Devlog Update: The Morphine Western Revenge (#3)

 

This is probably some of the best footage I've captured from the game, IMO

 

In a Nutshell

Development of The Morphine Western Revenge has slowed over the past month and a half, mostly due to personal morale. Early in a game's development, it's easy to be motivated by the possibility of what a game can be. As the game's development reaches its final stages, I now have a much clearer idea of what the final work is actually going to be like.

The game's probably fine, don't get me wrong. The story's paced well enough, and the action's fun, snappy, and a little brainy. It will be the most ambitious and polished complete game project I'll have ever worked on. However, any mystery surrounding the game, from my perspective, has almost been totally lost. I am no longer motivated to create out of a desire to discover my own work, as I have now discovered nearly all of it.

Finishing games is almost always boring, and I tend to somehow forget this.

(As usual, if you're confused about What's Going On Here, the first two devlogs for the game can be found here and here.)

Regarding the Game's General Structure

The Morphine Western Revenge will be split into five levels. Each serves a unique, deliberate purpose, but generally, the first three of them are educational in nature, while the last two test the player's abilities.

The first level is the explicit tutorial level, in which the player is directly taught those rules of the game than can only be explained through text. "Press these buttons to move! Press this button to kill people. Press this button to maintain your morphine addiction." I also take time in this level to provide some basic narrative motivation for the protagonist's behavior.

However, it is otherwise best to allow players to learn how to play the game on their own without being told what to do. The second level is designed to teach the player the remaining core rules of the game without text. Rather than tell the player that "melee attacks only insta-kill unaware enemies" or that "it's possible to hide from enemies and sneak past them when outnumbered," I instead attempt to place the player in highly-controlled scenarios where they discover these rules and strategies through trial and error.

The third level introduces all remaining interactive elements (namely, weapons and enemies) that haven't already been introduced, and, therefore, is the last level designed to teach the player anything. From here on out, the player should be applying their hard-earned knowledge of the game's rules to overcome its final challenges. Being the game's halfway point, I also introduce a minor plot twist - the protagonist's motivations are not all that they initially appeared to be. Scandalous!

I'll be returning to level four in a moment, but it's worth mentioning that level five will be little more than an epilogue. It will be a short level with a purely narrative purpose - not to challenge the player, but to provide closure to the game's story.

The first three levels were completed by the time I wrote the previous devlog, each one taking about two and a half weeks each to create. Level four, despite being no larger than any of the previous levels, has taken me six weeks to create. If the first three levels are educational in nature, and level five is about narrative, then level four is the game's raison d'être. Everything leading up to level four exists only to prepare the player for it.

The game's stealth mechanics could still use a little work, but it's almost perfect.

Actually building the level that the whole game has been leading up to has been emotionally underwhelming for reasons explained earlier. But it was also during this level where I finally met the limits of the sort of play that my game's own rules could support. The somewhat obvious reality is that the player can only fight so many other characters at one time. I needed to make the encounters in this penultimate level more challenging and larger in scale than anything that came before, but I was finding that it was difficult to make the game's encounters more difficult while keeping the game fair. While my morale slowed much of the game's development, level four has also taken so long to develop because it simply been one of the most difficult game levels I've ever had to design.

It's been a tough slog, but I've finally emerged from triumphant. I think the level works.

Regarding the Music

Another level, another track. Here ya go!



As I wrote in previously devlogs, I'm attempting to recycle motifs shared among each of the game's pieces in order to create a sense of cohesion through the music. The music track for level four, "Cowboy Corpses," exemplifies this by almost using and combining every theme and motif from the preceding three tracks without introducing anything new. My intention is that, by doing this, the fourth level's music helps communicate to the player that, yes, shit is getting real, and this is the end of the game.

Regarding What Happens Next

Aside from completing the fifth level, all that's left for me to do is to finish implementing the game's user interface (title screen, pause screen, and credits), debug the HTML5 version, and playtest the final game. The game will be released no later than October, at which point I'll immediately and joyfully return to finishing development of Monsterpunk. My intention is to release both games by the end of this year, and really do some soul searching about the creative direction I want to pursue with my work going forward.

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.