Evelyn, the character you play as, has a much closer history with Eliza than initially evident. Throughout the game, she’ll reacquaint herself with old coworkers, including her two former bosses who have recently split and run different companies over their differing frightening visions for the future. The game offers a biting critique of the kind of tech company optimism that brings rich, eccentric men to believe they can solve the world’s problems within the hyper-capitalist structure they’ve thrived under, and how quickly this mindset gives way to techno-fascism. There’s also Evelyn’s former team member, Nora, who has quit the tech world in favor of being a DJ “activist,” and her current lead Rae, a compassionate person who genuinely believes in the power of Eliza to better people’s lives. The writing does an excellent job of justifying everyone’s points of view and highlighting the limits of their ideology without simplifying their sense of morality.

Why this game works so well isn’t just its willingness to stare in the face of uncomfortably relevant subject matter, but its ultimately empathetic message. It offers no simple solutions to the world’s problems, but also avoids falling into utter despair. Instead, it places measured but inspiring faith in the power of making small, meaningful impacts on the people around you, and simply trying to put some good into your world. It’s a game both terrifying and comforting in its frank conclusions.

2. Death Stranding

For a game as willfully dumb as this one often is - that, for example, insists on giving all of its characters with self-explanatory names long monologues about how they got that name - Death Stranding was one of the most thought provoking games I’ve played in a while. Outside of its indulgent, awkwardly paced narrative, the game offers plenty of reflection on the impact the internet has had on our lives. As Sam Porter Bridges, you’re hiking across a post-apocalyptic America, reconnecting isolated cities by delivering supplies, building infrastructure, and, probably most importantly, connecting them to the Chiral Network, an internet of sorts constructed of supernatural material of nebulous origin. Through this structure, the game offers surprisingly insightful commentary about the necessity for communication, cooperation, and genuine love and care within a community.

The lonely world you’re tasked to explore, and the way you’re given blips of encouragement within the solitude through the structures and “likes” you give and receive through the game’s asynchronous multiplayer system, offers some striking parallels for those of us particularly “online” people who feel simultaneous desperation for human contact and aversion to social pressures. I’ve heard the themes of this game described as “incoherent” due to the way it seems to view the internet both as a powerful tool to connect people and a means by which people become isolated and alienated, but are both of these statements not completely true to reality? The game simplifies some of its conclusions - Kojima seems particularly ignorant of America’s deep structural inequities and abuses that lead to a culture of isolation and alienation. And yet, the questions it asks are provocative enough that they compelled me to keep thinking about them far longer than the answers it offers.

Beyond the surprisingly rich thematic content, this game is mostly just a joy to play. Death Stranding builds kinetic drama out of the typically rote parts of games. Moving from point A to point B has become an increasingly tedious chore in the majority of AAA open world games, but this is a game built almost entirely out of moving from point A to point B, and it makes it thrilling. The simple act of walking down a hill while trying to balance a heavy load on your back and avoiding rocks and other obstacles fulfills the promise of the term ‘walking simulator’ in a far more interesting way than most games given that descriptor. The game consistently doles out new ways to navigate terrain, which peaked for me about two thirds of the way through the game when, after spending hours setting up a network of zip lines, a delivery offered me the opportunity to utilize the entire thing in a wildly satisfying journey from one end of the map to another. It was the gaming moment of the year.

1. Outer Wilds

The first time the sun exploded in my Outer Wilds playthrough, I was probably about to die anyway. I had fallen through a black hole, and had yet to figure out how to recover from that, so I was drifting listlessly through space with diminishing oxygen as the synths started to pick up and I watched the sun fall in on itself and then expand throughout the solar system as my vision went went. The moment gave me chills, not because I wasn’t already doomed anyway, but because I couldn’t help but think about my neighbors that I had left behind to explore space. I hadn’t known that mere minutes after I left the atmosphere the solar system would be obliterated, but I was at least able to watch as it happened. They probably had no idea what happened. Suddenly their lives and their planet and everything they had known were just...gone. And then I woke up, with the campfire burning in front of me, and everyone looking just as I had left it. And I became obsessed with figuring out how to stop that from happening again. 

What surprised me is that every time the sun exploded, it never failed to produce those chills I felt the first time. This game is masterful in its art, sound, and music design that manages to produce feelings so intense from an aesthetic so quaint. Tracking down fellow explorers by following the sound of their harmonica or acoustic guitar. Exploring space in a rickety vessel held together by wood and tape. Translating logs of conversations of an ancient alien race and finding the subject matter of discussion to be about small interpersonal drama as often as it is revelatory secrets of the universe. All of the potentially twee aspects of the game are balanced out by an innate sense of danger and terror that comes from exploring space and strange worlds alone. At times, the game dips into pure horror, making other aspects of the presentation all the more charming by comparison. And then there’s the clockwork machinations of the 22-minute loop you explore within, rewarding exploration and experimentation with reveals that make you feel like a genius for figuring out the puzzle at the same time that you’re stunned by the divulgence of a new piece of information.

