It's the sequel to 2015's Bloodjak, an arcade-style shoot-em-up set in the darkest corner of cyberspace.
Footage from the original
Besides its fast-paced and unforgiving gameplay, what sets Bloodjak apart from other games of the genre is its scoring system. Dead players do not get to submit their score - in order to save your score, you must determine when to end your run and survive for the remainder of its duration. Complicating this is the fact that your ship is fragile and is destroyed in a single hit, resulting in a high-stakes, but rewarding, play experience.
The original version of the game was created in 48 hours for the 2015 Indies vs Gamers Jam at Game Jolt. It ranked in the top 10% of over 369 entries for the jam, and as a part of Underground Arcade Collective's exhibit, it's been widely enjoyed at the festivals and conventions at which we've shown it. While I've made countless small improvements over the years, the original is still constrained by the brevity of the original jam from which it was produced.
So, I'm leading an effort to remake the game, bigger and better than it's ever been. The game is being developed as part of Philly Game Mechanic's Profit Jam, an initiative to make, ship, and sell a game within two months. I've been itching to revisit Bloodjak for a long time, and the Profit Jam seemed like the perfect opportunity.
What new stuff will be in the sequel?
At the very least, Bloodjak II will feature new enemies, more bosses, improved pacing, faster and more intense combat, improved visuals, and higher quality audio. My goal is to make a more complex, action-packed, and visceral experience.
The original was made a small team consisting of myself and Geoff Backstrom, who composed the game's music. To help deliver on the promise of a better game, I'm working with a larger team this time - Alex Cole and Dan Halma are handling the game's sound and music respectively, and Danielle Vuono is handling the visuals. They're all very good at what they do, and I am excited to work with them!
I'll be sharing regular updates about the game's development in the coming weeks - you can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed from the bar on the right, or you can follow me on Twitter @alchiggins. Thank you!
Underground Arcade Collective is returning to Cecil Con this upcoming Friday and Saturday! Woo! Stephen, John, and I will be showcasing FIFTEEN VIDEO GAMES this weekend! Which is a lot! It's a lovely event and we are thrilled to return.
As is always the case leading up to a con, I've updated some games of mine in preparation for the event.
Danger Zone Friends Update!
In response to player feedback, I've improved the tutorialization in the introductory level of Danger Zone Friends, better explaining JRPG fundamentals to players who may not be familiar with them. The tutorialization was not something I handled gracefully as the game's audience shifted from one person (my partner who has played JRPGs before) to a general audience (who includes... everyone). Hopefully this makes the game somewhat more accessible.
Exclusive to people attending Underground Arcade Collective events is a special demo version of the game that features a demo exclusive boss! The demo exclusive boss is called Demo Exclusive Boss. Yes, the Demo Exclusive Boss is a palette-swapped Screaming Tortoise Sword who can shoot lasers and turn invisible. No, the Demo Exclusive Boss will not be available as paid DLC for the full version of Danger Zone Friends. You have to come to a live event to fight Demo Exclusive Boss. Those are the rules.
The Danger Zone Friends demo starts at the game's introduction and concludes shortly after the first dungeon. In the context of the full game, the first dungeon itself doesn't need a climax, but as a stand-alone episode, it badly does. Hence, the creation of Demo Exclusive Boss.
Bloodjak Update!
Four years after being asked by several people to add gamepad support to Bloodjak, I've finally done it! I've resisted buying a gamepad for a long time on account of being poor. I now own a gamepad, but I am still poor.
There is a mechanical difference between playing with the keyboard
and playing with the gamepad: the gamepad joystick uses vector math,
while the arrow keys do not, meaning that, when playing with a keyboard,
you will travel faster diagonally than you do orthogonally. However, the advantage to the keyboard player
is slight and does not outweigh the extra finesse granted to the
gamepad player.
This difference in diagonal speed would not normally be ideal, however, the physically incorrect keyboard movement has been present in the game for four years. It can be hard to walk the line between updating a game in a way that respects the original work and doing it in a way that fundamentally changes it, and improving the keyboard movement falls in the latter category. Meanwhile, adding physically correct gamepad movement is easier than having it match keyboard movement. Purists can still play with a keyboard if they want the "true experience," but if you own an Xbox controller, that is now the best way to play the game.
You can download the latest version here. Someone please beat Teapawncha’s high score.
Angie is a disgruntled former CIA agent with uncanny parkour skills.
