Patching of Games and the Implications

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.

The Morphine Western Revenge already had the fix applied, most people shouldn't download and play Darcy's Yurt Adventure, and Empty Chambers and How to Fly were made in Game Maker 8, so I ain't touching those anymore. Everything else was made in Unity or Twine. 

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The scary thing, though, is that Game Maker: Studio is no longer supported by the developer, as it has been replaced by Game Maker: Studio 2.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.

Triple Project Update

I'll start with the bad news. My old computer died a couple of weeks ago, and while I've been able to carry over all of my important data to the new machine, I have, of course, had to reinstall a much of my software. One of those programs, Game Maker Studio, is my primary weapon-of-choice for game development. Between the day I originally installed GMS and the day my computer offed itself, YoYo, Game Maker's developer, changed its licensing system. The old version of GMS allowed me to export games to both Windows and Mac - the current version only allows me to export them to Windows. Regaining the ability to port games to Mac will cost me a $150 upgrade. While I would like to purchase this upgrade, I really can't afford to until I find a god damn job.

Long story short, it's going to be a real long time before you'll be able to play Bloodjak and Monsterpunk on your Macs. I hate it that most of my creative work isn't going to be playable by a significant portion of the desktop computing population, but that's the way it is. It'd be an understatement to say that I'm deeply unimpressed with YoYo for stealing a piece of paid software from me.

However, a more pressing matter than my GMS downgrade is my loss of the previous version of the software, Game Maker 8. Game Maker 8 lost all technical support ages ago - even if you can find an installer and have a legal product key, the servers through which you'd register the program are long gone. Unfortunately, GM8 is the version of Game Maker that I had used to develop Waker.

Waker

Waker

I haven't touched Waker in nearly a year. Student game projects and an undergraduate thesis occupied my attention for most of the past 12 months, and completing Monsterpunk has taken priority over Waker, being the smaller of the two projects. However, I've changed a lot since I started working on the game in 2012, and I have doubts as to whether Waker is the sort of game I still want to make.

My plan has always been to revisit the project, polish it up for new demo build, and then decide whether I wanted to see the game to completion or dump the unfinished version as is, and then move onto something more creatively fulfilling.
 
As I said, the game was originally developed in the now defunct GM8. While it is possible to continue working on the game in GMS, it would require me to recode a very large part of the game. A lot of GM8's features are incompatible with GMS because the latter is designed for multi-platform publishing, while the former could only export Windows builds. It just so happens that Waker depends on many of those obsolete features.

It doesn't mean the death of the project, but it's completion is less likely now than it ever has been. If I don't complete Waker, it'll be due to a number of factors that are well worth writing about, but only worth writing about once. I hate to repeat myself, so I'll save the (possible) post-mortem for later.

Okay, here's the good news.

Monsterpunk

Monsterpunk

Monsterpunk's development is nearing its end. I need to add a couple more songs to the soundtrack, I write the endings,  finish implementing a couple of side quests, and playtest and polish the thing. But everything else is done.

Speaking of the soundtrack,  I recently composed a new loop for the game called "Prom 1999." It's probably some of the best digital music I've written so far, give it a listen.

I'm currently in the middle of programming a mini-game for Monsterpunk. It's a birdwatching sim in space. You flip through the pages of your guidebook and correctly identify space birds. It looks like this.

VIDEO GAMES

And, as if I weren't busy enough, I'm ready to formally announce a project I've spent the past month working on.

Digimon Red: A Pokemon ROM hack

Digimon Red

That's right kiddos, I'm hacking Pokemon FireRed and am replacing all of the Pokemon with Digimon. 179 Digimon, to be exact. Deal with it.

Why do this? Well, Digimon fans really never got a good Digimon game besides Digimon World (and even that is disputed), and the original Pokemon Kanto campaign holds a lot of meaning for us 90's kids. It's been a lot of fun so far to redesign and reinterpret a classic campaign and breath some fresh life into it.

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood your question. You're really asking: why are you spending hours of your life replacing the characters of a game from one highly commercialized children's franchise with the characters of another? Not only that, but the other franchise in question is one that everybody stopped giving a shit about when they turned 10. Aren't fan works inherently immature anyhow?

I'll begin to answer these questions by introducing Gargomon. Gargomon is a Digimon. He's a fat dog that wears jeans and has machine guns for hands.

Gargomon is a Digimon. Gargomon is a fat dog that wears jeans and has machine guns for hands.

