How I'm Redeeming a Terrible Game (Monsterpunk Devlog #15)

Here's a story about an ongoing misadventure lasing several years, player progression systems, efficient problem solving, inefficient problem solving, and the creative process.

Your Boy was in Trouble

The last time I touched Monsterpunk was April of last year. Higher priority projects filled my time since then - namely, festival applications, game launcher software, graduate school applications, The Giant Robot Blues, and Monster Truck Power Fantasy. 

When I finished Power Fantasy, I breathed a deep sigh, re-opened Monsterpunk's project file, compiled it, and played it. I was mortified. 

I softly screamed into the internet:

Been working on a game on-and-off since 2014, opened and played it after a year hiatus with fresh eyes, it's two hours long, now I realize only about 15 minutes of it are good.

— Alex Higgins (@alchiggins) January 23, 2018

I can't think of another game I've made, no matter how old or awful it is, that I haven't been able to enjoy on some level. Even the trash I made in middle school has entertainment value in the same way your kindergarten doodles of Jedi stabbing each other and gushing fountains of blood has entertainment value.

The main problem with Monsterpunk was that it was simply boring.

I don't think the game is destined to be boring. Often, it shows in the finished game if it had a troubled development cycle, but this isn't always the case. For example, Looking Glass Studios didn't have a working game a year and a half into the development of Thief, and the project almost folded. In order to save the game, they had to reprogram many of the its fundamental features from scratch. They went on to release a highly-influential classic.

Fixing Monsterpunk requires me to do the same. The game's problems aren't hidden in the details, rather, they're rooted in some of the game's central premises. Fixing the game has been similar to stripping away the foundation away from a building, replacing it, and hoping the structure still holds. So far, it's been a daunting, but rewarding process.

Writing about the awfulness your yet-to-be-released game is not a conventionally sound PR strategy. However, I think there is much to be learned from an experience of producing a strong piece of art after a long and troubled creative process, and I can provide a more accurate and useful account of the process by writing about it as it happens, rather than as a post-mortem.

My game was bad, but it's better now. Let me tell you why.

The Context

Before I describe my solution to the problem, I want to provide some more of its context. I've been creating Monsterpunk since the fall of 2014. Originally, it was a small life-simulation RPG titled Toilets, Meat, and Drugs that I made in a week for a game jam. It was inspired by the mechanics of the life-sim game Digimon World and the aesthetics of punkgames by developers like Porpentine and thecatamites.

Digimon World, 1999

Armada, Porpentine, 2013

Space Funeral, thecatamites, 2010

Unfortunately for my game, the MS Paint-esque punk aesthetic was a lot more relevant in the early 2010's than it is today. All I can do now is continue to embrace it.

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs, even in its earliest form, was a boring mess. Jupiter Hadley, who does the fantastic work of covering and recording footage of every indie jam game she can come across, recording the opening minute or so for one of her compilations of game jam entries.

The opening of the game consists of you character slowly moving in front of a series of signs, reading through a full explanation of the game's rules, before slowly backtracking to use a toilet. The writing is cringe-worthy.

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs intro, 2014

In one of my less-proud moments, I made a comment to her asking why she recorded such a dull segment of play, and we had a brief exchange, toward the end of which she made some comment along the lines of, "if you want me to record something interesting, make something interesting."

Her actual wording was a lot gentler, and please make no mistake, I was being a jerk (I am so, so sorry). I was irritated and confused following the exchange, but eventually, I came to understand her point. The opening minute of the game (and much of what followed) was boring, it was a serious problem, and it was my fault. Generally speaking, a game, like any other form of entertainment media, should be engaging from the moment the player boots it up. If it isn't, it better be justified. Toilets, Meat, and Drugs did not offer that justification.

The Core Problems

The problems with game, both in its 2014 and 2017 iterations, are numerous, but the two largest problems are its tutorial (which sours the beginning) and its pacing (which sours the middle). The 15 minutes of fun I referred to in my tweet  happened during one of the game's ending sequences. That particular sequence is very good, but it takes an hour and forty-five minutes of unrewarding play to get to it.

It should be common sense to even a novice game designer that verbally conveying all of the game's rules to the player at the very beginning without any context is a terrible idea. It's too much information, it usually can't be referenced later, it isn't interactive, and the player has no reason to care about any of it. One of the earliest changes I made to the game was replacing the tutorial with something more interactive, simplified, and user-friendly.

Monsterpunk intro, 2015

That said, it's still a boring way to start the game - its opening minutes are still slow and information-heavy. I've only just begun to remake the game's beginning, and will write more about it once I've finished.