After quitting her awful job in an inglorious fashion, she attempts to
earn some money by working some side jobs - jobs that require an
experienced wall runner. But nothing can prepare her for the truth of
her very existence...
Currently, you can download it for Windows from Glorious Trainwrecks. A web version will be on Gamejolt and Itch soon.
Post-Mortem
I spent about half of the past five weeks developing most this project from scratch, splitting my attention between it and Danger Zone Friends, the BloodjakPhillytron port, grad school applications, and holiday mirth.
The most unusual aspect of this game's development is the soundtrack. A day before the game was due, it had no sound! So, I dug through my hard drive and found a series of bass recordings, most of which I made back in the fall of 2016. During that time, I hadn't yet found other people to play music with, was trying to develop a solo act for open mics, and recorded instrumental song ideas that I could reference later. Ultimately, I never developed a solo set, but I was glad to have finally found a use for the recordings!
I spent more time developing the mechanical aspects of the game than usual. Many games have featured wall jumping, but wall running? In 2D? If there's a similar game I could have referenced as I designed and programmed American Wallrunner's movement, I had never heard of it.
This game combines the movement logic of 2D top-down games with that of 2D side-view platformers, and it needs to switch between them on the fly. The problem with this is that, in top-down games, the player only collides with the walls. As far as game logic goes, floors do not exist - they are defined by the absence of anything rather than the presence of something. However, in side-view platformer games, the player collides with both walls and floors - floors are defined by the presence of floor rather than the absence of wall!
As I made American Wallrunner, I began with the logic of top-down games, and added platformer logic later. This meant that floors were defined by the absence of wall instead of the presence of floor. So, when the player lands on platforms suspended on walls, their character is checking to see if they're making contact with nothing. In theory, this sounds simple. In practice, this is the complete opposite of how game collisions are supposed to work, and it's provided a series of technical design problems to numerous to fully document.
What I'm trying to say it, the game's movement seems straightforward on the surface, but it's terrifying under the hood. Take my word for it.
As is the case with most games, but especially games of small scale, I didn't get to implement as much content as I would like. While this is often invisible in the rest of my projects, the foundations for systems and events I wanted to add later are a bit more plain. For example, the whole game was structured around having a good handful of odd jobs for the player to complete before they could unlock the ending. While the final game works well with the two jobs that exist, the game's structure would have made more sense with at least one or two more. I also had planned for nearly every statistic displayed in the player menu to have some sort of bearing on the game world, especially hunger, thirst, and bladder. I laid the groundwork: the numbers are there, and they're dynamic, it's just that only a few of them have any sort of practical significance.
Overall, I'm happy with this! Part of the reason I do the Secret Santa jam every year is that it pushes me far outside of my comfort zone and forces me to make design decisions I never would have considered. Who the hell makes a 2D top-down game with wall running as the main mechanic, set during the Cold War, with fantasy creatures as the supporting characters, that casually condemns American foreign policy? I do. I am that guy.
Other News
Well, would you look at those control prompts on that there menu? Are those... buttons? Yes, folks, it's true! Bloodjak has been ported to an arcade cabinet! But not just any arcade cabinet - it now lives on Philadelphia's community arcade cabinet, the Phillytron! While I was unable to attend MAGFest myself this year, the Phillytron and its assortment of local games did. Thanks again to Philly Game Mechanics for encouraging me to port the game to the cabinet, and showcasing Bloodjak as part of the collection.
Speaking of conventions, I am excited to announce that Underground Arcade Collective will be returning to Cecil Con this April! We had a lovely time last year. I hope to see the rest of you mid-Atlantic nerds there!
Finally, after I finish porting American Wallrunner to the web, I will be able to give Danger Zone Friends my full attention, and release it this month. Stay tuned.
This is older news for those of you who follow me on Twitter, but for the rest of you, I am pleased to announce my next game... Danger Zone Friends! It's a JRPG about a turtle and a pantsless otter who make a grocery run for shredded cheese, but take a wrong turn into the DANGER ZONE. As our heroes attempt an escape from this strange and dangerous land, rumors spread of the return of an ancient evil, the Dairy Demon, Cheelzebub...
Spoiler alert - it is.
This is, undoubtedly, my greatest game to date, featuring some of the best encounter design, art, storytelling, comedy, and music I've ever produced. 3-6 hours of playtime, 20 minutes of original music, over 25 enemy types, so on and so forth. It's been an undertaking.