You know your favorite character from your favorite fiction of choice? Sydney Carton? Mal Reynolds? Bigby Wolf? Is that character a fat dog that wears jeans and has machine guns for hands? Oh, sorry, is that a no? Then that character ain't got shit on Gargomon.

Also, most internet users spend their time masturbating to memes of pop-tart cats who are actually John Cena. Most of the media we consume (and like) is trash. We're all in this wretched pit of consumer media shit together. Not all of the media I consume is trash, but of that trash, Digimon is my favorite.

Finally, regarding the stigma against fan works: it's mostly a byproduct of copyright law. When you use characters such as Robin Hood, Snow White, and the Big Bad Wolf in your stories, you're a "creative genius" who's taking advantage of the pre-existing narrative meaning inherent to them. By contrast, when you use Darth Vader, Pikachu, and Harry Potter, you're being "creatively immature." All pop culture characters have the potential to be folk characters - however, copyright law makes the usage of those characters in  mainstream culture difficult, resulting in terribly amateur representations of those characters outside their source work, resulting in the general disdain for fan works.

I'm not going to be too pretentious about this project - it's just me screwing around. But it's some of the most fun screwing around with a computer I've had in a while, and I might as well share the end results of that labor with the rest of the world. While it won't be legally possible for me to distribute the hacked ROM, I will be able to distribute a patch you can apply to your (legally) obtained ROM of Pokemon FireRed.

I'll talk more about the technical and creative challenges of this project later on. For now, here's some screenshots.

Disclaimer: Pokemon and Pokemon FireRed are property of Nintendo; Digimon and the Digimon sprites are property of Bandai. This project constitutes fair use: work is transformative, noncommercial, and has no impact upon sourced work's market value.

Postmortem: The Void Hero Blues, Constraint, and Violence

The Void Hero Blues was a strange game to make. While I've been making games for nearly 10 years now, it was not only my first university student project, but also my first game to feature post-1998 quality 3D graphics. The context within which I made the game determined not only the development process, but shaped the concept itself. If I didn't have to make a game under the conditions I did, I would not have had any desire to make The Void Hero Blues. Unlike the rest of my work, this did not start out as a passion project.

I feel a very strong ambivalence about the game. On one had, it is probably one of the most technically impressive, visually interesting, and mechanically solid games I've ever made. On the other, the game's treatment of violence simply makes me uncomfortable. Let me explain.

Constraint

If you aren't familiar with the game, The Void Hero Blues is a short first person shooter in a cyberpunk setting. The player character, Void Girl, is stranded in a  pseudo-virtual environment, and must fight enemy security forces and survive for nine minutes. The catch is that every time she kills an enemy, a message will appear where they were slain that shares personal information about them. As her enemies are de-objectified, Void Girl's mood deteriorates. By the end of the game, she puts down her gun and stops fighting altogether.

The game was made over a semester and a half as an undergraduate student project at Ohio University. Most of the projects created in my class were made by teams of five or more people. Most of the members of these teams had never worked on a game before. Because I had a bit more experience than my classmates, I was pretty quickly bored with the team project I was initially assigned to, and figured that I could probably accomplish more on my own. Much to my surprise, my professor was kind enough to let me work on a solo project.

With most of my recent game projects, I strive to make something that is personal, experimental, subversive, or soulful. However, with this student project, I didn't have the free reign to do whatever I wanted as I usually did. I had to make a game using Unity 3D (which I had never done before), and I had to make it within a semester and a half. For the first time in a long time, I had to make a game using tools I was mostly unfamiliar with.

Most importantly, however, I felt a need to prove myself to my professor, and to the class. I felt that I needed to justify the privilege to work alone that was given to me. At the time, I felt that I couldn't get away with whatever nonviolent interactive art I wanted to do. Instead, I felt that I had to demonstrate that I could make a traditional game, with traditional mechanics, and do it well. I felt as though something that wasn't a "real" game wasn't going to cut it.

In short:

1) Because I had never made a 3D game in Unity before, I had to design a game that was easy to make.

2) Because I thought I had to prove that I was capable of design good, traditional game mechanics, I decided to focus on making a "fun" action or strategy game rather than an interactive story or "art game".

3) Because I have more experience making shooters than any games of any other genre, I could most realistically make a complete shooter game in a semester and a half. Making a shooter would also satisfy the requirement that the game is "fun" in a traditional sense.

