Void Hero Blues and Toilets Meat and Drugs update

First, I'm going to start with the bad news. I'm formally putting Waker on hold until next year. For the next few months, I need to write half a thesis and finish The Void Hero Blues, and I'm aiming to get Toilets, Meat, and Drugs all done and out of the way. The sound guy for Waker, Ashton Morris, also has plenty on his plate to deal with. People ask me about Waker on a semi-regular basis, and I'm sorry that I haven't been able to resume development on it. Yet.

Good news is, Toilets, Meat, and Drugs: A Pink Monster Story, is nearing completion. I need to add a couple more endings, update the tutorial, update the story, and add music. The bulk of the work is done.

I went ahead and jacked up the speed of the player and all NPCs - it improves the game tons. Combat is oodles better than before, if you wanna play that way, and fleeing/evasion is now a more effective strategy than in the original.

The closer that TMD: PMS gets to completion, the less I have to say about it. When it comes to these projects, silence is often good.

MEANWHILE....!

Development on the Void Hero Blues is picking up. It's my first time working in (true) 3D since my teenage years, first time using Unity, and my first time coding in Javascript. Development is slow. Building the test level above, and simply getting the player to shoot and reload, has taken up the first couple months of development. But I'm finally moving on!

Here's an early model of the grunts you'll be fighting in the game. Designing the grunt was tricky - because the point of VHB is to humanize the victims of game violence, and perhaps re-sensitize players to game violence, I needed something with a human face that could be a subject of sympathy. However, I also needed something that could be mass produced. I compromised by settling for a character with an androgynous build and exposed, expressive mouth, but with their face mostly covered. However, I gave the bulbs on his visor "eyelids" so that they could remain expressive.

Not bad for my first serious attempt at modelling a humanoid, I think.

And here's the player's weapon! It kinda reminds me of Quake III's rocket launcher. I left a blade in there in case I have time to add a melee attack. The texture's still a work in progress - this thing definitely needs a bump map.

If you're looking for something to play in the meantime, why not check out Empty Chambers, Digital Toilet World, or How to Fly?

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs Update

 Alright, enough talking about politics for a while. Here's an update of Toilets, Meat, and Drugs.
I've recently figured out what the game really is about: a bizarre remix of stereotypical masculine and feminine styles, not only in terms of aesthetics, but in terms of game mechanics. While the combination of ugly monster and pink cutie aesthetics has been obvious for a while now, the combination of play styles has not. For example, if you want, you can play the game as your typical violent masculine power fantasy and kill everything. But the game's charming (or is it flirting?) and fleeing mechanics pose unusual alternatives to the traditional masculine play style, and don't only supplement the violent experience, but with adjustments I've made to the game, can now totally replace it. Instead of playing as a lethal force of dominance, you can play as a force of love, or as a victim of violence.

And, regardless of which path you choose, you still need to feed your character, take them to the toilet, and maintain their health. The game deliberately includes a return to the (usually) mundane, but relevant experiences, but it reminds us that those seemingly mundane needs can sometimes prompt memorable experiences.

I've always been disappointed by many open world games in that they don't let the player decide whether or not they'll be a killer, but rather what sort of killer they'll be. Toilets, Meat, and Drugs is a challenge to that. It's as though a mainstream shooter, an art game, and a social justice game got together and somehow made a super sexy baby. It's all of these games at once, or none of these games at once. It depends on how you play.

This means that it's either the sort of game that'll be enjoyed by everyone, or hated by everyone. I don't care. It's still a super sexy baby to me.



Now that I've realized that, I feel a lot better about making it. What started out as a Digimon World fan game (lame) has become something I feel proud of.

