Devlog Update: The Morphine Western Revenge (#2)

In a Nutshell

Development of The Morphine Western Revenge has been going pretty smoothly! When I last wrote nearly two months ago, I had little more than a test level. Now, the first two-thirds of the game are fully playable, written, and scored.

In addition to churning out levels, music, art assets, and dialogue, I've also been working to make the game's play a bit more dynamic and fine-tune its pacing. This has mostly meant expanding upon the (still basic) enemy AI and adding new baddy types (more on that later), but I'm also trying to speed up the game's combat and having it play less like chunky-ol' Halo and more like Hotline Miami.

(If you're confused, the first formal devlog for The Morphine Western Revenge can be found here and offers a pretty good primer on What's Generally Going On.) 

Regarding Artscape/Gamescape

My proposed booth showcasing Revenge, Digital Toilet World, and Bloodjak got waitlisted. Considering the roughness of Toilet World and the incompleteness of Revenge, this is not surprising.

For Revenge's development, this has been both a blessing and a curse. Originally, I was on schedule to have the game fully complete by early July in time for the festival. Now that the deadline has become irrelevant, I've been freed up to develop the game at a much slower pace, allowing me to make a better game and better take care of myself. Unfortunately, this means an August release date for the game, further postponing Monsterpunk's development.

Regarding the Game's Music 

I've got some! Have a listen:







I'm now comfortable enough with basic composition that, compared to Toilet World and Monsterpunk's soundtracks, Revenge's soundtrack is more expressive. I'm also attempting to make the game's soundtrack cohesive by sharing common motifs and patterns across multiple tracks. In this way, I hope to make each level feel like part of a greater, unified world.
 

Regarding the Limitations of the Source Material

An advantage to making games in cyberspace, sci-fi, and fantasy settings, as I've done in the past, is that it gives you a lot of freedom with the game's mechanics. You can easily create a small but diverse collection of abilities, enemies, and obstacles that can be mixed-and-matched to great effect. Doors, elevators, platforms, terminals, teleporters, armored bad guys, flying bad guys, giant bad guys, explosions, invisibility, double-jumping, sniping, backstabbing, etc.

The Hyperbolic Needle, the novella that Revenge is based upon, is set in the wilderness of 19th century Imperial Valley, California. Imperial Valley mostly consists of static elements - rocks, sand, and plants. Furthermore, all of the characters in the novella are human, with fairly normal human abilities.

The game's source material imposed two challenges I failed to consider when starting the project: 1) designing interesting levels that work well as play spaces while staying true to the setting and 2) creating interesting gunplay with an extremely homogeneous group of human adversaries.

Level design for Revenge, by necessity, has become fairly nonsensical and abstract. Boxes, stacks of rocks, and wooden walls litter an otherwise natural landscape in patterns that make no practical sense. However, these patterns allow for, say, a certain someone to find cover at any moment and flank her enemies from any direction.

My solution to the problem of enemy variety has been less satisfactory. While the game's human enemies carry a variety of different weapons, they are all similarly squishy, speedy, and stupid. In order to provide some contrast, I've added tall, broad men who are uniquely bearded and hatless. These bearded hatless men are inexplicably slower and harder to kill than their comrades, but are still fairly stupid.

It's the best I could do.

Regarding Current Events and the Game's Content

Okay, here's where we get off the hype train.

Making a shooter video game in the aftermath of one of our country's worst mass shootings doesn't feel terrible, but it doesn't feel great either. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

If you've been reading this blog for the past few years or even have played some of my work before (especially The Void Hero Blues), then you know that my feelings toward violence in games, especially gun violence, are ambivalent. While I can probably best be described as an action game designer first and foremost, I usually try to avoid historical or contemporary settings, guns, and human enemies in my games - and if my games do feature those things, I try to subvert the violence in some way.

Revenge, of course, features gun violence between humans in a historical setting and is loosely inspired by historical events of the time. It also does relatively little to subvert the player's enjoyment of that violence compared to previous work. If it isn't the most brutal game I've made, it comes close to it.

No matter how much of an anti-hero I make the protagonist, no matter how poorly her revenge goes for her, no matter how clearly I state that everything that happens in the game is Terrible and Bad - the fact remains that I am still glorifying the violence in the game. As a designer, I want the player to be entertained by their primary mode of interaction, and if I'm doing my job right, then I will succeed in that. When you click the mouse and you hear the bassy thud of your shotgun and all of the pellets strike your target and he flies backwards with force as blood sprays in the other direction - it feels good, and it's designed to feel good.