4) HOWEVER, I also wanted the game to be subversive in some way. I wanted to be critical of the way in which violence was portrayed in games.

This is how I came up with the concept for the Void Hero Blues. It was one of the few concepts I could conceive that met the criteria for ease of development, fun, and subversion. However, it is the compromise between  fun and subversion that causes my discomfort about the project.

Violence

I think about violence in games a lot. I grew up playing shooter games and RPGs, and such games have probably been the largest influences on me as a designer. Even when I make a game about monsters that poop on the ground, I still rely on violence as the fallback mechanic. As a game designer, it's a habit that's been strongly ingrained in me, and I resent it.

Having violence as the primary way through which a player interacts with a game world severely limits the type of story you can tell through a game. For most people, the infliction of violence by them isn't a prominent aspect of the human experience. Halo, Quake, and Jedi Outcast are lots of fun, but at the end of the day, fun is all they are. Lately, I've been finding that narrative games in which violence is tangential to or absent from the experience, such as The Walking Dead, Sword and Sworcery EP, and Kentucky Route Zero, are far more compelling and meaningful. If I find a game primarily concerned with combat to be at all compelling, nowadays it is in spite of the violence, and not because of it.

In sprite of my criticism of game violence, every game I've worked on over the past two years besides Waker has been, in some form or another, a shooter. In three of those four cases - Empty Chambers, Toilets Meat & Drugs, and The Void Hero Blues - I attempt to provide critical commentary on violence in games through my game's mechanics. In these attempts, the violence in Empty Chambers and The Void Hero Blues both have left me uncomfortable, and the only reason it hasn't in Toilets Meat & Drugs is that the violence that does occur is between non-human cartoon characters.

In the case of The Void Hero Blues, I think that the cause of discomfort is the dissonance between the game play and the narrative content. The game's protagonist is a reluctant fighter who grows self disgusted with each life she effortlessly takes, but actual player has a different experience from her. Dodging lasers, finding health packs, and killing enemies are all fun things for the player to do. The visual and audio feedback the player receives upon sinking their blade into an enemy's flesh is satisfying. If you remove all of the narrative and subversive elements from the game, you're (arguably) left with a satisfying minimalist shooter. It is the game's biggest problem. I tried to make something that was both compelling and fun, and in this case, these two goals were at odds with each other.

Because of the game's dissonance between its game play and its narrative, I think that the game's message - that every stranger we meet is a human and not an object - was lost on a lot of the players. Some people I've met online were impressed by the game's subversive elements, but most of the people I've watched play the game only talked about the mechanics, graphics, and features of the game, not its meaning. Many players, as they played the game, actively expressed a lack of sympathy for the characters they killed, sometimes mocking them as they shot them, or remarking that they deserved it. In the case of these players, the game had failed to accomplish what I had hoped it would accomplish - feelings of sympathy and remorse.

In spite of my ambivalence about the game, I am proud of it, and if you haven't played it yet, I hope you do, but I still feel really odd about the finished project. Once I complete work on Toilets, Meat, and Drugs, I'm going to take a break from violent games for a long time. After much experimentation, I think I've realized that violent mechanics aren't going to help me achieve what I want to achieve as a game developer. I want to tell stories that are relevant to people's lives, and I know now that attempting that through action games will likely be a waste of time.

If you have played the game, how did you respond to it? Did you find it enjoyable, meaningful, or compelling in any way, and if so, why? In regards to my more general discussion of games and violence, am I actually full of shit? Please let me know.

Devlog Update (Toilets, Meat, Drugs, and Gender/Romance/Sexuality)

Life's been preventing me from writing as much as I'd like. There's a lot I'd still like to say about Gamergate, about conversations with strangers, about gamer identity as a capitalist construction, and about soda pop and self destruction. Sadly, I've got no time for any of that. What I do have time to do is fulfill the bare minimum requirement for this blog's existence, and update the devlog for Toilets, Meat, and Drugs and The Void Hero Blues.

I'm currently in the process of implementing NPCs and writing dialogue for Toilets, Meat, and Drugs: A Pink Monster Story. I never set out for the characters of  TM&D to be well-developed, or for the story to be profound. However, as I write for TM&D, I'm beginning to notice that themes of queerness, sexuality, and androgyny are sprouting up through the cracks. This is a pleasant surprise.

From the beginning, I had vague androgynous intentions when designing the game, mostly with the aesthetic (I'm going to combine pinkness, cuteness, and hearts with terror, explosions, and BLOOD), but it was never anything serious. I didn't set out to make a strong or elegant ideological statement through the game. But the ideology seeped through, and continues to.

