Devlog Update: The Morphine Western Revenge (#4)

Gameplay footage of a rain skirmish.

In a Nutshell

The Morphine Western Revenge is not done, but as of this week, it is fully playable from start to finish. The past few months, I've finished the game's final two levels, implemented its opening cutscene, and made some final much-needed adjustments to the enemy AI. I also recorded and edited some natural sound effects (actual rain and thunder), which is something I haven't actually done before and had a blast doing. Just so ya know, the wind you hear in the game is fake - that's just me blowing into the microphone.

All that remains is playtesting and some UI work. While I am always hesitant to make predictions regarding release dates, it is hard for me to imagine the game being released any later than a month from now.

As with most pieces of media, the whole work is greater than the sum of its parts. Now that I have a clear sense of what the entire work actually is - a sense of how the story is paced, how the action plays out from start to finish - I'm pretty damn excited about it. Any pessimism I've had about the game in August has been dissolved. This is by far the strongest game I've ever made, as dark and violent as it is.

This will most likely be my final devlog for this project before release, so I'd just like to get a few more thoughts down regarding its development. Specifically, I'd like to talk about the project's central premise and greatest challenge - the adaption of a story from text to game.

The game opens with a campfire conversation.

Regarding Adapting a Novella into Game Format

Revenge, as I've mentioned, is based on Brian Cristi's free online novella The Hyperbolic Needle. Transferring a story with any faithfulness from literature to game is a pretty massive leap. Literature traditionally favors narration and internal monologue; games are traditionally a good medium for demonstrating the causal workings of systems.

While notgames, artgames, and walking simulators aspire to tell more literary stories, such narrative-focused games usually require stronger art direction and overall more production to be compelling (interactive literature being the exception). By contrast, creating compelling action games is mostly dependent upon having solid mechanics. While I can't speak for all game developers, I think that I can make a compelling action game much more quickly and easily than I can a purely story-driven game.

So, with Brian's blessing, the game became a shooter, despite the novella depicting only one violent encounter. The story itself, in both the novella and the game, is the story of a loner traveling through a valley (movement) to enact revenge (shooting). Moving and shooting are the core actions of a shooter game; it was undoubtedly the most fitting traditional game genre for the adaptation.

Once it became apparent that a truly faithful adaption would be impossible, I gave myself permission to take whatever creative liberties with the source material I wanted. Telling the story as I wanted to tell it, under the technical constraints of game development, while still hitting the same narrative, thematic, and emotional beats as the original, was a challenge. It's easy to complain about how the book/game/movie version of a movie/game/book isn't true to the source material. I now have a healthier respect for the unfaithfulness of these adaptions, and am able to forgive most of them. Except for Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The last two-thirds of that movie still disappoint me.

Regarding Horses

Game development, of course, contains many technical hurdles. One of the greatest advantages of literature is that there are virtually no technical restraints on what it can describe - it is as easy to write about a woman standing still as it is to write about a horse in motion. This is not the case in games. Animating horses is hard. Have you seen the way they move? It's fucking unnatural.

Probably one of the biggest changes between The Hyperbolic Needle and The Morphine Western Revenge is the removal of horses. The novella had a lot of horses in it. The game has no horses.

I'm sorry.

Regarding Storytelling

Needle is mostly lacking in dialogue or dictated internal monologue - it's almost entirely told through poetic narration. Because most of the action and scenery in Revenge is presented visually on-screen, most of that narration becomes unnecessary.

If you haven't read it, this is how Needle is written.

The specific storytelling method of Needle works because of it's consistency and poetic style. It is impossible to emulate its style through a visual game, but even attempting to approximate that style would be inadequate - simply narrating the events on screen would be boring.

The best solution was to have my protagonist monologue throughout the game to fill in the remaining plot holes and flesh out her character. This is something that Needle's protagonist (originally named Maya, unnamed in my version) almost doesn't do. We rarely hear her speech or thoughts. Probably my favorite aspect of making the adaptation was to take a silent character from one story, analyze her behavior and emotions, and try to put convey those aspects of her personality through her speech.

