Waker Update

     Waker now has a working inventory! It didn't need it before, but the as the game grows and I find that I need to add more and more ways to reward exploration, I'm finding that the game is becoming more and more cluttered with items. Not totally happy with how it all looks, but I can worry about that further down the road.

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.

Also, Jurassic Heart

Also! There's a short dating sim parody in which you play as a young woman who is friends with a ukulele-playing Tyrannosaur. The Tyrannosaur has the hots for you.

It's called Jurassic Heart. It's freakin' odd, in case your afternoon doesn't have enough weird. Yer welcome, kid.

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)

Recommendation - Get Punched! (also swearing)

     Okay, so if you've read any of my writing, you know that the reason I make games is to attempt to tell emotionally engaging and meaningful stories and be part of a movement to help mature the medium and press its limits and blah blah blah yeah yeah whatever.

     I lied - that's only half the reason I make games. The other half is this:

     This is a short punk game in which you punch people called Get Punched, and it the most fucking fun you will have all week. The game's feel is amazing. It's crude as hell, but I love it. The download link is further down the thread here.