This game was originally made for my girlfriend, who asked for a "cute game" for her birthday with animal characters. She plays a fair amount of Persona and Pokemon, so I thought she would appreciate a *cough* short JRPG. As a supposedly casual project, it seemed like a good excuse to dust off the copy of RPG Maker VX Ace I got in a humble bundle a while back, and just have fun making something without having to code original mechanics from scratch. Many of my favorite RPGs of all time - Off, Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle, and Space Funeral - were vanilla RPG Maker games created without a lick of original code. It felt like a rite of passage to produce my own RPG within the (very limiting) constraints of the tool. A lot of folks question the legitimacy of RPG Maker as a development suite, and while I know it was the right tool for the job, I still feel self-conscious about using it. At the end of the day, though, you can't argue with the results.
Despite my aspirations for this to be a tiny, casual, and sloppy game, it quickly turned into a serious endeavor. It became clear, after I had drawn, written, and programmed the initial cutscene that I was onto something special. I started development in June, missed my girlfriend's July birthday deadline, and continued to work for the following three months, pushing myself to push myself as an artist, composer, and writer.
As this game was made for my girlfriend, it includes a number of elements - inside jokes and scenarios - that will only truly be understood by the two of us, making this the most personal, expressive, heartfelt game I've made, strangely enough. However, the game should be just as enjoyable for the rest of you. Remove the insider knowledge, and what remains is an unusual story filled with non-sequitur humor.
But if you didn't know that about Astrodon Johnstoni, that's okay.
The combat is mostly what you'd expect from an RPG Maker game, building upon the default turn-based battle system. What sets Danger Zone Friends apart from other RPGs is the increased importance of non-damaging support skills, namely, abilities that cause buffs, debuffs, status effects, healing, and MP manipulation. Out of the three characters in your party, only one of them is any good at dealing raw damage. The game places more emphasis on providing adequate support and changing the flow of battle. As a result, battles are slowly paced, thoughtful affairs.
Despite having the same core battle system as nearly every other RPG Maker game, I attempt to make combat in Danger Zone Friends deeper than in other games in its genre.
All in all, the game's loaded with jokes, cool monsters, and a rockin' soundtrack. Currently, my girlfriend is about 80% through her playthrough. As soon as she's done, I'll start preparing it for general release. I'm also going to wait until a lot of the hype around (the admittedly fantastic) Deltarune starts to die down - it shares a lot of tonal similarities with Danger Zone Friends, and there's no use in competing with it.
Anyway, the most important thing is, I love Danger Zone Friends, and I hope you will too!
Updates to Monster Truck Power Fantasy and Bloodjak!
In other news, both Monster Truck Power Fantasyand Bloodjakhave gotten patched! There's minor bug fixes with both, but the largest changes are that Monster Truck Power Fantasy now has a subtitle option, and Bloodjak now runs at a constant speed, regardless of its framerate. These were mostly made to address technical issues when showcasing the games live, but for those of you who are hard of hearing, hopefully the subtitles allow for you to better enjoy Power Fantasy.
Baltimore Game Collective: Now Featuring John D. Moore!
Tomorrow night, Stephen and I from Baltimore Game Collective will be showcasing our collection of work at Colorspace Labs' First Friday Indie Arcade in Philadelphia! What's new this time around is that we'll also be showcasing some games by our newest member, John D. Moore. John is a prolific developer whose diverse creative output spans over two decades. We'll be featuring three games of his this time around: Monster Hug, Dr. Creepinscare's Pumpkin Patch Match, and Ungrateful Birds. Happy to have you on board, John!
That's all for now. Please stay tuned for the release of Danger Zone Friends later this month.
A friend brought it to my attention that Monster Truck Power Fantasy, among other Game Maker: Studio games I've made, would display a black screen on his computer running Windows 10. This appears to be a rare bug, but it's one I've since fixed. Monster Truck Power Fantasy,Gewgawlicious, Bloodjak, and Digital Toilet World should now run on Windows 10 with no problem.
I know I'm late to the conversation about the permanence of software as a medium, but I'm becoming increasingly aware of just how fragile it is. Text can always be transcribed and preserved in a dozen different ways. Music and film can always be digitized to a playable format indefinitely. I'm starting to come to the realization that my games may no longer be playable on Windows, maybe not even ten or twenty years from now, and there isn't much I can do about it.