The last few hours of the game contained a couple puzzles so obfuscated that I had to consult a guide, which admittedly lessened the impact of those reveals, but it all led to one of the most equally devastating and satisfying endings I’ve experienced in a video game recently. I really can’t say enough good things about this game. It’s not only my favorite game this year, but easily one of my favorite games of the decade, and really, of all-time, when it comes down to it.

[thewildjoshwaa]

Oni:Trials of Destiny Dev Blog

Pre Assumptions/Week 1

The first week we formed our groups. After a successful project working on Ashes myself, our former team leader Hassan and artist Cedez wanted to form up and work together for this project. However, this time we decided to take on Nela who is an excellent programmer, Mike who is a talented 3D modeller and Ella who is also a talented 3D modeller. Between the former Ashes team we decided we needed two modellers as opposed to one, as last time we had a very large workload to create 3D models just for one modeller. We decided this time we would need two in order to better space out that workload.

Last module I was an artist for the group and had helped with other aspects of the project such as texturing. This time however I wanted to work on the programming, as I had an entire semester working with code and would also be working in unity for my other project this semester. Therefore I believe I would be able to apply my new skills here. This was agreed with the entire group meaning we would have myself, Nela and Cedex as programmers. Hassan as team leader and artist. Finally Mike and Ella would be our 3D modellers. I was very happy with this team and felt we had one of the strongest teams assembled so far. 

Our task this week was to each come up with a game idea and some concept art for it to show off our ideas and between us all pick one idea to go with and develop it for the project. My idea was a cyberpunk themed platformer where the player would have to track criminals/dangerous creatures and hunt them down bringing back the targets alive. The player would have to find clues in the levels to find them and track the target.

Week 2

After some careful consideration we actually took a few ideas from a couple of the other ideas we put forward and developed it as a group, each member contributing evenly to our idea until we had something concrete so everyone was happy working on the project in a passionate way. 

Week 2 ended up being a very busy week for the group. In order to inspire the aesthetics of our game  we built up a pinterest board centered around the Kitsune, Japanese mythology, futurism and other mythologies/cultures, which was collaborated on as a group. For my own personal contribution I was tasked with developing the character controller and the camera controller for the player in a white box level. 

This is the first time I have worked on a 3rd person 3D game before, but with the help of some tutorials, developing these components I was tasked with this week turned out to be a relatively simple task at first. The challenge with this task was solving the camera collision and clipping issues we would inevitably have. I couldn’t get this to work perfectly from week 2, but I did manage to get the camera to collide correctly to limit clipping in terrain. Whilst clipping would still occur at this stage, I will have to tweak and refine the character controller in future weeks. For the purposes of a whitebox however, what I had developed this week would suffice.

Week 3

Again this week would turn out to be a very busy week as I had picked up 3 important tasks in terms of developing more basic mechanics for the player character. We also had a major setback in that Hassan unfortunately would leave the team this week to work on his placement for the BBC. Hassan would have been an amazing asset for our team so I saw this is a pretty big blow for us particularly because he was our project manager for the last project and now this one. Luckily we do still have a very strong team despite the loss of Hassan and Nela naturally stepped up in the project manager role, setting tasks for the team this week and organising our documentational side of things.

In terms of my tasks, I was developing the jump, dodge and health mechanics for the player. Unfortunately the jump and dodge mechanics took a little longer than anticipated to get working, I had some major issues with the jump being far too strong or too weak even though I was only increasing or decreasing the jumpforce by very small increments. I did manage to find a workable medium that would work for the very early prototype stages of the project, but the jump did feel very floaty and was still a little too high. Ultimately this will be worked on and tweaked in future weeks. For the dodge I opted to have a teleport style dodge similar to how Noctis would dodge attacks in the latest Final Fantasy instalment at the time. I did this as I was keeping in mind the workload for our modellers who would also be rigging the character for animation, and in order to lessen their workload I felt having a particle effect animation play when the character does the teleportation dodge would not only help reduce their workload, but also fit the character being a mystical kitsune with powers and look aesthetically pleasing at the same time. This would also need tweaking as right now the player can teleport through geometry which can cause bugs of falling through the map or skipping puzzles we had planned later down the development pipeline.

The final task I worked on was the Health mechanics. I had opted to develop a health system that both the player and the enemies can use, as well as a visible health bar that the player and enemies can use. I managed to get this working relatively fast and through testing damage to the player would accurately reflect on the player health bar.

Week 4

After a busy first few weeks for me in developing this project, this week was more relaxed. We were ahead of schedule compared to other groups, so this week was solely focused on refining the character controls and tweaking the current mechanics. Other members were working on getting assets into our would be level and developing the game infrastructure such as the menus. I also added sections on the Game design document based on the assets I had produced so far on the project.