For a while, the game steered clear of sexual/romantic themes altogether, until I recieved feedback for the original version of the game and playtests of the upcoming version. During that time, at least one person referred to the game's charming mechanic as "flirting," While I didn't original conceive of the mechanic as such, from that moment onward TM&D became a game about flirting.

The game's aesthetic, combined with the game's heavy mechanical focus on flirting, reproduction, and physical change, have naturally influenced the way I write for the game. Because of the aforementioned mechanics are so prominent, the characters must refer to them fairly frequently. Meanwhile, because I've felt reluctant to directly impose a gender on the player character,  and because the player character is capable of flirting with nearly everyone in the whole game, I haven't assigned a gender to anyone in the game (with the exception of the one human character). Essentially, the world of TM&D is one in which, if sexuality isn't experienced by the player, it is at least implied, and, yet, gender is virtually nonexistent.

Now, if you are expecting this game to be primarily about queerness, sexuality, romance, or androgyny, or if you expect it to make a profound statement about any of these things, you're going to be disappointed. That was never my intention with this project, and I am not the most qualified person to make profound statements on these topics. However, while my exploration of these themes may be shallow, they are themes that aren't typically explored in games, and certainly not in this manner. It may just be icing on the cake, but icing is still really fucking tasty, and it's the good homemade stuff you don't often get your grubby hands on. Just remember that it doesn't have any nutritional value. I don't want to sell the cake as something it isn't.

MEANWHILE...!

Regarding my student project, The Void Hero Blues, I'm mostly focusing on modelling, texturing, rigging, and animating the art assets, and implementing them in game. I don't have much else to say about my work on this one, so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

Both of these games should be done in time for the holidays, for whatever that counts. Just a reminder that the rest of my games can be found here. Follow me on Twitter @alchiggins, as Twitter's become the primary way I engage with the game development community. Cheers!

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs: Bug fixed!

Some of you who've been trying to play Toilets, Meat, and Drugs may know about a save bug in the game.  Basically, the game would be unable to save until after you close it for the first time. I am so relieved to say that I have finally fixed the bug.

Here's the technical explanation of what happened. When you save progress a video game, the game itself is unchanged. Instead, a separate data file is created that contains all of the relevant information, such as the player's status or location. While game developers usually create save scripts from scratch that target the information that needs to be saved and ignore the information that doesn't, Game Maker has a single function, game_save(), that automatically stores all information to a file. While this function is overkill and only recommended for beginners, it's really convenient to use for a jam game, when time is not a luxury.

The function has worked wonderfully in past experience, with older versions of Game Maker. But when Yoyo made the switch from Game Maker 8 to Game Maker Studio, the file directory system changed so that Game Maker games could be ported to platforms besides Windows. Which is great and all, except you don't get the benefits of this change unless you pay $100+ dollars for a professional license. The standard license, which I have, lets you port games to Mac, but that requires going through a holyshitton of hoops that I don't ever want to go through again.

Anyway, Game Maker Studio used to have the game_save() function removed altogether. It's since been added back in, but doesn't work as its supposed to with the new file directory system. Basically, the function doesn't actually create a directory in which to store save files until after you close the game for the first time! What the hell?!
 
What this means is that people who played Toilets, Meat, and Drugs for the first time would lose all of their progress upon dying or quitting the game. This is incredibly frustrating for the player, and even more embarrassing for me. I also wasn't able to detect the bug during development at all - the directory was created well before I even implemented the save system. It was a much unwanted surprise when I found out that I published a broken game!

Let me tell you, for a developer, there is no worse feeling than releasing a broken game. I would rather release a bad game than a broken one. I feel no shame about releasing games with crude, hastily draw, graphics, or a game with overly simplistic game play, or a game with missing music, or a game that I made in middle school. However rough these games are, they still have some sort of appeal, and, goddamnit, at least they work. Technical competency is the baseline, the absolute minimum standard a game must meet. Releasing a buggy game is like releasing a song recording that can only play through shitty laptop speakers - technical incompetence ruins the art.

I've been incredibly anxious over the past few days trying to figure out the cause and solution to this bug. Just this evening, after the deleting the game's directory and keeping an eye on Windows explorer as I played the game, I finally was able to identify the problem. Finally, by using a piece of code that creates an empty dummy folder when the game starts, I've tricked the game into actually creating the directory before the player closes the freakin' game. Cripes.