However, because the game is less poetic that its source material, I decided to discard much of the original story's spiritual and supernatural elements. This is partially due to my own secular worldview, but also because games as a whole are more usually more literal than the text. To make my adaption more grounded in reality was natural, given the medium I was working with.

That being said, some of the strangeness of the original story remains. Why is the man responsible for killing the protagonists' family and abducting her sister still living in the valley where he did it? Why do his men attack the protagonist on sight? Why is my level design so unnatural? The vagueness, openness, and non-literal elements of the original story gave me some permission for my game to break some of the rules of reality, which was often convenient.

But also, because games take so damn long to make, I had to trim the story to its essential elements. Namely: "Native American woman loses sister to soldiers, takes morphine, returns home, kills a guy, finds sister, [SPOILERS REDACTED]." Any story that fails to hit on these essential elements fails to be an adaption of The Hyperbolic Needle, so I made sure to focus on them. But a lot of the story - namely, the horses - has been omitted or entirely re-imagined.

That being said, I had a lot of fun incorporating as many non-essential story elements from the novella into the game as possible. Both versions of the story begin in a cave and end in a thunderstorm. The protagonist attacks people with her syringe. There are train tracks. There are exactly twelve enemies in the game's final level - a reference to the twelve angry men who attack Maya at the end of Needle. So on and so forth.

Overall, I managed to create a true adaption of a pre-existing story while still being able to tell it on my own terms. This game very much feels like my own work without losing sight of its inspiration, and in that regard, this has been a successful and rewarding undertaking.

Regarding Research

Here's where I admit that I am a bad man.

The extent of my research in making this game amounts to
1) Looking up pictures of the game's setting, Imperial Valley, California,
2) Researching the history of morphine and syringe usage, and
3) Quickly skimming through the history of Native American-US relations in southern California in the mid 19th century.

From my outsider perspective, Brian did research sufficient for his version of the story. But, because I am telling a story with different content and a more grounded style than the original, I had a responsibility to do further research.

I left some essential questions unanswered, such as: What tribe would the protagonist have belonged to? What would her name actually have been? What would she have believed in? Was the Imperial Valley known as such at the time? So on and so forth.

Researching the above questions would have added some authenticity, depth, and value to the game. Mind you, I did the next best thing and wrote around my ignorance - rather than make assumptions about the protagonist's culture, I deliberately left those elements up to interpretation. Part of the reason I felt uninspired to commit more research is because, admittedly, the game's story worked very well without it. The central plot point is that soldiers eradicated the protagonist's culture. Therefore, it's thematically justifiable that any references to that culture are absent.

I can make the above excuse, and I can make excuses about not having time to do proper research in such a short development cycle, but the real reason that I didn't do further research? Mostly, I was lazy. And at this point, the game is just about finished - I'm mostly stuck with it as it is.

This was my first attempt at making any short of historical game - everything else I've made so far has been cemented in fantasy, cyberpunk, and science fiction. So, it's only naturally that I made mistakes in my first attempt. However, I am tackling some sensitive subject matter in the game (actual genocide), and while I treated that subject matter with enough respect that I feel comfortable releasing the game, I feel as though I could have treated it with more respect.

I just hope that there isn't something super problematic about the game's political themes or portrayal of history that I'm overlooking due to my ignorance. I don't want to be another Ken Levine.

I don't think I am. But Ken Levine doesn't know he's Ken Levine either.


All that being said, I'm still mighty pleased about the story I'm telling. It's more than good enough as is, and I can't wait to share it with you. Thank you all for your support this far!

Also, shout out to Isaiah, if you're reading this. Keep programming cool stuff! Sorry for the naughty words.

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!

Recommendation: Save the Date

Play this.

It's called Save the Date. It initially appears to be a visual novel dating sim, but it isn't. At all. It's really best to go into it blindly, so I'll try not to spoil it, but it's really, really funny, fantastically written, and provides really great commentary on storytelling (esp interactive storytelling). (Tip: keep playing after each bad ending. Try to avert them. You will progress.)