I have, however, solved the game's pacing problems. The game's sluggish pacing and excessive downtime are the result of its player progression system.

In most role-playing games, your character progresses via an experience point (XP) system. Most of you know this. Your character completes challenges, are awarded a number of XP, and when they get enough points, they level up and become stronger, allowing them to complete challenges that were previously impossible.

Monsterpunk is not like most role-playing games - most of its mechanics, including its progression system, are inspired by Digimon World. The full manner in which the player gains abilities and becomes stronger over the course of Digimon World is surprisingly layered, but the most obvious form of progression is through the passage of time. Digimon World's protagonist is a human with a monster partner. That monster partner goes through different life stages, usually becoming more powerful each time it grows, until it dies, is reborn as a baby, and the cycle repeats. A monster's progression through its life stages is directly linked to its age, and time in Digimon World progresses at a constant rate. It's a form of progression that, for the most part, occurs irrespective of anything the player does.

On paper, this is an idea that can work thematically, and it does, but it sounds terrible from a conventional game design perspective. As described above, outside the context of the game's other systems, the monster aging mechanic removes agency from the player. However, Digimon World makes it work. When the player hits a wall of difficulty that requires a more powerful monster, instead of simply waiting for the monster to grow older, they can pass time by taking the monster to the gym, thus increasing its physical strength. Incidentally, training at the gym also accelerates the game's clock. An hour in World is normally the equivalent of a real-world minute - an hour of training at the gym, however, is nearly instantaneous. In other words, if the player's monster isn't powerful or old enough for them to progress, there's a single fallback mechanic that solves both problems. It's still a tedious solution, but it does have a certain elegance to it.

In Monsterpunk, I similarly linked player progression to play time. This was a life simulation, after all, so it made some sense to adopt mechanics that most closely resemble real-world aspects of being alive. As time passes, the player character passes through different life stages, with each stage being more powerful than the previous. However, Monsterpunk does not have a fallback mechanic analogous to Digimon World's gym. If you hit a wall of difficulty that requires a more powerful character, your only option is to wait it out. 

This would lead to situations, for example, where a player would progress too slowly through the game, and their character steadily age and advance through life stages earlier than necessary. Their power level would be ahead of the difficulty curve, diluting much of the game's tension. More frequently, however, a player would progress too quickly, accomplish every challenge they could at their current power level, and then find themselves hitting a wall of difficulty that could only be overcome by waiting to age.

This threw the player into a state of tedium in which they lacked an immediate objective. Even worse, few of their choices mattered until they passed a growth threshold.

The Solution

 

In the end, I came to understand why the traditional XP progression system is so widely adopted.

While we take this system for granted, it works for numerous reasons. By attaching an XP reward to certain behaviors or challenges, you can incentivize the player to do virtually anything. Not only that, but it allows the designer to make any interaction rewarding, even if in a superficial way. Most importantly, though, it directly links the pacing of the game to the player's mastery of it. The more efficiently the player overcomes challenges, the faster they become stronger, allowing them to access more of the game's content sooner.

In the case of Monsterpunk, implementing an XP system did everything it was supposed to do. Not only have I eliminated most of the game's downtime, but every action the player took that awarded XP now has a little extra meaning attached to it.

Where Monsterpunk's XP system diverges from most other games is that it places less emphasis on killing other characters. While combat, and the decision to abstain from it, are central parts of the Monsterpunk experience, the game must have a means to reward players who pursue any play style. Therefore, I attached XP to nearly every system in the game I could think of, from flirting with other monsters, to growing your own food, to pooping in toilets.

Every time the player gains XP, their progress bar briefly flashes alongside the amount of points earned.

I was reluctant to thoughtlessly fall back on a classic set of game mechanics that most designers and players take for granted. While conventional design ultimately served as a solution to Monsterpunk's core problems, it was only through a blind rejection of convention that I was able to better understand its merits.

I booted the game back up, played through it, and was amazed by how much my game had transformed. All of the tedium and downtime once plaguing the game was gone, and just as well, everything I achieved as a player felt a little more substantial, and every interaction that lead to an achievement felt more enjoyable.

Wait! It gets better!

 

Monsterpunk's new XP system proved to be a gift that kept giving in unexpected ways. Adding inherent rewards to most player behavior allows me to trim superfluous features from the game that have become obsolete. The best example of this is the game's reputation system.