This particular black screen bug, from what I've read, was caused by the Windows 10 Creators Update, and it affects fullscreen Game Maker: Studio games indiscriminately. There's a simple fix that can be performed from within the program. So far, so good. It took an evening for me to go through nearly every game to perform the fix and re-upload it, but it's worth it to make sure that my games can run, let alone run well.
The scary thing, though, is that Game Maker: Studio is no longer supported by the developer, as it has been replaced by Game Maker: Studio 2. GM:S, in its final version, was capable of circumventing the bug. I certainly can't count on that being the case in the future, or on Game Maker: Studio properly running in the future.
So, it's possible to port all of my games into the new program. From what I hear, this requires the games to be reprogrammed, to an extent. I've made six Game Maker: Studio games so far, and it would take some serious time and effort to port them in Game Maker Studio 2 to make sure everything continues to work on current software and hardware. Not to mention, every time I have to make a change to fix a bug across all of my games caused by, for example, a Windows update, I have to fix and re-upload all of my games.
I make about two or three games every year. Let's say Game Maker Studio 3 comes out in five years. By the, I would hopefully have at least 16 games that I would need to port into that program... the workload required to keep my work current will snowball over the decades.
Of course, who knows how long Game Maker will exist as a program in any iteration? Nothing lasts forever. Maybe the last version is released, say, fifteen, twenty years from now, the company goes bankrupt, and I lose the ability to make any changes to my games' source code?
Of course, you can run any outdated Windows program in compatibility mode, and it should run correctly. But whether it does or not depends entirely upon the competence of Microsoft engineers. The ability for anyone to play my games over the course of my lifetime is largely in their hands. Not to mention, it won't occur to the typical player to run a game in compatibility mode, or to run it through an emulator.
This is probably going to be a widespread problem as operating systems undergo countless iterations over the coming decades (get hyped for Windows 40), and I may be pleasantly surprised by the solutions the IT community develops, but in the meantime, it is unnerving.
I can't believe I forgot to post this, but last month, Greg Livingston interviewed me about Bloodjak! I talk a bit about procedural difficulty, the game's unusual scoring mechanic, and emotive game design. The discussion gets pretty good, especially after the five minute mark.
It includes game footage from both me and Greg - if you ever wanted to watch me reach 10,000 points and die, here ya go.
It's always wonderful to be given an opportunity to talk about your work. Greg records a ton of great interviews with Baltimore devs and posts many videos on design theory - you can watch them all on his Youtube channel!
screenshot of the finished Underground Arcade launcher program for festival exhibitions
Thank you all so much for stopping by our humble little table at Artscape! It meant a lot to both me and Stephen to see yinz playing our stuff and duking it out for high scores! We're definitely looking forward to showcasing our work at more festivals in the future. If you're looking for more of Stephen's work, you can find it here.
As promised, the winners of the Bloodjak high score competition will have a game made by me - I already have one winner's wishlist and am starting to pump that game out. If, by any chance, you participated in the competition and did not get an email from me, please let me know.
As I prepared the games for festival exhibition, I noticed that all of my games were running slowly on my laptop hardware. I won't go into the technical explanation (sleep margin! *shakes fist*), but Gewgawlicious,The Morphine Western Revenge,Bloodjak, and Digital Toilet Worldhave all been updated and should be running at peak performance on all hardware now.
Furthermore, after the first day of festival, it became immediately clear that Gewgawlicious, the least playtested of my games, was way too long. I've since shortened the game's length by 45 seconds. I also fixed a minor bug in Digital Toilet World in which the android sprites would blur.
After I finish making the prize game (stay tuned!), I should be able to seriously redirect attention to Monsterpunk.
This is old news to those of you who follow me on other social media, but I am pleased to announce that the Baltimore Game Collective (consisting of Let-Off Studios and myself) will be showcasing our games at Artscape in Baltimore this July! Together, we are presenting Underground Arcade, which consists of eight games, half by me, half by Let-Off. Check out the trailer above!
Artscape advertises itself as the largest free arts festival in America, so I am grateful to be able to showcase my work in this setting. If you're in the area, do stop by and say hi!
If I've gone dark from the dev blog for a few months, it's because (surprise) I've been busy. Part of that busyness can be attributed to game development, primarily to two large projects. The first of these has been my application to Artscape, Baltimore's big ol' arts festival. I've been collaborating with another local game developer (Let-Off Studios!) under the moniker "Baltimore Game Collective" to exhibit a collection of eight short games during the festival, and while our acceptance status is pending, I am feeling confident this year! I've made a short demo reel for our showcase that will function as a promotional video if our acceptance is confirmed.