Fuck you, Game Maker. Fuck you. This extra stress was the last thing I needed.

But thanks for allowing me to create games for the past nine years.

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs is now available on itch.io and Gamejolt. And thanks to Warpdoor for featuring it on their site!

IndiE3 as an alternative mode of cultural politics

IndiE3, if you didn't know, was a free cyber indie game dev expo that ran parallel to E3 last week. Throughout the week, a group of volunteers in Seattle live streamed indie game trailers and panel discussions. As I previously wrote, I had lost my initial pep for the event a couple of days in, and I missed the end of the event due to wedding attendance, so I didn't find the event fulfilling in terms of raw content. Of course, there were some high points: I caught the end of a fantastic interview with Christine Love on representations of sex in games, was introduced to some cool games through Warpdoor's panel, and saw some intriguing trailers. Sadly, I missed most of the panels, and wasn't very interested in most of the games shown. That being said, IndiE3 is still damn worth celebrating.

Never before have I heard of an international cultural expo being so inclusive. Do you want to attend IndiE3? All you have to do is sit in front of your computer in time for the live stream and chat as it happens. Do you want your game featured? It doesn't matter who you are or what your game is - send an email, and it will be shown, for goddamn free. Want to talk in front of an audience of hundreds? Again, it doesn't matter who you are - send an email, and you can host your own fuckin' panel. About just about anything. Yes, you.

Do you know how cool that is? THAT'S FUCKING ICE COLD.

Just about every other game expo, such as E3,  is rife with barriers to entry. It costs ahellovalota money to book a flight, crash in a hotel, and attend the event. E3 itself is open only to industry professionals, and being able to host a talk requires an even greater level of pre-existing legitimacy. So, through these sort of conventions, a relatively small group of people (technically skilled college-educated white men who like videogames just fine the way they are) gain reinforced status as the elite creators of games. Dominant discourse about games is limited to this group, and remains relatively stagnant.

At this year's E3, the games we see are the same old violent games with white male macho protagonists*. I mean that literally: it seems as though at least half of the new releases I encountered are sequels, spinoffs, or reboots. Mainstream games simply haven't responded to much of the social, narrative, or even ludological criticism that those of us on the fringe have been slinging at them. Games are capable of exploring as wide a variety of human experience as any other entertainment medium, yet so far have only explored a small fraction of it. Mainstream games have so much growing they can do, yet grow so little.

Compare this to IndiE3. While most people involved with the event were men, I noticed a greater diversity of individuals than typically is associated with gaming. Not only that, but panelists seemed to be greatly concerned with social and economic criticisms of games and their production. Panel topics included: "Games have a Racism Problem," "Creating Games Under Capital," and "What Not to do with Native Americans in Videogames." Other panels were more critical of dominant design philosophy and storytelling in games, but even these panels had a socially conscious edge: one panel I overheard on "Designing RPGs without Combat" was critical of how relationships and sex were portrayed in most RPGs.

Now, of course, with such low barriers to participation in IndiE3, you're bound to get some pretty awful games showcased. Some of the games honestly looked a little like the stuff I made in middle school. That being said, there were tons of really cool games too, such as Unrest, There Shall be Lancing, Charlotte Seeker, and Witchmarsh. What's more, the ability for anyone, regardless of their background, to have their creative work broadcasted to over a thousand people around the world, with no strings attached, it amazing. It's an opportunity that, under capitalism, is incredibly rare.

That's essentially what makes IndiE3 so special. The mainstream games industry, and all of the expos associated with it, are capitalist institutions to their foundation. IndiE3, by removing all economic and social barriers to participation to it, is fundamentally critical and egalitarian. It's what a game convention looks like if designed by anarcho-socialists.

Considering the results, that's fine by me.

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I'd also like to briefly share some more personal notes on my IndiE3 experience. Digital Toilet World, unfortunately, was not shown during the Warpdoor showcase as promised - the live streamer progressed through the list of games rather slowly and only played about half of it. 

Toward the end of the event, a volunteer finally confirmed that they had received promotional materials for Waker, but, because of the aforementioned wedding, I missed the trailer showing. I'm currently having trouble finding and viewing its recorded video segment. 