Now, it's been pretty well proven, of course, that playing violent video games does not directly, universally, or significantly cause violent behavior. However, this isn't to say that violent games, and violent media in general, have zero influence on out collective beliefs on appropriate and normal uses of force. While most of us consuming violent media (nearly everyone) are fairly peaceful people, I do wonder about the George Zimmermans of the world who try to play vigilante, as well as the folks out there who are stockpiling AR-15's in preparation for the post-apocalypse. These individuals do not engage in lethal violence throughout their day-to-days lives, but in the situations where they think its appropriate? They're performing the role of the Hollywood action hero.

My contribution to our culture of violence is pretty small. Neither me nor my work is especially popular, and the work itself is probably harmless. I am proud of what I'm making and hope you all enjoy it when it's done.

However, this is a good time to recognize that art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Our interpretations of art both drive and are driven by context. I am disheartened by the news in Orlando and simply hope that, whether through policy change or a rejection of gun culture, we are able to prevent future tragedies. Figuring out what role I play, and what role I should play, in a world where this is possible is difficult.

Devlog Update: The Morphine Western Revenge

So, as I mentioned a few months ago, the new game I'm working on (now titled The Morphine Western Revenge) was originally supposed to have been released at the beginning of April. Now that it's the beginning of May, I figured that a status update for the project was in order.

As I already explained, the game is loosely based on the story of a19th century morphine-addicted Native American woman attempting to rescue her sister from the US military (you can download the story here). As I simply did not originally have the time to adapt the text into a fully experimental or narrative work, the game will mostly be carried by conventional mechanics, and since it's a Western rescue/revenge story, those mechanics are shoot-y in nature. As a result, the game is starting to become more evocative of Django Unchained than anything else.

What I have not yet explained are the details of The Morphine Western Revenge's shoot-y mechanics. The combat in the game will be fast-paced but emphasizes stealth, guerilla tactics, and deliberate planning. While the player character uses her morphine to cope with the pain sustained through combat and other sources, she and her enemies are otherwise fragile. Players will be able to carefully plan out their method of attack, but once that plan goes into practice, it will have to be executed relatively quickly.

Click to enlargen; it looks best that way.

As is the case with any game, it's taking more time to create than once expected. I originally only had a month to make it, but since it was originally intended for an art showcase, I wanted to make it as polished as I could. These circumstances impacted much of the game's design, particularly its oversimplified art style. Unfortunately, the design shortcuts I took were not enough for me to complete the game on time. It turns out that, even when your characters are white silhouettes, drawing and animating them in eight directions is still a total, time-consuming pain-in-the-ass.

In addition, I finally got a real job last month, which has been a larger obstacle to game development than I originally anticipated. I am still learning how to properly achieve work/life balance, but I suspect that I will begin to develop faster as time goes on.


By the beginning of April, I had successfully completed a prototype level, but still did not have enough content to build the rest of the game. Most of the past month has been spent fixing bugs and design issues made apparent in the prototype. This month, I am finally beginning to build the game's actual levels. Playtesting will follow shortly afterward, and the game's release after that. I intend for this to be a relatively short game consisting of five levels, each of which will be under five minutes long.

I know better than to offer any indication of the Revenge's release date. It'll be done when it's done. Development on Monsterpunk and my Pokemon ROM hack are on hold until the Morphine Western Revenge is complete, as Revenge is the smallest of the three projects.

I think this is gonna be a good 'un. It's one of the gamiest things I've worked on lately, but still hopefully weird and tragic enough to make up for it. Here's a GIF of the player stabbing someone to death with her syringe:

Bloodjak v1.2

Bloodjak is now at version 1.2!

The trickiest thing with making changes to Bloodjak is the fact that the game has competitive online scoring, and that any changes I make to the game's difficulty need to respect that. As soon as I change the timing of the spawns, the health of the enemies, or the fire rate of the player, player scores between versions cease to be comparable.

I did cave in and make one change that, I believe, still respects the game's original difficulty: enemies now provide a short visual cue before attacking. This allows players to better predict enemy attack patterns without me actually changing anything about the patterns themselves. This should make the game more accessible to more players.

I've also added a web version for those of you not running Windows!

Play the game here! Enjoy!

No gamepad support yet (sorry Wzzrd).