Changes to Digital Toilet World will be minimal (in fact, I'll be reversing some unnecessary changes I made in the last update), while changes to Bloodjak will be a bit more extensive to make it more accessible to casual members of a festival audience. As for Gewgawlicious...
Gewgawlicious v1.1 is out! Now with audible music!
As is the case with most jam games, Gewgawlicious was rushed, and benefited from some minor revisions. Namely, there were three issues: 1) The music was too soft. 2) The bomb beeping was too loud and 3) People were confused by the user interface and basic rules of the sandbox. The first two issues required straightforward solutions, the third required a bit more care. I made a number of subtle changes to the game's user interface that will hopefully provide sufficient guidance to the player and keep them playing up through the game's punchline.
As for the other project that's been occupying my time...
Monsterpunk Devlog Update #14! Now with character portraits!
After spending nearly a year on The Morphine Western Revenge, I've been able to return my focus to Monsterpunk. For those of you who are newcomers, it's a survival action-RPG inspired in equal parts by virtual pets, punk games, and queer games. I've been working on it on and off since... 2014? Gosh.
I started off by finishing off drawing portrait art for all of the game's characters - a task I had left unfinished about a year ago - and since then have mostly been making fundamental changes to the game's mechanics. I'm always growing as a designer, and that has been especially true over the course of Revenge's development. One of the most frustrating aspects of working on a large, long-term project is that there's a mismatch between the initial quality of the work and your current ability, and taking a lengthy hiatus from a project only makes that difference more obvious. So, I'm making changes to some of the game's most fundamental aspects. I've slowed character movement speed in order to better control the overall pacing of the game, while lowering adversary health in order to make combat faster and snappier, among countless other changes.
For those of you who just got here, this is also a game about flirting and pooping.
At this point, I'm aiming to release the game by this summer. While there is much about it that I find endearing, I've been working on it long enough that it is, admittedly, beginning to feel like a burden! It is already playable from start to finish, and has always been even after the first week of development. The question has never been whether it can be released at a given moment, but whether it should. I don't know if the game will be the best it can be by the summer, but as time goes on, that question becomes less important.
The trickiest thing with making changes to Bloodjak is the fact that the game has competitive online scoring, and that any changes I make to the game's difficulty need to respect that. As soon as I change the timing of the spawns, the health of the enemies, or the fire rate of the player, player scores between versions cease to be comparable.
I did cave in and make one change that, I believe, still respects the game's original difficulty: enemies now provide a short visual cue before attacking. This allows players to better predict enemy attack patterns without me actually changing anything about the patterns themselves. This should make the game more accessible to more players.
I've also added a web version for those of you not running Windows!
Change log: -Web version added -Enemies now provide visual cues before shooting, HOW NICE OF THEM -Increased time between shots for the big glowy ship by 1/30th of a second (not that you'll ever see one) -Minor text changes -Giant ship recoil exaggerated (a whopping 2 pixel kickback!) -Blocks and debris spawn rate decreases with framerate -Performance improved -Audio engine updated
Monsterpunkis the first game I've made where I've put serious effort into playtesting. Most of my jam games are never tested before release due to time constraints. Sufficient playtesting for my student projects was, unfortunately, a low priority due to development conditions. At the time, simply finishing a game was a challenge; let alone making anything playable by a lay person.
While most of my jam games err on the side of being too difficult (but fair), they have generally been playable and enjoyable by most people even without playtesting. Because of the incredibly short development cycle on such games (2-7 days), the mechanics of my jam games are relatively simple. By the end of each game's development, I have plenty of practice playing it, but not so much that my abilities fully eclipse those of a first-time player. Basically, it's still possible for me to imagine what it's like for a first-time player to try the game, and I design accordingly. Even though, as the Bloodjakhigh score table below demonstrates, I have a very different relationship with my own work than anyone else does (6821 points), many other players were still able to form some sort of relationship with it. I consider the game to be more successful than not.
While Bloodjak's high score table provides an objective measurement of just how better I am at my own games than average players, geoffryb, Raeleus, and DifferentName still scored high enough to experience all of the game's content, and lower scoring players still gave me very positive feedback.
In other news, my niece and nephew ("StRuby" and Huck) are totally destroying the Guest Leaderboard.