I added a reputation system to the game to address some of the problems with its flirtation system. The player's character is capable of flirting with other monsters in the game - those whom they successfully flirt with will no longer be hostile to the player. It's the game's primary nonviolent means of problem solving. This mechanic is inspired by skill check system of Dungeons and Dragons - the player character has a score that represents how good they are at flirting, the target has a score that represents how easily affected they are by flirtation, a random number is generated based on these scores, and if the number is high enough, the flirtation attempt is successful.

In narrative-driven games, it's a really effective system, but in most cases, if you want the player's choices in a game to feel like they matter, you should avoid designing with output randomness. That is to say, the result of a player's choices shouldn't be random. If a soccer player kicks a ball into a goal, and the referee flips a coin to determine whether it was actually worth a point, it would be a frustrating experience for everyone involved. The outcome of the soccer game would cease to be wholly representative of the either team's skill, and instead be largely left to chance. The players' decision making and physical feats would feel as though they didn't matter.

Unfortunately, early in Monsterpunk's development, I designed the flirtation system to be heavily dependent on chance, and replacing with a new skilled-based system isn't very feasible this late in development. Instead, I opted to make it so that there was some guaranteed reward attached to every flirtation attempt, regardless of whether it was successful - a guaranteed non-random outcome.

This was the basis for the reputation system. Every time the player flirts with another character, regardless of how well it goes, their reputation goes up. If their reputation reaches a certain level, their flirt attempts become more effective. Furthermore, acts of violence decrease reputation, making flirtation less effective, and the player's reputation naturally resets over time.

Ultimately, the reputation system didn't make the game any more compelling. It was a needlessly complicated mechanic that required me to frontload the game's tutorial with yet another long-winded explanation of a system that the player didn't have a reason to care about, because it wasn't fun.

Just wait until I clutter the screen with a fourth freakin' bar!

After I implemented the XP system, I was relieved to have realized that the reputation system was now obsolete. Instead of awarding the player reputation for their flirtation attempts, they were now awarded experience, which is just as effective at providing consistency to their decisions' outcomes. In this case, an experience-based reward was more meaningful than a reputation-based one, as advancing a life stage is much more exciting to the player than building a short-lived flirtation bonus.

It should go without saying that it is almost always better to solve multiple design problems with a single system than to create a new system for each problem. This is what makes games elegant.

The Downside

 

My original goal with Monsterpunk wasn't necessarily to make a "fun" game, but rather, an interactive experience that's compelling on multiple levels. I think that game designers are just starting to explore what else can be achieved artistically with digitally interactive pictures and sound besides "fun," and I think life-sims have a lot of potential to thematically relate to the human experience in numerous ways by the nature of their content. One of the reasons I am obsessed with Digimon World is that, for a flawed, buggy, poorly-translated children's game, it mechanically explores the passage of time, death, and the existential angst they cause better than anything else I've played.

My current goal, however, is simply to release something worth playing as soon as humanely possible. That means I have to sacrifice some potential for thematic depth in exchange for raw quality. Right now, it's better for me to release something that's fun, but relatively shallow, than something that aspires for depth, but fails to engage the player on any level.

Monsterpunk's time-based progression system had potential to explore existential themes regarding the passage of time, but ultimately, it failed to do so. The new XP system lacks this potential, but makes the game worth playing. Could I have found a way to preserve the time-based system and make it compelling? Absolutely. Would it have been as efficient, simple, or viable as implementing an XP system at this stage of development? Probably not.

I'm a little sad that Monsterpunk, however good it may be, will not be the game I originally intended it to be. But, confronted with that reality, I've made the optimal design decision, and now have a game that I can be proud of.

The Lesson

 

In game design, I think it's often easy to become lost in the details - to see games as a collection of individual features and visual and audio assets. My approach for the first three years of Monsterpunk's development has been to improve it by improving the details. Would it be more fun if I made the textboxes look nicer and drew character portraits? What if I composed distinct music for each area? What if I provided better feedback through the UI? How about if I added more playable characters? Expanded the game world?

Yeah, sure, let's spend a few years adding 25 playable characters instead of addressing your game's real problems.

I spent a long time making changes to the game that, undoubtedly, were improvements. Yet the game itself still wasn't that much more enjoyable than it had been before making those changes. It was frustrating.

Even for those of us working outside of the industry, who make more minimalist work, the underlying assumption that "more polish + more features + better graphics = better game" is so prevalent that we have a tendency to focus on improving the individual components of a game at the expense of examining the larger picture. Or, at least, I have that tendency.

The thing about this approach is that it isn't a time-efficient way to solve design problems. Even though Monsterpunk's primary design problem (the awkward pacing) was a singular problem, because it impacted every sub-system of the game, and impacted them throughout the entire game, I originally thought that the solution was to improve each of the game's individual sub-systems. I spent years doing this with only modest success.