Overall, I think that, since the event was planned over a weekend by volunteers with no budget, it was stronger as a proof of concept than as an actual event. Poor communication and lack of manpower posed problems throughout. However, most of the issues were resolved over the course of the week, meaning that, if IndiE3 happens next year, it'll be as as strong as a magical flying ox. Bad ass.

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Please feel free to talk to me about IndiE3, the intersection between gaming and social justice, or anything else. I covered a lot of subject matter in this and didn't go into much detail about any of it. Hit me up. 

*Seriously scroll back up and watch the video in the link before the asterisk. This is what gaming mostly is. We all know it, there's no excuse for it, and it's gotten boring.

Breakthrough, Response, and Transition

That up there? That's a video of a guy that I don't know playing "Digital Toilet World".

That kills me.

Here's the thing about me. I've been making games with Game Maker ever since I was 12. The first few years, I only shared the (terrible) games I made with my friends. By the time I was 13 or 14, I had discovered  this amateur entry-level first person shooter software called Silent Walk, and so I had made some (pretty bad) shooter games and shared them with the Silent Walk community, most of the members of which were boys my age. During my high school years, Silent Walk ceased to satisfy my creative needs, and I resumed work with Game Maker. I had published (mediocre) games on Game Maker's website and received maybe a dozen or so plays for each of my games (one of which was How to Fly). Having those dozen plays from strangers made my day. The possibility that people who didn't know me could choose to play my games, and that some of them could even like them, was inconceivable to me. I didn't care how few people played my games - the fact that there were people mattered.

It was during my high school years and early college years that I had really discovered the indie game scene. I had discovered the games of developers like Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, Bento Smile, Christine Love, Amon26, Jonas Kyratzes, Anna Anthropy, Daniel Remar, Jason Rohrer, Cactus, thecatamites, and countless others. Most of the people above were my heroes. I played and idolized their games. I wanted to be one of them.

Before I reached adulthood, started this blog, and shared Waker on the Tigsource forums, I was just a kid who, in his spare time, made little games that his friends and family would occasionally play. Now, that's all changing. Over the past year, people I've never met have been blogging about Waker's development, following it, and are offering to write music for it. "Digital Toilet World" has been downloaded over a hundred times, ranked well enough in Ludum Dare, has a "Let's Play" video, and was posted to freeindiegam.es by Terry Cavanagh, one of my goddamn teenage heroes.

It's not much press, but holy shit, it's press. This is a transitional period for me as a game developer. It might be a little obnoxious, but I am probably going to freak out with every piece of publicity I receive for a while. It's just a phase I'm going through, please bear with me.

And thanks for playing and reading! For those of you keeping score at home, this is my 100th blog post here. I've undergone a lot of change as a developer and as a person since I started writing; I can't wait to see what the next 100 will bring.

The Echidna Awards! (GOTYs 2013)

After much careless deliberation with myself, I have chosen the top 8 games of 2013. These are clearly indisputable. Check out my list at Beta Fish mag and be enlightened.

Grumpy Programmer Live Blog Spectacle

11:50
Okay, you sad sassy dipshits, here's the rundown:

I'm in this bullshit game design class this semester. I'm supposed to have a sparkling-cider-ass digital prototype of a game done tomorrow morning, 9:00 sharp. You need perspective? I'll give you some peanut-butter-shitting perspective - I haven't started, and it's 11:50 right now. 11:50 in the frackin' PM. It's supposed to be a group project. It's supposed to be an equal division of labor. Guess whose partner doesn't have any game design skills and didn't respond to his email  asking when to meet up to work on this piece of flaming spiraled ape shit?

Bloody hell like I've had time to get a headstart on this shit. Bullshit.Game design class.

You know what this means, right, you sewage guzzling skunk munchers? Yeah, that's right, it's the GRUMPY PROGRAMMER LIVE BLOG SPECTACLE. (Pricks).

Every 15 minute interval, you get an update on my progress, you privileged pompous bourgeois blowhard.

Maybe this will be entertaining, as you derive intense pleasure from documentation of my pain. Maybe it will just be sad. Actually, you know what? It'll probably just be frumpin' sad. You know why? Because I'm making a piss-wallowing game about a young woman who can repair elevators. Guess what you do in the game? Repair the motherfucking elevator. Press R to restart and repair it again in a different way! DO IT YOU CAPITALIST SLAVE.

Let's go.

12:15
WHAT THE GHOST-SNORTING-SNORLAX DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO HOLD CTRL AND SHIFT TO CREATE MULTIPLE OBJECTS IN THE ROOM AT ONCE IN THE NEW VERSION OF GAME MAKER. PUFF SHITTER.
I paid money for new software because I expected improvement. Literally feeling myself get arthritis is not an improvement.
Jesus Christ.