Monsterpunk is fundamentally different from anything else I've worked on. I've been developing (and playing) the game for nearly a year and a half. Not only am I exceptionally skilled at the game, I'm also starting to become bored by it. More so than usual, I have an insufficient ability to predict what an average player will be able to understand, what they'll be able to accomplish, and what they'll enjoy in the game. While every video game should be sufficiently playtested, Monsterpunk is both the first recent game of mine for which sufficient playtesting is possible and the game of mine which requires playtesting the most.
Playtesting for the game is far from over - I'm only halfway through the list of people who offered to help - but it has been a thoroughly useful process. The first two playtesters barely lasted 10 minutes in the game. With necessary changes, Playtester #3 was able to play the game for a couple of hours. Further changes allowed Playtester #4 to be the first to beat the game. Playtester #5 not only beat the game, but voluntarily played through the opening 30 minutes of the game twice. The game has transitioned from something unplayable to something genuinely enjoyable over the past few months, and it's been both a pleasure and a relief.
Altering the HUD's color scheme was one of many necessary tweaks made evident through playtesting.
What's left for Monsterpunk? I'm recently begun drawing and adding character portraits to the game, but once that's done, I'll add a character selection quiz, illustrate the game's endings, exaggerate the impact of the player's violence (or lack thereof) on the world, complete the soundtrack, and make various other small mechanical and audio-visual tweaks.
Character portraits
Considering how consistently wrong I've been in predicting the release date for the game (originally December 2014?), I probably should stop making promises regarding it. That being said, I'm currently aiming to finish this game by spring, and I can't imagine that I'll still be working on it through the summer. I don't want to spend more than two years on this project, and I really don't want it to stay in perpetual development hell. I don't want this to be another Waker.
This time, though, I actually have a good reason for extending the game's release date!
On Preparing Games for Festival
I'm intending to showcase my shorter games at Artscape this Summer! Artscape is a massive, free arts festival held in Baltimore each year. Local game developers have been showcasing games at Artscape (through Gamescape) for a few years now, and I want to participate. Monsterpunk is too long, complicated, and R-rated to be showcased at such an event, but Bloodjak and Digital Toilet Worldare short and simple enough that they'd be perfect for it.
In preparation for Artscape, I'll be making changes to both games to make them more accessible to a festival audience. Bloodjak will mostly receive minor difficulty tweaks, but changes to Digital Toilet World will be more extensive, including some basic animation for the enemies, edited dialogue, and significant changes to the game's difficulty. If possible, both of these games will soon be playable in your internet browser!
I originally wanted to present Empty Chambersat Artscape, but I've begun revising it and realized that the game needs to undergo some very heavy changes to reach the same level of quality as my more recent work. It's the only jam game I've made that hasn't yet had a post-jam revision, and it shows.
In any case, those new versions of Bloodjak and DTW will be out within the next few weeks! I'm pretty stoked about it.
But wait! It gets better!
New Project!
I've been asked by a friend in Athens, Ohio to make a short game for an art showcase he's curating at the beginning of April. The game's inspired by a piece of writing of his - a western story about a Native American woman addicted to morphine who's allegedly trying to rescue her sister from Union soldiers.
Since I'm adapting the story into a video game, I went ahead and added a ton of shooting to it. As much as I'd like to break away from traditional (violent) design sensibilities, imagining the story as a top-down shooter was simply the fastest and easiest way to add a compelling interactive element to the story given the limited development time. Making compelling narrative games requires engineering the entire experience from start to finish; making compelling action games only requires engineering specific elements of the game (enemies, weapons) and then mixing and matching those elements.
Here's an early peek of it, two weeks into development. I'm pretty happy with it so far!
The enemies don't shoot yet, obviously.
The new game will premiere on April 1st at Athensworks, and then will be made available online shortly thereafter. If all goes well, it will also showcased alongside Bloodjak and DTW at Artscape.
Changelog:
-High scores can now be viewed in-game
-Spawn patterns are slightly less random, especially in the early game.
-Player is invulnerable during the last 1.25 seconds of jacking out (this is when the screen flashes)
-Points awarded upon destroying enemy ships are now displayed
Hopefully, the new spawn patterns will make the game more interesting for less skilled players. The ability to view the high score table in-game is an essential feature that I simply ran out of time to implement during the jam.
I've been debating making changes to the game's difficulty, especially during the jack-out sequence, and have tried out some potential solutions. However, I am not comfortable making any drastic changes to the game without live play testing. The game's difficulty is part of what makes it what it is - it's probably going to continue to be a challenge.