Change log:
-Web version added
-Enemies now provide visual cues before shooting, HOW NICE OF THEM
-Increased time between shots for the big glowy ship by 1/30th of a second (not that you'll ever see one)
-Minor text changes
-Giant ship recoil exaggerated (a whopping 2 pixel kickback!)
-Blocks and debris spawn rate decreases with framerate
-Performance improved
-Audio engine updated

Digital Toilet World v1.2

I am pleased to announce that Digital Toilet World, after 2 years, has been updated to version 1.2!

Being one of my earliest efforts at a 48-hour jam game, it is crudely drawn, scored, and programmed. There were only so many improvements I could make with the time available to me that respected the original flavor of the game. That being said, it looks, feels, and plays much better now than it ever has. My goal was to transform the game into something I'd be comfortable presenting at a showcase, and I succeeded.

Here's the complete change log:
-Web version added
-Dialogue can be skipped by holding enter
-Opening scrawl can be skipped by pressing enter
-Holding escape now quits to the menu instead of quitting the game.
-HUD updated
-Tileset updated
-Dialogue rewritten, most drastically in the case of the survivor
-Enemies and NPCs are now animated
-Ghost now has attack animations
-Level geometry changes, especially in the final areas
-Changes to enemy spawn locations
-Damage taken reduced on normal and hard difficulty settings
-Boss attack frequency increased across all difficulty settings
-Boss attack patterns changed
-Androids and boss now fall from the sky instead of emerging from your poop
-Android HP lowered across all difficulty settings
-Android fire rate decreased on poop hell mode
-Android spawn time from poop now randomized
-Final encounter length increased
-Stranger now dies
-Music and speech are now louder
-Music now plays in the survivor's area
-Bathroom signs added
-Keys now bob
-Difficulty setting names changed
-Text box opacity increased
-Some bug fixes

Unexpectedly, most of my time was spent making technical changes to port the game to HTML5. The bugs I initially encountered when attempting to do so where ghastly.

I may update the game again before summer to make further changes - the Artscape submission deadline is the end of March, and I simply wanted to make this game extra-presentable before then.

As usual, you can find the game at either itch.io or Gamejolt. Thank you for playing!

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.

Review: Undertale

Sometimes, I think video games are really goddamn stupid.

My feelings about most video games are similar to my feelings about bacon cheeseburgers. Yeah, I like them a ton, but I don't feel virtuous about eating them, and unless a person's expressed a similar passion for them, I'm not going to recommend burgers to them. Sure, I had a ton of fun with the Star Wars: Battlefront beta the past weekend, but if someone who doesn't play games asks me why I care so much about the medium, Battlefront is not the game I would point them to. Honestly, I am a little embarrassed that games like Battlefront, Call of Duty, Pac Man, and Mario are the public face of our medium. But my general angst about games can be saved for a separate essay.

The point is, because of the piles of adolescent masculine power fantasies I'm expected to pre-order for sixty bucks every damn year, I sometimes forget why I give a shit about video games. But, once every year or so, I play something that reminds me that games, occasionally, can be truly worthwhile.

This year, that worthwhile game was Undertale.

source: undertale.com

Undertale is a role-playing game for PC and Mac that was almost entirely made by one person, Toby Fox. You play as a human child who's fallen down a hole into the underground world of monsters. What begins as a simple journey to return home, predictably, evolves into something more dire.  

Don't let the game's crude graphics fool you: the game's electronic soundtrack is amazing, the writing is superb, the humor is on-point, and the design is smart as hell. Player behavior shapes the story in a natural, immediate, and significant manner.

source: undertale.com

There are two things about Undertale, on a general level, that clearly differentiate it from other games of the genre. The first is that the game doesn't forget past decisions you've made when you  reload your save file after death or quitting,  nor  does it forget when you clear your data and start a new game. Many characters are aware of the protagonist's ability to save their progress, and one in particular retains his memory when a saved game is loaded. I can't say more without spoiling the game's endings, but what happens outside of, and between, playthroughs of Undertale is nearly as interesting as what happens within it. At the end, Undertale's metagame is used to great dramatic effect, creating one of the most memorable boss encounters I've ever experienced.