Week 5

This week had some confusion. We had two white box levels. Myself and Cedez were working in one white box level and Nela was working in another. In order for Nela to test her enemies she had to incorporate some of the assets I had developed such as the camera controller and health system. I had to show Nela how to correctly set up and link the camera controller as well as how to set up the health bar on the enemies correctly. As a result of proper testing with the projectiles and multiple enemies this caused issues for the health bar both for the player and enemies. Whilst the health system itself was tracking the correct amount of health and damage for the player and enemies, the health bar wouldn’t reflect this properly. The issue was having multiple enemies on a level at the same time, the health bar script was looking for one enemy health bar to work with but it had multiple. In the end we took the health bar off the enemy entirely. This solved the issue with the player health bar also.

Week 6

We had successfully managed to transfer the assets we had to the actual game level people would play, and even the actual fox player models to the player and camera controller. This was in time for testing this week whereby we had first year game students come and give us feedback for the game. I was in charge of producing a questionnaire for playtesters to fill in and logging their feedback as well as any bugs they encountered.

As a result of their feedback we immediately started working on fixes to the bugs people encountered which I had helped with. The biggest contribution from me was fixing the camera controller making it way easier for the player controller because before the test it was clunky and strange to work with.

We also removed the dodge mechanic from the game as it was causing too many issues with clipping the player through the geometry and skipping parts of the level. We decided dodge was no longer required anyway and the player could work without this mechanic as the player had tools such as their projectiles to defeat enemies or they can easily sun away if they take too much damage.

Week 7

Week 7 was a very tough week for me personally. I was tasked with developing a sprint mechanic for the player and fixing some of the bugs that were reported in play testing. However I didn’t complete these tasks as I was faced with some very difficult and tough personal circumstances that caused me to lose my normal passion, motivation and fight to achieve in developing a game. I brought this to the attention of the group and they were very understanding with me and Nela was especially so as she picked up my tasks, and was very supportive.

Quarantine

Uni closed down and everyone was forced to work from home. I still had ongoing personal issues and was bouncing between places I was living, which limited my capability to work on the project. Due to the uncertainty and overall lack of motivation across the group there were a couple of weeks where a few group members understandably didn’t work on the project too much. Even Nela who I would say is the hardest working member of the group had knocked motivation based on the circumstances. During the early stages of this period the group didn’t communicate as much as we normally would have which is again understandable considering the circumstances. Thanks to all the hard work we had put into the project before the lockdown, these weeks where little was being developed didn’t affect the project too badly.

After a few weeks we managed to pull together as a group, fix issues, communicate better until the project was near completion. Towards the last 3/4 weeks before deadline we only had sounds to incorporate, narration for the cutscene and finishing up the documentation for these parts as well as producing a presentation with some gameplay. When I had personally bounced back I was tasked with creating fall damage for the character. I had successfully created working fall damage that reflected damage based on how far the player fell. However when applied to the fox character for some reason this would not work properly. Fall damage was being reflected with standard jumps when it shouldn’t and changing the fall value slightly would mean the player would take no damage no matter how far they fell. I brought this to Nela’s attention and she couldn’t figure out how to make it work properly either. We believe it has something to do with the fox having two character models at all times due to the transformation mechanic. As the transformation mechanic is a key mechanic and we were running out of time we decided to scrap fall damage for now and implement fences in places the player could fall from to skip parts of the level, or instant death if they fall to places the player shouldn’t go.

I was tasked with being the voice of the narrator. Between myself and Cedez we came up with a script that goes with the cutscene. We had to not only write something that goes in time with what the player is seeing but also provide enough story and context to give the player a better idea of what is going on in the game. We had no issues with the script or recording my voice and Cedez edited the narration to fit the cutscene.

My final effort with the project involved working on my task for the presentation we had to film. I talked about some of the things I had produced earlier on in the development for Oni. I quickly produced a speech and recorded myself going through it resulting in a three minute thirty audio clip. I then recorded gameplay whilst listening to the clip to ensure what I was playing fit with what I was saying in the speech which resulted in three minutes thirty seconds worth of gameplay on my segment of the presentation alone.

Post Mortem

Ultimately Oni:Trials Of Destiny really turned out well despite the setbacks we had as a group both before the lockdown and during it. Due to the group's strength, I believe we came up with a really cool prototype that is both fun and artistically pleasing. Both the programmer and the modelling teams did a great job on developing their assets as a team and we all supported each other and helped each other when it was required. Creating a 3D 3rd person platformer I thought was going to be a real challenge due to my own personal lack of experience in developing a game like this, but thanks to really digging in and researching how to develop a lot of the assets and components needed at the start of the project, really helped push me and learn.

I had learnt so much switching from an artist to a programmer for this unit. I felt being a programmer meant I was far more involved in the project and how it would turn out, whether it would be a success or a failure. I enjoyed the problem solving aspect of this role despite the stress it brought at times. Whilst some of the components I produced were not perfect, I had learnt a lot by making mistakes and having people like Nela and Cedez helping me, as I helped them at times during the project.