I would eventually like to make a Mac build and add Xbox controller support - however, making Mac builds in Game Maker is a pain, and I still don't have a controller of my own.
Surprise! I made a game last weekend! It's called Bloodjak.
It's a fun little side-scrolling arcade shooter set in cyberspace. I made it in 72 hours for the Indies vs Gamers jam at Game Jolt (voting is still underway this week, so be sure to play some games and vote for your favs).
I outsourced the music to a fellow named Geoff Backstrom, and I'm glad I made the decision. The game sounds kick ass.
It might possibly be the best complete game I've ever made. It's also the most conventional game I've ever made. This is not the sort of game that idealistic teenage me wanted to make. In fact, it's a very radical departure from the sort of games I was working on when I started this blog, and is personally significant for that reason.
This isn't the first time I've written about how I've felt weird about the games I make. But it's a different sort of weirdness than I felt when I made The Void Hero Blues, thankfully.
Look, if you just want to play and enjoy the damn thing, stop reading and do that. You should play it. It's fun. It's hard. It looks cool. It sounds great. I'm really proud of this one, and I think it'll do well in the competition. But if you want to read about what the game means to me, well, get comfortable. This might be one of the more self-indulgent things I've written. I don't care.
Things have come full circle in the strangest way. Let me explain at the beginning.
Making Games as a Child: In Pursuit of Fun
The earliest games I made as a pre-teen were mostly shooters and fledgling attempts at RPGs. Run-of-the-mill stuff - imitations of the mainstream games I was playing at the time. It was 2005. The contemporary indie game scene was barely forming. The artgame, notgame, Twine game, and altgame scenes were, as far as I know, totally nonexistent. Communities for hobbyist game development around certain tools, like Game Maker, existed, but those communities were isolated.
By 2006 or so, I got pretty good at making shooters, for a scrawny 13 year old boy. Me and a bunch of other 12-14 year old boys were making first person shooter games with this software called Silent Walk (the original, low tech version that we used is hard to find nowadays). In retrospect, I was probably one of the more prominent of the young game designers in that community. I was the first person to have created a game in Silent Walk with original 3D models (they looked like shit), and also had a reputation for being one of the few people who made a game with stairs in it (it was a big deal). Silent Walk, while very accessible,wasn't very powerful, didn't require code, and was used by a bunch of preteens. The quality bar was pretty low, but I surpassed the bar, damn it.
I owe a lot to that community. Just thinking about it reminds me of how magical the internet felt back then.
Point is, I gained a ton of experience making action games during my first 3 years of game dev as a kid. I think that experience greatly influences my game design today. They were formative years.
My design tendencies changed around 2009. I was 16, and was finally learning how to think for the first time (still trying to get it down, honestly). Tale of Tales released The Paththat year, spawning the artgame and notgame movements (near as I can tell) and changing what many people believed was possible with interactive media. I was one of those people. "Wait a minute, you're telling me that I can create interactive art without goals, challenges, violence, competition, risk, or any of the things that have made games what they are until this point? And it can actually be good? Sign me up!"
Making Games as a Teenager: In Pursuit of Emotion
Notgame design philosophy fundamentally changed my mission as a game designer. My goal was no longer to make games that were fun, but games that were profoundly emotional. I am still trying to meet this goal - it's six years later, and I do not think I have yet succeeded.
How to Flywas the first notgame I created. You play as a bird who flies around eating mosquitoes in mid-flight. The more you eat, the larger you get. However, by the end of the game, you shrink back to normal size, then are transformed into a mosquito for some reason, before getting hit by a truck and dying. Your score is reduced to 0. The game is full of symbolism, the original meaning of most of which I have since forgotten. In retrospect, it's a pretty game, and one that I appreciate, but it's not the emotionally profound masterpiece that my teenage self set out to create.
How to Fly
I remember presenting the game to the Game Maker Games community and it was immediately shot down. Everyone there hated it for it's lack of traditional game elements. My ego was crippled.
Later that year I created A Day by the River, a game made for a high school English class project about the importance of civility. Notgamedesign philosophy also guided this project. However, this game had also failed to meet my objective of emotional maturity. In fact, the game I made was about as emotionally immature as I was. The game was supposed to be serious and dark - instead, the class laughed most of the way through it. I didn't realize it at the time, but the game is actually quite ridiculous.