Thank god I can just rip old platformer game code from previous projects for this. Oh, did I forget to mention?
This isn't just a game in which you fix elevators.
It's a game in which you can fix elevators and  jump.

12:30
What the hell is my roommate watching? Did the sports announcer just say ninjitsu fight?
i wish i could watch two ninjitsus fight BUT NO I MUST WORK because SOMEBODY HAS TO DO IT
Fucking ninjitsus. They're not all that cool.

Shit, is 64 pixels too great of a range within which the player can interact with the elevator? How close does one have to be to elevators to fix elevators? Judas Priest.

12:31
Yeah if anybody was wondering 64 pixels is too much distance.
YOU'RE WELCOME.

12:32
AND SO IS 48 IF YOU WERE ASKING

12:45
No my bad 48 is totally the right distance.
If you're trying to work on an elevator and you're more that 48 pixels away from the fucker you better put your fancy-ass elevator tools down and hightail it out of there before you hurt someone.

There used to be a strange joke about aunts here but I removed it because it was dum.


1:00
Guess whose game has an elevator that can detect bullshit?


It's on to you, pansy-farter.

1:15
Tahoma?!
Why the hell is Tahoma the default font?
Who the hell types in Tahoma?
What the fuck is a Tahoma?
I expected improvement. I didn't pay money to type in Tahoma in the built-in graphics editor.
Fucking ninjitsus.

1:30
Look, I hate it when humorists make self-referential, self-depricating humor or commentary. It's never funny, and it never helps. But in all honesty? This post has lost me any credibility I've ever had as a writer. I lost the credibility precisely when I wrote about the aunt dying in the elevator accident.
The proofreading and review processes are not by any means underrated. Make no mistake, this is an unfiltered vomit of words.

         I continue to write this for the slim chance of self redemption.

on another note sewage guzzling skunk muncher ha ha

1:45
You know, this is a lot like Ludum Dare or 7DFPS.
Except not fun, and if you fail to meet the deadline you lose your scholarship money.
That's sickening. What sick turn of fate this is.

Look, the game has choices in it now. And what meaningful choices they are.

I should work for kitten-huffin' Bioware.

What kind of sadistic elevator repair simulator is this. Jesus.

2:00
Oh shit.
I forgot to change the font from Tahoma.
Fuck me blind.

Should I just censor that moronic post about the aunt? I should probably do that.
Oh geeze.

I hope your computer's badass enough for this game, because it needs to run at a howling 60 frames per second.

2:15
Yeah, definitely censoring that stupid elevator crash with dead aunt joke. Geeze. Can't believe I wrote that shit.

Yeah that looks better.

Yeeaaaaah.

2:30
And now the game has exploding elevators.

I swear to god I'm being productive.

2:45

Now the game has bad guys.

This is going to be great for my portfolio.

I have a headache and my stomach hurts.

What am I doing.

3:00
You see, over the bad guy's head, it says, "bad guy".

Did you notice?

I noticed.

Wait a second, I'm almost done.

3:08
The game prototype's done. If you want to download it for some reason you can do it here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89594581/Posthuman_Prototype.zip

It's a Windows build as usual. Not bad for three hour's work.

That... that was the
GRUMPY PROGRAMMER LIVE BLOG SPECTACLE. 

Never... never again...

Recommendation: Hate Plus

Oh, *Hyun-ae. I really shouldn't be romancing you in-game because you're an underage genocidal computer program and it all kind of makes me uncomfortable, but I'll still drop everything and make you a cake when you ask me to ~! In a mug. In the microwave.

<3?

Look, a computer game made me do this. If you've learned anything from my blog, learn this: computer games are evil. Ugh.

The Narrative Constraints of a Violent Medium

     And now, ladies and gents, here's an article I wrote for Beta Fish about the narrative limitations of game violence, mostly in response to Bioshock: Infinite. Thoughts?

Have I mentioned that I love Nightmare Mode?