The second obvious differentiating feature of Undertale is its "combat" system, if it can be properly referred to as such. As in most RPGs, you will find yourself in violent turn-based encounters with monsters and the occasional boss. However, instead of fighting them, you are capable of interacting with them in various nonviolent ways, with the end result of reaching a mutual agreement to spare each other. For example, one volcanic monster in the game will spew magma at you, mistakenly thinking that it has healing powers. Instead of killing the monster, you can instead take a turn to criticize the monster, informing it that it isn't being helpful. The monster will then feel dejected and sulk in the corner, ceasing to attack you. The player can then hug or encourage the monster, ending the battle.

source: undertale.com. I didn't know that the website had an official screenshot of this encounter until after I wrote that paragraph. Very convenient!

Undertale markets itself as a game "where nobody has to die," and while a pacifistic run of the game is not an easy feat, it is highly encouraged by the game itself, which is refreshing. Undertale, at its core, is a game about compassion, which is so damn rare for our medium. Not only does it encourage compassionate interactions and emotions through its mechanics, but also through its story. There are, arguably, only two "evil" characters in Undertale - even your main adversaries are incredibly likable and decent characters, making violent confrontations with them especially heartbreaking. Violence in Undertale is tragic, rather than recreational.

Of course, your choice to spare the lives of your adversaries is meaningless without the choice to kill them. The game has an entire alternative narrative for the bloodthirsty player, but it is a tragic story, and the player pays dearly for pursuing it. Again, I can't say much, but a genocidal player will permanently suffer for their actions, even if they restart the game. This serves not only as interesting commentary on violence in games, but on the completionist impulses of players. Undertale may be a game packed with secrets, choices, and alternate endings, but unlike other games which boast these features, it is not a game that is meant to be experienced in its entirety - in fact, it punishes you for it.

Ultimately, what truly makes Undertale so special is its emotional breadth. Most games, focused primarily on conflict, make you feel frustration, fear, tension, and the respective releases from those three emotions. Undertale, because it is as much focused upon compassion as it is conflict, comedy as much as tragedy, is a game that makes you feel the usual video game emotions, but also more. For me, those emotions included affection, gratitude, sorrow, remorse, and defiance. More impressively, the game was able to evoke these emotions in a non-exploitative way. Rather than, for example, force you to watch a predetermined, scripted cutscene in which the villain kills your favorite character, most of the game's most emotional moments are largely the result of player choice.

source: undertale.com

Of course, Undertale is by no means a perfect game. You know how most stories have one climax, and how that generally works really well? Depending on your choices, you may find yourself experiencing two climaxes for the game, one right after the other. Not only does the game's second climax lose some impact just for existing, but it especially pales in comparison to the excellent climax preceding it. Furthermore, as is the case in many fantasy stories, most of the game's endings heavily depend on some fairly nonsensical deus ex machina, diminishing their impact. Thankfully, the game's writing leading up to its conclusion more than makes up for its flawed ending.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to discuss the game in more concrete terms without wandering too far into spoiler territory. Half of what makes Undertale so great is its overall structure and premises, but the other half consist entirely of the game's specific moments. I would happily deconstruct the mechanical and narrative brilliance of the game's first hour, but even describing the game's beginning would spoil too much. Even though the game uses many common tropes and storytelling conventions, it subverts expectations from the beginning, and it often moves in directions which are genuinely surprising. More so than usual, Undertale is a game you want to play blindly.

Undertale is a significant work for many reasons, the least of which are its quality of storytelling, its subversion of genre tropes, and its sheer roller coaster of emotions. But it also, in many ways, represents the result of a decade of experimentation in the indie scene. Whether or not game creator Toby Fox was directly influenced by the mechanics of Iji and imscared, the aesthetic and narrative style of OFF, or the crudeness, humor, and charm of Space Funeral and Armada, many game design trends unique to the indie scene, especially the freeware scene, have seemingly converged into this single point, and have resulted in something wonderful.

Undertale is the sort of game that can only be created by an individual. In a subculture that places disproportionate value on the production power of large studios, examples of individually created works with strong personality are vital. Part of my angst about games in general stems from the lack of personality in the majority of celebrated games - an inevitable byproduct of massive collaborations between hundreds of professionals. I have long insisted that individuals or small collaborations are much more capable of creating impressionable, personal, and soulful art. Undertale is a strong example of the potential for individual expression through games.

You can download Undertale for Windows and Mac. It only costs ten bucks. There's a free demo, but... the game only costs ten bucks. That's a little bit cheaper than a ticket to that disappointing blockbuster film that person you don't like wants you to see, and a hell of a lot cheaper than the DLC for Overproduced Military Shooter Game 4: The Good, the Bad, and the Mediocre.  Buy the damn thing.