For the next three years, I would struggle to complete any game projects. Wakerwas one of the last project that I started with artgame or notgame design philosophy in mind. It was one of the last times I attempted to create something with deep emotional significance. The game has been in development hell for 3 years now and counting. Making people feel things outside of tension and fear through video games is hard.
Making Games in College: In Pursuit of Thought
Two things happened during my college career that resulted in another large shift in my design tendencies. The first was that I got a little better at thinking. The second was that I became exposed to games and writings of "punk" game developers: developers associated with the queer, Twine, and most recently, alt games scenes. These developers were not only conscious of the social and political themes in games, but in the social politics surrounding the creation and play of games.
Whereas artgames and notgames, traditionally, held themselves to high aesthetic standards, punk games usually were less concerned with aesthetics and more concerned with ideas.
This isn't to say that art games aren't about ideas, or punk games aren't about emotion (indeed, all of my attempts at artgames have been very message-driven). But I think that my exposure to punk games prompted me to focus primarily on the ideasof my games without trying to purposefully evoke emotion through aesthetics.
My mission as a game designer had expanded: not only did I want to make games that made people feel, I wanted my games to make people think. I didn't necessarily want may games to be fun - but if fun happened along the way, I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
Empty Chambers, Digital Toilet World, The Void Hero Blues, Mandibles: Change is Coming, and Monsterpunkare all games in which I attempted to communicate ideas through narrative or mechanics. Most of them purposefully disregard typical aesthetic standards in games, and, as a small act of rebellion, none of them feature white male protagonists. Chambers and Void Hero both criticize traditional conventions in first person shooters. Mandibles has overt political themes, and Monsterpunk subverts gender expectations and has themes of environmentalism and pacifism. Even Digital Toilet World has underlying themes about religious zealotry and the futility and dangers of human progress (it's not just a poop joke)!
Monsterpunk
Over time, you can observe my game design become more conventional with each of my creations. Among Chambers, Toilet World, Void Hero, and Monsterpunk, Chambers is the most mechanically subversive, giving the player a gun and then rewarding them for not using it. Toilet World and the Void Hero, while emphasizing their anti-game quirks, are more conventional, featuring and encouraging shooter-based combat throughout. This was especially problematic in Void Hero, a game which attempted be both a criticism of first person shooters while also trying to provide Quake-esque gameplay. Monsterpunk is the most game-like of any of these, featuring layers of complicated rules and mechanics and traditional win conditions.
Bloodjak is the conclusion of this trend towards convention. The Indies vs Gamers jam had two requirements for its entries - the game had to be arcade themed, and the game had to feature online high score table support. While it is possible to create experimental works that meet these criteria, I had trouble coming up with a good artgame or punk game idea that did within such a short time period. So I made a shooter.
It is not a game designed to make you think. It is not a game designed to make you feel anything beyond tension, fear, and excitement. It is a game that is meant to be fun.
I'm back where I started.
Making Games Now?
Bloodjak's been out for a few days now, and it's already becoming one of the most well-received games I've ever made. People have been telling me that they love it. One person's already enthusiastically competing for the first spot on the high score table; a kid's already recorded four minutes of gameplay, threw it on Youtube, and gave the game an astounding recommendation. The game's received more ratings on Gamejolt than anything else I have on there, and not one of them has been negative, which is unusual for me.
Don't get me wrong: I'm really glad people are enjoying the game. I enjoy the game. I'm really glad to have made the game! At the risk of sounding arrogant, it's a good freaking game. However, Bloodjak is not the sort of game I expected to be making at this point. My mission as a game designer for the past six years has been to tell meaningful stories, stories about politics and human experience, stories told through games that are accessible to both gamer and non-gamer audiences. I've had mixed success trying to do that, and perhaps am now having great success not doing that.
Hopefully, the creation of Bloodjak will give me the room I need to finally tell those stories I've been wanting to tell. Most of the games I've been over the past two years have straddled the line between convention and experimentation - I wanted to change people's perceptions of what video games could be, but felt a need to prove to the world that I already understood what video games were. I felt as though I needed to demonstrate not just a willingness to break the rules, but a complete understanding of them.
Bloodjak, I hope,is proof that I can design a conventional game, and do it well. Now, maybe now, I can give myself permission to start making stuff that's more beautiful, nonviolent, personal, political, and experimental than the games I've made up to this point. Or, at least I can try to.
In the meantime, blow up shit and have a good time doing it.