It's short, it's free, and it's quality. So much quality.

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

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.

Waker Update

Hey all,

     I haven't been making much progress on Waker lately. School's generally been kicking my ass, and I've been out of town for a few days to take care of family business, and I've started designing a competitive tabletop collectible monster roguelike game to which I've foolishly been dedicating my creative energies. More on that some other time.

     The game's still about 40% of the way to completion. I've been adding plenty of new content over the past few months - new areas and puzzles and characters and all that -but I've generally been expanding the beginning of the game. Now that I have a grasp on the world and the characters, I've been embellishing pre-existing content quite a bit. For example, I'm currently working on the interior of an apothecary in a town that previously had no explorable interiors to its buildings. The player is sent on a short quest to find a key in this town, and in the original version the key was placed in plain sight on the same screen in which the town is entered. This didn't feel like much of a search. By adding a "dungeon," the search is expanded, and the player is required to solve a puzzle (and thus actually work for the key). I also took the opportunity to give the player the opportunity to find (or fail to find) a sample of anti-venom that holds severe consequences in the story later on, and I felt as though it would be a good point in the game to introduce one of the game's monsters, and a dungeon is a fine place for that. It's a lot of extra work that isn't necessary to tell the complete story, but I'm already finding that it's enriching the game a lot.

(more below the jump)

Another Great Nghtmare Mode Article

Jonas Kyratzes wrote another great article, basically answering the question about how games have unique capabilities for storytelling, but using Photopia as the example instead of Shadow of the Colossus like I had. He does a better job of answering the question than I do, too.

Living for Yourself and Nobody Else: Why Skyrim Left me Cold

I was really, really confused when I had finished my playthrough of Skyrim. It was probably the most critically acclaimed game of 2011, everyone I knew who played it enjoyed the game, and there were many among them who absolutely swear by it. If you ask any gamer about Skyrim, they will tell you it is amazing. Starting the game for the first time, my expectations were high, but by the time I ended my quest, I found the entire experience to be unmoving and unrewarding. I felt totally ambivalent toward the game.

At first, I thought that I was just insane. The game's world is massive, detailed, and immersive. The amount of freedom given to the player is vast. The soundtrack is epic.The game is so gorgeous that I would often stop and remove the HUD just to take screenshots. Most of my friends who are enthusiastic about the game are people of good taste. Normally, I'd just leave it at a difference of taste and move on, but the more my Skyrim-enthused fans talk about the game, the more I found myself thinking about it, and I've since realized that I might not be entirely insane.

Now, an incredible effort was put into Skyrim's world-building. Not only is the literal, physical world massive and detailed, but great effort was put into creating the Tamriel, game world's, history and cultures. It may possibly be among the most well-developed fictional worlds of recent time.

This is an incredible waste, though, because I didn't give a shit about Tamriel or the people in it. I was never given a reason to.

The Echidna Awards! (a delayed List of GOTYs 2012)

I'm currently bored out of my poor mind at Columbus International Airport and just realized that I never got around to making a list of the best games of 2012 like any respectable video game blog would do. Having little else to occupy my time, I figured I would take a few moments to remedy this travesty.

Six games make the cut this year. I decided to cheat and include two games from previous years that were only ported to PC this year or remastered this year because I love them so much and wanted an excuse to ramble about them some more, so forgive me. Also, only one non-indie game makes the list. The only mainstream commercial games from 2012 I played this year were Mass Effect 3 and Borderlands 2, the former of which made the list. Borderlands 2  had a few laughs and was sort of fun at the time, but overall it was a forgettable experience that didn't leave a lasting impression - at it's core, just another shooter. It also doesn't make the list because I'm a little salty that I wasted $50 on it.


In no particular order (although I save the best for last), my six Echidna Awards:

Nightmare Mode is the shit, just about

Here's a fantastic essay that Dylan Holmes wrote for Nightmare Mode about Dear Esther, accessibility in games, and the isolation that one feels as a gamer. It resonated with me on a couple of levels.