My only disappointment was the lull I had during my difficult time just before the quarantine and some weeks during the beginning of it. I wish I had bounced back sooner as I feel I disappointed my team despite their understanding, and I wished I picked up my own slack so they could get on with their own tasks. Whilst the end product of our project turned out really well, there were some things we couldn’t quite get to work such as the dodge mechanic and fall damage that if I did bounce back sooner, may well have been implemented properly into the game making it better. However, I did bounce back, I wasn’t down and out all the way through. This will make me a stronger game developer no matter what role I end up in future projects.

Asset List

- Character controller

- Camera controller

- Jump

- Dodge (not used)

- Health system

- Health bar script

- Fall damage (not used)

- Narrator (voice and script)

- Some Sections related to what I did, in the GDD

[fromthedeskofelizabeththird]

Dearest Elly, allow me to identify myself as the thirsty anon who asked about slbp. I want to thank you for answering my ask so quickly and thoroughly. As suggested I went with Shingens route noting to put Saizo on my next list cause again, I am one thirsty virgin. Allow me to jus say that I was moments away from blowing my whole paycheck on pearls. All of it. I had to put the phone down, eat dinner with my mom, take a long cold shower, and ponder my life choices. (Part1)

(Part2) This hasn’t happened since mysme. Not because it was revolutionarily smutty but because I fell hard for Shingen and was hella frustrated that I could read his story in one sitting. Those bastards at voltage know damn well what they’re doing by creating games like these and yeah I can see why teasing smutty content would become a meme. I mean damn. I haven’t wanted to bang a fictional character this bad since Jihyun said “wait for me.”

(Part3final I swear)Anyways thanks for your recommendations and advice. I am now looking for a higher paying job to support my newfound obsession. And as always thank you so much for everything that you post with us. Might I mention again that it was your wonderful writing that made me want to try this game out in the first place. I wanted to know the characters and was hella curios about a Yukimura?

I’m so happy you’re enjoying it, Nonny! Welcome to hell…we have kinky njnjas! Really though, I don’t think there’s a bigger honour as a fic writer to hear your word vomit inspired people to check out the original work, so thank you so much.

In terms of pearls, there are a number of ways to get them for free, though it takes quite some time to do so:

Visit your allies at their castle! You can visit your allies whenever you want and leave messages etc, but it’s definitely worth doing at least once per day as the game gives you a limited number of attempts to claim gold, onigiri and sometimes even pearls.

Speaking of onigiri, make sure you use the tea garden, since you can exchange onigiri for in game items, including story passes, gold and...yes...pearls.

Speaking of gold, the castle lottery is a great way to farm pearls. You can play 10x in a row in exchange for 3000 gold, which doesn’t take too long to gather if you go training/trysting often enough. Bear in mind which events are on, though, since in story events you will need that gold to progress through the event. (The alternative is spending pearls, which goes against the object of the exercise lmao)

Events! More specifically Battle Events (which is the next event!! Yay!!). Battle events are awesome for farming pearls, since all you have to do is hand over the items you automatically collect for playing the game. Story events also have pearls, but you need to be top of your allies to get them, which as a beginner player won’t be so easy at first.

Sometimes the devs have log in events or reading campaigns, but not all of the time. The rest, though, are tried and tested and have saved me so much money, haha.

Also, if it’s smut you’re looking for, I honestly recommend trying Love 365 or Lovestruck on the app store. These are also Voltage apps, but are 17+ rated, compared to SLBP’s 12+. As I’m sure you can imagine, these stories are a good deal raunchier. Love 365 is a paid app, but all in all it isn’t too badly priced. I personally have the VIP pass and get three stories every month. Lovestruck comes from the American branch of Voltage and not only is it steamy and free to play, but it’s also a good deal more...progressive??...than a lot of otome apps. You have multiple POC and LGBTQ love interests (and many who fall into both categories). 

Also holY shit Yukimura. I love him so much ;; He’s just so cute. He’s a peach.

I feel like if you enjoy V, you’ll probably like Kenshin. Everything fandom loves about V, like the eccentric, overly romantic artist with a soft heart who loathes himself and will die for those he loves, is true of Kenshin and his route.

I’ll shut up now dgdfgd, but yay for playing SLBP!

[possumcorpse]

Nightly Post

Thinking at night isn't that fun sometimes. Thinking isn't fun sometimes.

So a sort of event happened after my playthrough of DDLC and I just wanna say that I hate myself for torturing myself and causing something not good, as well as not reading warnings until after the game is over. Big oof.

I ended up buying the DLC fan pack thing for it because 1.) It has cool music and 2.) support indie devs. Night in the Woods was made by 2 people (I think? Or a large team but two people who had the idea). Same thing with PUBG- one guy started off naking mods for games, and now he's working with a large company to develop PUBG.

Five Nights at Freddy's, although long overdue its expiration date imo, is made by a single person, so that's still something to recognize. Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion is made by two people. Unturned was made by a high schooler.

