Farewell, Waker

This is four years overdue, but I am formally declaring that I've abandoned development on Waker.

For those of you unfamiliar, Waker was a fantasy narrative adventure game that I was largely developing by myself from 2012-2014. The talented Ashton Morris was handling audio. It was to be a full length game with distinct puzzles and a branching story. A fair amount of people (strangers, even!) were excited about it. Folks were asking to collaborate. The game was blogged about. I never had as much engagement working on a project in the years since.

What lead to the demise of the game wasn't the scope itself as much as the fact that I had outgrown the project - my skills had improved considerably over the years I spent working on it. There are still a few really neat things happening visually and narratively - I still love Sue the Poggle.

During a couple of years following 2014, I had thought that I would one day return to and finish the project. While this possibility had rapidly dwindled since then, the release of Danger Zone Friends last winter was the final nail in the coffin. DZF became the full-length magnum opus that Waker was once meant to be, rendering Waker obsolete.

The last build I created is now publicly available in the Posterity Archive. It consists of about half of the planned story. The game ends abruptly when you reach the castle of Eldria, which I never populated.

Again, lots of y'all were really excited about the project, and I appreciate it. Thank you for your support.

Game is Renamed; has Blue People

You Will Probably Lose Your Job, in addition to being an obnoxiously long title for a game (or for anything, for that matter), no longer suits the theme or mood of the game now that the actual implementation of the story is underway. So, for now, the new working title is Waker.  There, isn't that much easier to say? "Waker." I'm certainly relieved.

Also, as of today, Waker now includes 50% MORE BLUE PEOPLE.

   It's sort of funny, I was determined to make a totally unique fantasy race, and instead ended up combining two of the most cliche fantasy race traits there are: pointy ears (elves/gnomes/goblins/faries) and blue skin (Na'vi/Asari/dark elves/smurfs/those blue-skinned black-haired red-eyed humanoid aliens from Star Wars). Honestly not sure how I screwed that up. At any rate, what the Feymer lack in originality they make up for in sass. At least, the one above does.

     I'm really excited about where the game's going, though - I haven't felt that way about a project in a long time.

You Will Probably Lose Your Job - Progress

Guess who's game now has a robust dialogue tree system?
There's a lot of other cool stuff I've thrown into the game since I've last posted about You Will Probably Lose Your Job, but I'm finally getting to the stage in development where I can't show some things without spoiling too much of the game - I would probably have waited until later to share screenshots displaying the dialogue system until I was able to take some of a less important in-game conversation, but I'm too gosh-darned proud to wait for that.

Not sure how I feel about the color scheme yet - we'll see.

Fun fact: I have literally made 25 different portraits of that woman, each expressing a different emotion. I am already saddened that I will probably not get to use all of them - such is life.

You Will Probably Lose Your Job - Progress

I'm going to be frank: I hate animating characters. Drawing them's fine - I love to translate the forms that I've envision for them into reality - but re-drawing them in a slightly different position a dozen times is one of the few parts of game development that I dislike. So progress on animating YWPLYJ's protagonist has been super-slow. Really, all I have to show for the past month of work is an animated character (with a shadow!) that can move around the world. Thankfully, I've gotten over that hurdle - the rest of the game's characters require much less animating, and the coding that will follow will go very quickly.

I'm going to have to make the protagonist's sprite darker since the side that is visible to the player is supposed to be in shadow, but that can wait for tomorrow.

You Will Probably Lose Your Job- Progress!

I've finally finished building the levels for YWPLYJ, which means I get to move onto character design and coding! More screenshots follow.

Things are coming along...

I'm almost done designing the world for You Will Probably Lose Your Job. I only have four more screens to make! Additionally, for the first time I'm putting a little effort into putting shadows into one of my game worlds. Makes quite the difference, I think!

More YWPLYJ Screenshots

Haven't had much time to work on You Will Probably Lose Your Job, but here are some more screenshots of the game world for your pleasure:

It's August (more or less)

A few items of interest:
1) You Will Probably Lose Your Job is growing into a much larger project than I originally planned. Right now I'm making tile sets and creating the maps before I start writing the code. The dream sequence of the game is going to look something like this:

 2) I'm starting to rethink whether or not I, as one-man team, have enough time and patience to tell the story I want to tell in Space Punk with sound and colorful graphics and do it justice. I'm thinking about instead attempting to tell the story in the format of an interactive electronic book. More on that when I'm done with You Will Probably Lose Your Job

3) Play this. It's a short flash game called dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, aka Auntie Pixelante. It's about her experiences as a transgender woman undergoing hormone replacement therapy. It's really cool; I wish more people would use games to tell these sorts of stories instead of the usual stories of wizards and space marines. 

Bahahaha moron

Release a game at the end of June, I said. Believed myself when I said it, I did. Dumbass.
It has taken me this long to get back to the point I was at before I had to restart my work on You Will Probably Lose Your Job. I'm finally getting some momentum again and will release it before I go back to school and forfeit my free time.

Ludum Dare Day #4: Retreat, men!

I don't have time to finish this game in time for the competition. I have no free time until late in the evening, and I really don't want to start all over again. This is not a good time in my life to be doing this.

At the very least, I now have a conception of a truly original game that I can create in a few weeks, so this short-lived experience hasn't been a total loss. You Will Probably Lose Your Job will be released by the end of the month.

Ludum Dare Day #2: Fuuuuuuuuuuu

Game Maker crashed when I was working on my mini-LD entry: the file was corrupted, and I lost everything except for a couple of sprites. All my code and maps and half of my graphics are all gone. 5 hours of work all gone. God, this is disheartening.

I'm sure at this point whether or not I want to duplicate my lost work or start all over. Certainly don't have it in me to continue work tonight. Bah! At least I still have five days to work on an entry.

Ludum Dare Day #1

Ludum Dare begins today! Here's a screenshot of what I've got to show for my first evening of work:

It's gonna be weird.

Games Page Added!

Hey, you. Do you see that little tab up top that says "My Games"? Good.

On that page you'll find information on my two current projects, as well as a couple of old games I made in high school, just for the hell of it. Check it out!

Upcoming Projects

Here's what I'm up to:

1) Spacepunk (working title)

     Spacepunk will be a medium length sci-fi adventure game. It will tell the story of Franklin, a freelancer and bounty hunter, and his crew as they travel through space searching for love, meaning, and an elusive murderous outlaw. Or something like that.

     I'm placing a very heavy emphasis on narrative and much less emphasis on complex game mechanics and violence. All interactive elements will serve to make the story meaningful and engaging; they will not be ends to themselves. Hopefully, I'll get this thing done within a year.

This is what it looks like so far. Graphics are mostly placeholders. Don't judge, it's still super-early in development.

2) My Mini Ludum Dare #36 Entry

     For those of you who don't know, Ludum Dare is a 48-hour game making contest. The main competition is held once every four months, and mini competitions are held every month. Hundreds of devs participate, including some pretty big names; for example, Notch and Terry Cavanagh, respective creators of Minecraft and VVVVVV have participated. Anyway, a lot of the work produced from these competitions is really creative, and it sounds like a lot of fun. I've been wanting to take part for a while.


     The next competition is one of the monthly mini-contests, and instead of being a mere weekend long it will last from July 9th to July 15th. The contest's theme is "contrasts". Not sure what sort of game I'll be making yet, but I still have a few more days to plan before I'm allowed to start cranking it out.