After taking a hiatus from the game, I re-examined the problem and came to the profound realization that the scope of the problem didn't change the fact that it was a singular problem and therefore demanded a singular solution.

Game development culture fetishizes time commitment to projects. For professional industry devs, working excessive overtime hours during periods of crunch is normalized, but even outside the industry, there's a broad expectation that successful game development requires great personal sacrifice. "If you aren't spending at least 30 hours a week on your game, you aren't going to cut it." "Don't sleep during game jams!" "Daisuke Amaya spent five years of his life handcrafting Cave Story, what the hell are you doing with your time? Spending time with friends?" With this prevalent attitude, my default assumption was that, if I simply spent more time on the game, it would improve, regardless of how I spent the time.

To a certain extent, those advocates of self-destructive workaholism do have a point. Like anything worth doing, making games take effort! But there is little advocacy for, or celebration of, efficient game design. The key to successful indie game development, especially for those of us working day jobs, is to find the most efficient path to achieve a desired audience response. Perhaps if efficiency and elegance were more appreciated within our subculture, I'd have approached Monsterpunk with a different mindset and have solved its pacing problems sooner.

Thanks for reading, here's a GIF of a bird in a yellow television pooping on plastic bricks.

April Update: Gewgawlicious v1.1, Monsterpunk Devlog #14, Music

In a Nutshell

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. 

The games I am contributing to the collection are Gewgawlicious, The Morphine Western Revenge, Bloodjak, and Digital Toilet World. While I am feeling good about Revenge in it's current state, the remaining work demands some additional polish before being publicly exhibited. 

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 always, you can play Gewgawlicious at itch.io and Game Jolt.

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.

I want this game to be great, but I'm also looking forward to being able to chill out, make jam games, and hack Pokémon roms again.

Here's Some Music, Too.

Finally I threw some tracks up on the Soundcloud - the music from Gewgawlicious and Darcy's Yurt Adventure, as well as two unused tracks - one from a collaboration that fell through, and another that was written for Revenge, but ultimately didn't fit the mood of the game, although I think it is rather good. Enjoy!

February Devlog Update

On Playtesting Monsterpunk

Monsterpunk is 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 Bloodjak high 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 World are 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 Chambers at 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.

Monsterpunk Development Update

Back in September, I wrote that I lost the ability to export games to Mac for stupid reasons. Thankfully, within a week of writing about the problem, Game Maker Studio became available for a ridiculously low price via Humble Bundle. I bought a new license and have regained the ability to port games to your Macs. It'll be some time before I'll be able to actually do that, again, for stupid reasons, but it is possible and it will happen!

Monsterpunk is slowly nearing completion. For the first time ever, the game is fully playable from start to finish without requiring my supervision. Because of this, I'm preparing the game for semi-public playtesting, but because of that, I've become increasingly aware of the ways in which the game isn't always user friendly. Most of my development efforts lately have been dedicating to making communication from the game to the player as clear as possible. It's the most mechanically complicated game I've ever made - making sure the player has a full understanding of what's happening to them and how everything works is a challenge!

For example, I finally added little bars to the eat and poop notifications. It's pretty important that the player knows how long they can last without shitting on the ground - I can't believe I didn't add the feature sooner!


I also want to make sure that the game's mechanics are as finalized as possible for what will be the game's last playtest, so I've added a few final features that I've been putting off for a while. Namely, angry monsters that you get in fights with now use special attacks. Now, they blow things up. Sometimes, the thing that gets blown up is you, as demonstrated below.

The object-headed dinosaur isn't actually supposed to fly forward - that's a bug - but it looks cool enough that I might turn it into a feature.

I intend to write more music for the game, but I've finally written enough songs, at least, to score the game from start to finish. I've written two songs since the last update: the first is "Birdskinner," the game's only analog track! It even has my voice in it. I needed an awful song about birds for the bird-watching minigame, so I took the lyrics and chords from "The Cuckoo Bird," and butchered them into something barely recognizable. It's post-hardcore folk sludge. Since the minigame is visually distinct from the rest of the game, I wanted to make its accompanying music track distinct as well - hence, my voice and a real instrument.

Point is, it is not necessarily easy to listen to, and it is only recommended listening for the most hardcore Monsterpunk fans.

The second track is titled "Sulfuric Indulgence." It's the game's boss encounter music and my most ambitious attempt at composition yet. It's a tad bit melodramatic, but I am otherwise pretty proud of it.