Supporting indie developers is the same as supporting artists. You enjoy their work, you spread their work, and you support them. That pretty much goes for a lot of stuff. And it's sometimes inspiring for other people to work towards that and make their own stuff.

Maybe I'm experiencing extreme moodswings or something, I dunno. Maybe it's just that I'm thinking differently tonight. Most of this week has been shit imo, with a few teensy good stuff in between, and that's what I'm focusing on and thinking about right now, I guess. Even if the week sucked ass, at least I did something and enjoyed myself a little bit.

There's just stuff I'm still worried about, and it's eating away at me. And I still got questions about myself as well.

It's Saturday and it's 1:20 AM. I'm gonna go to sleep and at least get a few hours of sleep. I can decide what to do today later.

I hope all of you are having a wonderful, beautiful day today and have an awesome rest of your week.

Goodnight.

Xoxo

- Jedi(??? oof) (Jedi works overall)

okay weird i was gonna post this but outside my room it sounds like a laundry basket fell? weird idk

A song for tonight? I don't got one sorry but check out any song from MLP, I guess? theres some bomb af music sometimes

[asfeedin]

7 Days in Hell, a rare Test win in Australia and Skydiving from space

4:44 PM IST

ESPN staff

Struggling to cope in a world without any sporting action? Fear not. In our latest series, we put together a list of videos you can watch right now to fill that adrenaline pumping again. This week’s picks features a rare Indian Test win in Australia and skydiving from space.

7 Days in Hell

The Wimbledon 2010 first round match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut is the kind of stuff they make 30 for 30 documentaries about. Until they do, we have 7 Days In Hell.

Comedian Andy Samberg and writer Murray Miller get inspired from the longest tennis match ever and take it into a weird and hilarious direction. Samberg and Kit Harrington play Aaron Williams and Charles Poole, two tennis players locked in a never-ending battle at Wimbledon. The origin stories of the players – which include a reverse Blind Side situation, prison escapes, bad parenting and drug abuse – serve as the perfect set-up leading to the climactic 7-day finale on the Centre Court. Williams is the adopted brother of Serena and Venus Williams, making a comeback, and Poole is a child prodigy who idolises Aaron Williams.

2 Related

The dramatic match features interruptions caused by things like weather delays and streakers, to things like road accidents and a failed magic trick by David Copperfield.

The documentary stars Serena Williams, John McEnroe and Chris Evert playing themselves, and a lot of other comedians, including Lena Dunham, Howie Mandel, and SNL alums Fred Armisen and Will Forte. – Annanya Johari

Watch it on Disney+Hotstar

When Tests were competitive but gentlemanly

In recent times, Jai Galagali has become a popular YouTuber thanks his Time Machine, rare footage of vintage Indian cricket. This is a clip of the final day’s play at Sydney between India and Australia in 1978. Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket had taken off, and Australia were forced to call Bob Simpson back from retirement to lead the team against Bishan Bedi’s Indians.

With Kapil Dev still months away from his debut, Karsan Ghavri and…Mohinder Amarnath shared the new ball. The pace of play is leisurely, but the quality is good. Bowlers applauded batsmen for a good shot, and fielders escorted the ball to the boundary (though substitute Madan Lal didn’t get that memo, around 17:55). It’s a rare Test win in Australia, though, and by all accounts India should have wrapped the series at Adelaide, but fell short of what would have been a record fourth-innings chase. Watch out for the interviews at the end, with Simpson appearing in his Australia blazer. – Debayan Sen

Watch it on Youtube

The ghost F1 lap

The best way to understand what Ayrton Senna meant to race driving worldwide is to see the 2h 43m Asif Kapadia documentary, Senna. A clip on YouTube shows a video of his 1988 Monte Carlo GP race, camera set up on his McLaren, and runs his voice in audio saying he felt like he was “in a different dimension… The circuit for me was a tunnel and I was just going, going more and more and more.” Senna wasn’t talking about the race, he was talking about his qualifying lap in an interview he gave to Canadian journalist Gerald Donaldson.

The YouTube clip off the documentary certainly looks like it belongs to that out of body experience, but it doesn’t. There is, in fact, no recording of that surreal qualifying lap where Senna dropped two seconds off his McLaren teammate Alain Prost, racing in an identically set-up car. The mystic lap remains part of the Senna allure but McLaren did produce an astonishing simulation complete with commentary. It was put together by Codemasters, the makers of F1 video games and commentator Murray Walker’s enthusiastic voiceover. It’s not the real deal, but you could be fooled. To get a taste of Senna on the charge, there’s the emotional six-odd minutes of Lap of Life – beautiful, powerful. – Sharda Ugra

Watch it on YouTube

Falling faster than the speed of sound

Felix Baumgartner once jumped out of an aeroplane, wearing a wingsuit, and beat the plane in a race. He has jumped into the world’s second biggest cave. He has jumped off two of the world’s tallest buildings (illegally). He has flown across the English Channel on a wingsuit (no jet pack, no engine, he glided across 34 kms at ~350kmph). They all sound impossible, and look even better. And yet, they don’t even come close to his greatest stunt.