The first thing that resonated with me was his necessary defense of Dear Esther. It really irks me it when people dismiss certain forms of interactive entertainment entirely just because it doesn't fit the conventional definition - it's a pointless act of destruction, a cultural murder of sorts. Games like Dear Esther, The Path, and other games without traditional interactive elements or challenge-reward are dismissed by gamers and developers for not meeting their narrow definition of games, and they for some reason they feel as though they need to protest when such games are given media attention or nominated for Independent Game Festival awards.

Why do people feel so compelled to knock these games down? If you don't want to play them, just leave the poor things alone and let the rest of us enjoy them, please. All you're doing is prolonging the inevitable evolution of the medium into maturation. People are finally figuring out that we can do more things with computer code and motion graphics than raid dungeons and win deathmatches, and nothing's going to stop that. If you're content with traditional hack-n-slashes and first-person-shooters, don't worry- they aren't going anywhere, trust me. They're here to stay. So please, let us create and play our "notgames," "artgames", "interactive narratives," or whatever the hell they're being called these days in peace, and maybe if you keep an open mind and shed your expectations of what a game is you might find that you enjoy them. By excluding and dismissing experimental games, you're doing nobody a favor. The debates about whether games are art or what constitutes a game are nothing but outlets for pointless and self-destructive in-fighting. Every game has an audience; don't deny that audience what they desire.

The next thing that resonated was the isolation that he felt as a gamer. I'm certainly well familiar with this both as gamer and developer- I try to explain my passion to middle-aged non-gamers, and none of them really get it. Out of all of the people in that demographic, only one asked to see one of my games. So, I played through the first couple screens of Waker for him. As I made the avatar walk across the screen, he remarked that it reminded him of Super Mario Bros. It seemed like a strange comparison to me, but given his limited exposure, it was likely the only one he could make. Once I demonstrated a couple of conversations with non-player characters, I think he started to understand much more clearly what it is that I'm actually trying to do with the medium. After the demonstration, I talked about my story-first approach to games and my dissatisfaction with the OU Game Developer's Association. He remarked to my mother afterward, "hey, did you know that your son went to game clubs, and ended up quitting because it was too mainstream for him?" He ended up understanding better than most, but it was still a rudimentary understanding. Most non-gamers (and most gamers, for that matter) I talk to tend to have a "oh, well, that's nice" attitude to the conversation and don't really listen to what I try to say.

Then there's the alienation that I receive from mainstream gamers and conservative developers, but I will refrain from writing about that out of fear of using the phrase "alienation from the mainstream" one more time and fully descending into hipsterdom. Anyway, I honestly can't think of a good way to conclude this blog post or bring it all together, but the essay that Holmes wrote was refreshing and served as a great vehicle for me to get a few things off of my chest. Did I mention that I love Nightmare Mode? Because I do.

Recommendation - Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle. Also random Waker Screen

Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle is a free open-world RPG Maker 2003 game by Saint Bomber. It was originally released in 2010, but an enhanced version of the game came out this year. I had never gotten to the end of the original, so I revisited it and was pleasantly surprised.

Waker Update

Over the past month, I've written and implemented Act I of Waker - a quarter of the story. If I had stuck to my original plan, I've done enough work to have been 2/3 of the way done, but had I done that the game would be far too short. The first act of the game was originally took about 5 minutes to breeze through - and there's no way in hell that I've put all this work in for a mere 20 minute game! So, I've trying to expand the story and the game's world, and thankfully it's been easy to do in a meaningful way and I've managed to avoid mere filler.

Thoughts on Game Violence Part 2

     I was really tired when I wrote that post on game violence last night and didn't hit on everything that I wanted to or expressed myself in a way that I would've liked. I just want to elaborate a few more things.