Articles worth reading:
The Challenge of the Virtual Reality Code
Player-Character Dynamics, Identity, and Sexuality in Video Games

Recommendations: Tower of the Blood Lord and Leigh Alexander's Critique of Bioshock Infinite

Here's an interactive fiction game made in Twine called Tower of the Blood Lord, which starts out as an amusing parody of the first 20 minutes of Modern Warfare 2, but then takes a surreal twist, and eventually ascends into a really well written essay about games and culture and violence and prejudice and interacting with culture instead of just consuming it. The game gave me a much needed reminder to consider the relationship between narrative and gameplay, especially violent gameplay, and to consider my own role as a game developer in proliferating (or not) certain cultural attitudes about violence, gender, and race in games. Definitely worth a play/read.

Especially relevant to the themes of Tower of the Blood Lord is this brilliant critique of Bioshock: Infinite by Leigh Alexander. While I enjoyed Infinite very much, I was a little off-put by the narrative context of the game's violence, as well as how the game addressed race. I might write more about race in Infinite some other time (I need to go to bed), but Alexander does a fantastic job in critiquing violence in the game. Well worth reading.

Review of Thomas Was Alone

Cheers! I just (somewhat scathingly yet always quirkily) reviewed the indie puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone for Beta Fish magazine. You can read it here!

Toward a Cutie Aesthetic

It's a little old by now, but I had just stumbled across a thought-provoking article by Andrew Vanden Bossche about the underepresentation of women and the LGBT community in games, the lack of "human" stories in AAA games, and what he calls "The Cutie Aesthetic" as a tool of cultural subversion. You can read it by clicking the fancy hyperlink here.

Review of Fez

I just reviewed the delightful Fez for Beta Fish magazine, and you can read my thoughts on the game and on exploration in games in general here.

Waker - It's Back On, and a Quick Question

     So, I'm done with school for the year, but I'm stuck in the town without anything to do for a week. You know what this means?

     A week of full-time game development in coffeeshops. I hope to have something interesting to show you all by the end of it!

     Also, quick question - I'm not sure how I feel about titling the game Waker. It's sort of awkward to say by itself, sounds a lot like wanker, and leads to people asking me what a "waker" is, which leads to having to discuss some of the game's original fantasy lore, which leads to me feeling super goofy. So I'm thinking of renaming it Wakers and Dreamers. Any thoughts? Seriously, though, I just need one person to comment with the word "yes" to confirm that this is in fact a good decision. I want this to be the last time I rename it. Do me a favor and be that person.

     In terms of Waker's development, this summer should be interesting. One week in a college town with nothing else to do, followed by three weeks in Baltimore with nothing else to do, followed by working for three months in Baltimore with nothing else to do in the evening. If I really, really push myself and find the motivation, I hope to be done with the damn game by the end of the summer so I can move onto the next big thing. I've been wanting to make this game about a girl who goes to high school in a walled-in dystopian corporate city. You see, life sucks for this girl, because she's in a dystopian sci-fi setting and  she's in high school (insult to injury, amarite?), when, one night, she stumbles across this creature from another world trapped in the city, and they become super good friends. Problem is, the corporate police state isn't okay with this, and they want the monster dead, because that's just want villainous corporate police states do - they hate fun. So, basically, it'd be a mix of 1984, high-school commedy/drama indie film, and Pokemon. I'm probably going to ditch the idea by the time I actually start my next project, but it excites me nonetheless.

Miscellaneous Short Essays I Had to Write for School

     So, I recently applied (and got in, of course) to Ohio University's Games and Animation program, while keeping my good ol' Political Science major. To do this, I had to write six short essays for an online blog - I don't know why it was necessary to post these essays publicly on the internet, since they're just going to be a general waste of server space - but a couple of them might be of interest to you.

     For the first of these, I had to explain why I applied to program. I ended up explaining why I want to make games, why I want to make them independently, and how I want the medium to evolve. If you want to know why I do what I do, give it a read here.

     The second is a review of The Binding of Isaac, a wonderfully twisted zeldalike roguelike. Those of you who are Indie Devs are probably quite familiar with it, but for the rest of you, it's cheap and good - and I give a good synopsis and short analysis of it here. Not my most in-depth review, but it'll do.

Please, for the love of God, no not read the rest of the entries.

On the Ideal of the "Notgame"

This week for Beta Fish I offer my thoughts on so-called "notgames," game difficulty, ludo-literacy, non-gamers, storytelling, the future of games, and more. Lots of theory and shit! Read it all here.

On Mad Father and Protagonists in Games

Here's a review I wrote for Beta Fish on the quite good freeware indie horror adventure game Mad Father that also talks about the problem that having a player avatar as the main character poses for storytelling in games. Enjoy!