That’s because, in 2012, Baumgartner went up into space, stepped out, looked at Earth as we have seen only from satellite pictures, and thought, ‘heck, let’s jump.’ – Anirudh Menon

Watch it on Youtube

The truth behind doping in sport

In Icarus, an amateur cyclist and playwright, Bryan Fogel pedals through the rickety cycling testing system in the wake of Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal. To uncover its facilitators, Fogel, the director of this documentary, takes performance-enhancing drugs himself and tries to dodge detection in preparation for an amateur cycle race. It’s only the starting point for graver, more morbid truths. He’s led to Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of Moscow’s anti-doping center, who is shown to display extraordinary commitment to furthering the cause of tainted sport. Rodchenkov goes even as far as confessing on camera that Russia’s medals at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games were ill-gotten, a product of its athletes using drugs to fudge performances. In that edition of the Games, Russia topped the medals tally with 29 medals, 11 of them gold. Rodchenkov is only a small part of a grand design. The documentary uses George Orwell’s 1984 as a narrative tool and what slowly creeps up on us is the workings of a state-backed doping program with links to the highest levels of the Russian government. – Susan Ninan

Watch it on Netflix

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Tags: 7, 7 days in hell, Australia, classic matches, coronavirus shutdown, covid 19 isolation, days, hell, lockdown watchlist, Rare, Skydiving, space, Test, weekend watchlist, what to watch, Win