Finally, as I've previously indicated, I'll be needing playtesters soon, most likely within the next week. If you are a friend or follower on social media (@alchiggins), keep an eye out for the announcement!

Because I've been GIF happy lately, here's some more footage from the game: the first is a series of successful and failed flirting attempts by the player, and the second is a drug-induced hallucination in the pause screen.

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.

Monsterpunk Development Update!

First off, Toilets, Meat, and Drugs, as you might have noticed, is now named Monsterpunk. Less syllables, easier to remember, less toilet references. Also, sexy.

Secondly, I've been working on the game's soundtrack over the past months. It's my second attempt ever at creating digital music (the first time being for Digital Toilet World), but I'm feeling pretty good about the results so far. I'm about halfway done composing music. It doesn't make for the best casual listening, but it is video game music. It does what it needs to do.

Listen to it here. I've also uploaded the (tiny) Digital Toilet World soundtrack, for anyone curious.

Thirdly, I've been experimenting with recording gifs of game footage. Being a punk inspired game, it looks a more impressive in motion than in stills, so it's important for me to have some video to show off!

Violent conflict. People say sad things when they die.

Flirting! Right click on people and hearts fill the screen!

Eating a meal in a graveyard.

More flirting!

More violent conflict :(

Pooping!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The game's getting pretty close to completion - I'm aiming for a September release date. I've finished re-writing most of the dialogue, have implemented a user-friendly tutorial, and am constantly tweaking and balancing everything. I still have to write the endings, finish composing the music, and implement a needlessly complicated and over-the-top secret easter egg side quest. Not that you heard anything from me about it. 

I will leave you today with this question. Or, rather, this poop monster will: 

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs Development Update

Sorry for the continued silence on this corner of the net. I am unable to work on my personal game projects at an ideal rate - my thesis and student development work continues to take priority - but some progress has been made! Character dialogue in Toilets, Meat, and Drugs is nearly complete. In fact, now whenever you flirt with characters in game, they'll say something cute! Or they'll reject your (probably) inappropriate advances.

Oh, and now when you take pills in the game, you'll hallucinate! I really want to drive home the negative aspects of drug/medication dependence in this game, and it was difficult to do that without adding an explicitly negative consequence to popping pills in game. Not only will hallucinations visually impair the player, but the longer you've been taking drugs in game, the longer the hallucinations last. I think the new feature makes the in-game decision to take drugs a lot more interesting, and adds a ton to the game's flavor.

I myself have had horrendous experience with ADD medication, and wanted to capture how awful that experience can be through a game. Being able to better explore themes of drug dependence, both recreational and otherwise, adds a greater degree of personal relevance to the game that makes it more engaging to me, and hopefully to others too.

I've only just now noticed how suggestive this screenshot is. Eh, the hallucination is randomly generated, what can you do?

I was worried for a long time about whether I was spending my time wisely continuing to work on Toilets Meat and Drugs - I've spent nearly nine months now on something that should have been a side project, and the jam version of the game was one of the most poorly received games I've made. I've spent a lot of time on a project that had a very real potential to be unenjoyable to a general audience, but now that I'm reaching the end of development, I think that the risk is going to pay off. The game has so much soul. If I were a video game, I would be Toilets, Meat, and Drugs.

I've pushed the expected release date to summertime. Sorry for making everyone's Christmas miserable by not releasing the game by then like I said I would. This year's Christmas will be better.

AIN'T NO BLUES LIKE THE VOID HERO BLUES

I am very pleased to announce that The Void Hero Blues is now available for download!

You can check out the game and download it from itch.io. You can also do the same from Game Jolt, but, let's be honest, the itch.io page is better looking.

I have some things I'd like to say about the game, especially regarding themes of gender and violence, but I'm fairly exhausted from cranking this beast out, and would like to get more feedback first.

Thank you so much for playing! I'm very proud of how this one turned out.

Now that The Void Hero Blues is good and done with, you can expect a lot more writing from me over the next few months, as well as the imminent release of Toilets, Meat, and Drugs: A Pink Monster Story. TM&D has been painfully close to completion for the past month and a half - until now, I simple haven't had the time to give it the little push over the finish line. 

It's been five months since I've worked on Waker. I needed a break, but am trembling with anticipation at the thought of working on it again. I think developing The Void Hero Blues has been a huge transitional phase for me as a game maker, for reasons I'll get to in the next post. I feel energized in a way I haven't felt in a long time. I think I can make Waker really, really special, not only because I have the technical skill, but because I feel driven to do so in a way I haven't felt in a long time.