     It isn't the violence in games themselves that makes me uncomfortable, it's how that violence is portrayed, the carelessness to which violence is inserted into games, and the feedback that games give to violent vs nonviolent behavior. Let's look at some examples. Generally, games like Iji and Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP use violence in a conscious and thoughtful way, while the aforementioned Skyrim, Torliight II, and nearly every first-person shooter and action RPG ever created use it in a thoughtless way.

Thoughts on Game Violence

     Nathan Grayson wrote an excellent piece on video game violence for Rock Paper Shotgun. It begins with the following:

"Everyone? We need to talk.

I didn't feel right playing Far Cry 3 the day after the awful, disgusting, utterly tragic shootings in Newton, Connecticut  I didn't at all.

I think that says something. I know that says something..."


     I've been feeling the same way, lately. Even before the recent shootings, I've been growing increasingly ambivalent towards violence as a primary interactive element in games. I'm in the middle of playing Skyrim at the moment, and while the violence in the fantasy RPG wouldn't have bothered me much in the past, for some reason it's bothering me a lot now. Generally, the game tries to make you feel like a hero or a badass for adventuring and killing lots of things. The sweeping score, the epic quests, and the praise that non-player characters give all communicate to you, as a player, that you are heroic and mighty. In the past, when overly violent games have communicated this message to me, I've accepted it without question. Killing a couple of dozen bandits or giant rats used to make me feel good, I felt like a hero, I felt accomplished. I was living through the power fantasy that the game developers constructed for me and it gave me pleasure.

Shadow of the Colossus and Story Telling

So, I've been writing some short pieces for Ohio University's self-described online "nerd culture" magazine, Beta Fish, and just recently wrote one about Shadow of the Colossus and how it uses the unique strengths of its medium to tell a compelling story. Give it a read!

(I also wrote a fairly general piece of indie games a while back and forgot to link to it, so here it is.)

Why I'd Rather Eat Gravel than Land a Job in the Games Industry

     For those of you who don't know, I'm a sophomore year college student majoring in political science. Despite my passion for making games, I have for a long time disregarded the possibility of studying game development or pursuing a career in the medium. Most people I've talked to about it tell me that it's a natural choice for someone with my interests. Whenever I have conversations about choosing a major or considering a career path, the other person almost always mentions, "you know, you've always disregarded the game thing, but you know, it's good to be paid to do something you love/good to pick up some highly technical skills/it seems like a natural fit for you." It was hard to provide a response that indicated otherwise, why wouldn't I want to be paid for something that I love? Yet, deep down, I knew that the games industry wasn't for me. I didn't want to be part of a massive development team, cranking out another generic AAA first person shooter whose story that wasn't worth shit. I wanted to do something different, I wanted to make stories that reflected upon real human experience, and I wanted to tell stories on my own terms, to realize my vision and not somebody else's. The games medium was made for me, but the industry, as it exists today, isn't.

Game writers and their thoughts on interactive narrative

Here's a great interview with Valve's Erik Wolpaw and Double Fine's Anna Kipnis on writing stories for games, non-game interactive narratives, and games developed by one-man teams (all of which are relevant to what I'm trying to do). Valve's always been telling great stories through their games, and I really enjoyed  reading what one of their writers had to say on some of the stories being told by modern experimental indie games. Give it a read!

Storytelling Through Games

Here's a fairly good article about the potential of games as a medium for storytelling. I'm actually in the process of writing an essay on the same topic, and it is always refreshing to read a piece by a game developer who agrees that interactive software can tell stories as well or better than other mediums, but that  potential for storytelling is being wasted on shallow, linear, overproduced playthings.

The only point of disagreement I have with the author is his praising of the player avatar over the player character. When the protagonist is an avatar of the player, makes decisions based off of the player's history in the player's world, but lives in a separate world... a lot is sacrificed. Avatar characters in games can't undergo complex character development the same way characters in novels and movies can unless the player who is operating the avatar is undergoing development himself. Even in that case, the character development is a result of events that happen in the real world, not the game world. It poses a serious problem for storytellers, I think. More about this when I publish that essay I mentioned.