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Hi everyone! We have just published an article on Failory written by Amir Rajan, in which he tells the story behind his mobile game, called “A Dark Room”, which hit #1 on the App Store and grossed over $800,000. Sit down and read his success story. I hope you enjoy it and if you have any questions, I will happily answer them below. Sit back. This is gonna be a long one. TL;DR:Did the whole "get a degree, get a job" thing. Ended up being incredibly well paid, but horribly empty because of corporate America. Decided to rage quit, downsize (sell pretty much everything I own), and take a sabbatical. After binge coding on random crap, I partnered with a guy in Canada and ported a web based, incremental, text based game to iOS (A Dark Room iOS). Welp. It went viral and hit the #1 spot. That let me extend my sabbatical for another three years. I built four more games, none of which succeeded. Now I'm back in Corporate America (luckily only part time now... I make enough off my games and other assets to not have to work all year). The Long Version: Frustration:There is such a heavy dose of luck in success. There are those that will give one thousand percent, and because the roll of the dice wasn't perfect, nothing materializes. They have as much love for the game development as I have... they've worked as hard as I have... but just didn't get a kiss from Lady Luck. And it sucks. It just isn't fair that they want to create more than their next breathe, but can't catch a good break to devote time to it. They have to look over at those that have the privaledge to take multiple rolls of the dice, eat their cake and have it too, and if everything still fails, they get bailed out by mommy and daddy.I was one of the lucky ones. I saved up for ten years, and was able to role once. I hit lucky number eleven. And even then, I still find myself having to grind in a 9 to 5 yet again. Sometimes it's fine. Other times I feel like I should have never taken that sabbatical and remained ignorant of the pure joy that comes from putting yourself in a creation. Before Sabbatical:I did what you were supposed to do. Did well (really well) in school. Went to college. Got a degree in Software Engineering and Computer Science. Did internships and landed a job as a developer for an insurance company right out of college. I did that for three years (two years of internships, one year as a full time employee). I then went to work for a company that build veterinary software. Did that for a couple of years. I really really loved coding. Lived and breathed it. I interviewed at a prestigious consulting company and got in on the ground floor. Spent three years there only to be scooped up by another consulting powerhouse. So here I am with a disgusting $140,000 in total compensation. A sea of cubicals, souless sheep that want nothing more than to do their time and go home. I didn't belong cause I actually cared about my craft. I tried to compensate for my unfulfilling corporate work with open source development after hours. This put a toll on my familial relationships (spending 45 hours a week working, then trying to get another 30 hours on nights and weekends, doesn't leave much time for anything else). I was at the brink of collapse. Lose my sanity, my wife, or my job. I decided to get rid of the job. I liquidated my 401k savings (took all the tax penalties up front), and said "alright, gonna live off of this for as long as I can until I figure something out". During Sabbatical:It was great to breathe. I was 178 pounds at 5'8 (a little portly). That changed during the sabbatical. It took me three months just to figure out what my routine looked like. I'd code on whatever my heart desired. It was wonderful. I didn't even know what day it was. I didn't miss my stuff. I didn't miss the anxiety attacks I got Sunday nights before having to go to work. All of that gone. By month four I came across the web based version of A Dark Room. I immediately connected with its sparse presentation. I reached out the Michael and asked his permission to port it to mobile. That night I lost track of time. I blinked and it was 3am. I had never felt that kind of loss of time before. Nothing around me existed, it was just me and my creation. After another four months, A Dark Room was done and released to the App Store. It got a whopping thirty downloads the first day. I didn't care. Cause it was my creation and it was awesome. I redesigned so much of the original game. So much of me went into it. Oh and I dropped 30 pounds too. Best shape of my life.I still remember one of my happiest days. It was early January. I was working on a stupid little multiplayer fighting game written in JavaScript and Pixi.js. I didn't care that ADR was barely getting 10 downloads a day, I didn't care that my savings was dwindling away. I found what I was supposed to do (build digital, evocative experiences). Savings Dwindling:The party was over at this point. My savings was dwindling down. A Dark Room was making its meager two thousand downloads a month (after Apple's cut, taxes, and splits, that's not a lot of take home). I started interviewing again for a job. I was better mentally, physically. And I never want my wife's quality of live to suffer (she was still in college at the time). Being the main bread winner of the home, I knew I had to suck it up and go back to work. I wasn't okay with it, but I knew it was my responsibility. I was interviewing again for those big salaries. I would save as much as possible given my now humble lifestyle. After I had enough cash tucked away, I'd quit and try again. Then. A Dark Room went viral. Out of nowhere it made $800 in one day. Then it made $1,200 in one day. Then it made $5,000. Then it made $8,000. Then it hit the #1 spot and I woke up to a $20,000 sales report. A Dark Room at #1:A Dark Room stayed at the number one spot. I was elated the first day. I was on cloud nine the second day. Then reality reared its ugly face with a sobering message: "this will come to an end."So I waited for it to come to an end. I didn't sleep for 18 days. My life: was hitting the refresh button on the App Store, seeing if I had fallen. I'd do it every 3 hours on the hour, day or night. I did it for eighteen days. I read every review that came through. I'd refresh the page again and see if I had dropped. This was my life. I was waiting for all this success to end. 250,000 downloads later, A Dark Room finally fell from the #1 spot. It was over. From there sales dwindled. After another four months, I was down to 100 downloads a day. I had recouped what I had "spent" taking the sabbatical (and then some). My wife was tired of living in a cramped one bedroom apartment. So, we put a huge down payment on a house. After A Dark Room Fell:I built a prequel to A Dark Room called The Ensign. It did okay (nowhere near as successful.. but not bad... this was around the time I did my interview with Indie Hackers). I wrote a book about Surviving the App Store too. I put my heart and soul into a game inspired by Edwin Abbot's "Flatland: Romance of Many Dimensions" called A Noble Circle. I created a digital Go board after binge watching Hikaru no Go. I built a touched based mobile RTS called Mildly Interesting RTS (MIRTS for short). Every game had "me" in it. I didn't do ads, I didn't do micro-transactions, scummy energy bars, and all those other bullshit monetization tactics. I ported A Dark Room to Android (which was almost not worth it). I did everything to keep building games. I wrote about all of my journey, presented, did podcasts, hoping to inspire others. And yet revenue kept dwindling. The writing was on the wall. Everything I did after ADR wasn't enough. And I got a job. Now:So here I am. Updating all my games to work well on iPhone X. Because I love them. I try to build what I can in my free time. But I'm back in Corporate America (it's been ten months so far). Two months in, everything became too real. My journey as a game dev was really over. I got so frustrated. I purged everything online. Took the book down, deleted all of my Reddit entries, my developer logs, my open source games. I removed all of it. All the content I created felt like a lie. Cause even with all this "success", I couldn't keep my dream going. I felt so much worse off because I got a taste of a fulfilling life that I wish I had been ignorant to. It has been eight months since "The Purge". I'm much better now. Mostly invisible outside of already established relationships. I stream occasionally on Twitch, keep my games maintained, and work on new ones as time allows.I no longer deal with anxiety attacks Sunday nights at the thought of "clocking in" Monday morning. I'm at peace with it. The people I once called sheep, aren't that. They just didn't have the means to roll the dice. All code I see is beautiful in its own way. It tells a story of the resonable programmers put in unresonable situations. Again, I'm one of the lucky ones. Because maybe in another year, I'll have enough play money saved up to role the dice again. ‍Silver Lining:My games provide a stable passive income (and I have a decade worth of an emergency funds in the bank). A Dark Room recently hit the #2 spot overall on Google Play (pro tip: stick to iOS, the revenue is almost an order of magnitude better). More importantly, I've very recently acquired the platform that helped me create my labors of love: RubyMotion. So between my games, subscription revenue, and my well paying contract gigs, I do alright for myself. Thank you Lady Luck. And my sincerest, deepest apologies for the 99.9999% that will never see the "failure" I've seen. I really do empathize with you. And I wish I had a better story. ‍Numbers?I'm sure some of you are asking about numbers. Do you remember the title of this post? Do you remember what I said about the 99.9999% failure rate? Do your remember what I said about privaledge, and eating your cake and having it too? What's the point of talking about the numbers I'm making now? So you can dream about one day making these numbers too? You wont. Start with that and work from there.But if you really want numbers, here are some of the numeric sacrifices I made to role the dice once:Have a 4.0 GPA through High School.Graduate #36 out of a class of 800+.Go to a community college cause it's cheap.Work two jobs in the summer to pay for college and save up.Go to university in 2001 when it was still possible to pay out of pocket and graduate without crippling debt.Get a degree in something that is valued. Even better if you actually like what you got a degree in.Land a job right out of school that makes you $55k a year.Live off of $15k a year. Don't buy a house. Don't buy a fancy car. Just save.Do this for a year.Land a job that makes you $100k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution.Celebrate by living off of $30k a year.Do this for three years.Land a job that makes you $140k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. Get a Roth, put $5k a year into that.Celebrate by living off of $60k a year.Do this for three years.Don't have kids. Don't get sick. Don't have any catastrophic events that leave you bankrupt. Probably best to just not leave the house.Quit your job. Sell everything. Liquidate your 401k. Pay all the tax penaties.Live without insurance cause COBRA costs $2000 a month. Still Don't have kids. Don't get sick. Don't have any catastrophic events that leave you bankrupt.Now you can take a year and a half off and roll the dice once. Now you can read all the success stories online and dream that you'll get that too.But you probably wont. And that's okay. ‍Original article posted at https://failory.com/battle-scars

[indgaming]

December Re-Cap

Wow, sorry that this post is over a week late. Anyways, this is my 2nd December re-cap, whoo! 2015′s december re-cap was my FIRST Re-Cap and it was only focused on our game, Greg Green. Since then, development of Greg Green has came to a pause and we have been working on other projects. I am going to write a 2016 re-cap blog post after this talking about all those games that we worked on in 2016, but for now let’s talk about December.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Oh! Circle, Dot.

“Oh, Circle Dot.” is a game I developed in about 6 hours for the Ludum Dare 37 Game Jam. It is a simple game, yet my idea was to challenge myself (not the player), to create a game in one day, in one sitting. I also started this project the same day the jam started without knowing the jam had started (because I forgot), and that is why it did not fit the theme very well.. because it wasn’t originally made for the jam. 

Anyway, I started with the idea of something simple but challenging, that was to have enemies spawn in from a random point in a radius off-screen, as a circle in the center is growing, while the goal was to grow your circle, as your enemies were to try to stop it. This caused for the player to constantly be involved with no breaks (also because I didn’t add a pause button), which is good and all but not for the long run. The game is going to receive a major update before publishing so expect a pause button and break periods to buy some powerups to help you out in the harder waves. The idea was really simple to build upon and gave me a lot of room for expansion, however with the time I had, I produced what I could. As I said earlier I forgot about the jam, well, the game’s original dev time was 5hrs, then learning about the jam, I squeezed in an extra hour to make it a little more challenging and appealing and fixed whatever bugs. 

Got decent feedback, checkout the entry here. Our best score was in audio, thanks to my cousin Joshua, our elite In-D musician. I can talk more about this game but to save some walls of text for other topics, I will save it for the actual release, for now feel free to checkout the early prototype here: https://indgaming.itch.io/oh-circle-dot

CHax 2

THE HOLIDAY UPDATE......

was awesome! a disaster!

Sadly even after all these cool new features were added, it was almost for nothing considering this update broke the game for a lot of players. It saddens me soo much, and I am truly sorry for everyone affected. Anybody not knowing what I am talking about, click to read here. Or don’t, basically it stopped a lot of people from being able to connect to servers, and for some people, even stopped them from hosting servers. I am working on a new big update to fix this, but in order to release this update faster I am going to have to make it a little smaller than originally planned. It is my fault for planning such a big update in a crisis like this, but I was trying to remedy the issues and I was very ambitious. 

EDIT: On the brightside, We also reached over 20,000 downloads!

To make up for it here are some screenshots of stuff:

New Match Finder:

New Create Match Menu:

Beautiful rendering on PC:

I am working very hard to get this update out.. soo hard that I have made a lot of sacrifices, such as Phasmophobia.. read the next section.

Phasmophobia: Hall of Specters

I have done some graphic improvements, along with getting the game running on Gear VR with a more “VR-Friendly” experience than the current Cardboard port. Also maybe some AI improvements ;) but the thing is, I originally planned to release this update before New Year’s.. and then I had a very special update planned to release after that on the 13th of January for “Friday the 13th”.  Well plans failed and fell short with issues with CHax in the way. So sacrificed had to be made and we won’t be seeing a Phasmophobia update for a couple months. I don’t know who will mind but I still thought I would let anybody know the status. Just know it’s gonna be worth the wait!

Conclusion

No conclusion, I have already talked too much. Haha, well, this was a good year and I can’t wait to write the 2016 re-cap. Stay tuned for that! 

(oh also, little personal info that reflects upon CHax, I have been having a lot of fun modding one of my favorite games, and this has inspired me to push modding into CHax faster, just thought I would let you know!)