Now, here's some more technical notes:

• The final game will be renamed Toilets, Meat, and Drugs: A Pink Monster Story. I figured that the title should be at least somewhat reflective of the actual game.
• Expect a release in 1-2 months. I'm almost done improving the game's mechanics (I just threw in a reputation system that actually adds some depth to the previously underwhelming charm system). I just need to finish with the new levels, re-implement the story, and add music. 
• Expect actual NPCs that can talk to you.
• The new game world is nearly 3x the size of the old one. Complete playthroughs  of the game should take about 1-3 hours. For a game made by one person in a couple of months, I think this is pretty good! 

Just a pair of reminders of how gosh-darned complicated this game is.

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs Update, Waker and Void Hero Blues Non-Update

TM&D now has too many monsters. Up to 25 playable beasties:

You kind of have to view it full screen.

There's been a slew of tiny changes, the most significant of which is that NPCs now spawn, grow and evolve as the player grows. Not only does this mean that the game's difficulty automatically adjusts with the player's ability, but previously explored areas never grow dull and constantly change. It breathes a lot of fresh life into the game! The end game is pretty epic when a random assortment of miniature gods crawl across the landscape.

I'm also about halfway done with the new areas. The new game world will be over twice the size of the old one. I also only have 2 more new monsters to program. Once I'm done with both of those things, I just need to rework the story, update the tutorial, write the music, and finish the thing!

Then I'll get back to Waker and The Void Hero Blues. VHB needs to be done by December, so it'll take priority. I'll then focus all of my energy on Waker and try not to be diverted by any more side projects. When I started Waker, I didn't have very many quality games in my catalog, and I felt a need to flesh it out. While Empty Chambers is awfully pretty, and Digital Toilet World has it's charm, both are pretty tiny games, and don't really show off what I can do as a developer.

TM&D is the first mechanically rich game I've made in a long time, is pretty substantial in scope, and really rounds out my collection of work. As a matter of fact, it reminds me a lot of the games I made in my early adolescence. I honestly haven't made a (complete) game of such length, or with such a large world, since I was 14, nor have I found myself pouring so many hours into a game's development. The graphics are pretty shitty too, just as they were back then.

Making games with crude, minimalist, punk graphics is so liberating. Give it a shot.

But, yeah, after this, no more goddamn side projects. Starting next year, all Waker, all the time. Oh, I think Waker's second birthday was sometime last month. Shit. I feel pretty awful, I couldn't work on it at all this summer - by the time my broken wrist was pulled out of the cast, I had been totally derailed by TM&D. So, so sorry.

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs Update

I've been working pretty hard on the final version of Toilets, Meat and Drugs the past week.

Changes made so far:
-Doubled the number of player and non-player monsters
-Added special powers to adult and epic leveled monster! Create shockwaves, vanish in a flash, calm angry monsters, and even cut the game's frame rate in half!
-Fixed projectile spawning and collision bugs. Combat's now pretty hard, and for weaker monsters, downright undesirable. Which is good!
-Fixed the health system so that it would be more responsive to monster care, etc.
-Plants now grow when you are far away from them! Woo!
-You can now check out monster stats in the pause screen!
-Monsters now have names.
-Hostile monsters no longer chase you from halfway across the planet.
-Monster growth is no longer determined by health, but instead by care mistakes and the players' charm-to-kill ratio.

What this means:
The game's mechanics aren't totally broken anymore! Also, the player is now encouraged and more able to play the game peacefully, due to the heightened difficulty of combat, increased player evasion capabilities, addition of more pacifistic monsters, and addition of non-violent special powers. Toilets, Meat, and Drugs was not originally intended to be a combat-heavy RPG, but a multifaceted world in which violence is a relatively small part. By traditional RPG standards, anyway.

Oh, and because of the aforementioned change I made to the gardening system, player gardens now grow out of freakin' control. Currently working on restoring balance, eheheheh.

Gonna do a post compo version of TM&D

I've decided to do a post-compo version of Toilets, Meat, and Drugs. As I've written before, as silly as the game is, it's the game that I've always wanted to make. I want it to be good.

Here's what I'm hoping to have for the final version of the game:

• More monsters. 
• Double (triple?) the world size.
• Better world tiles.
• Bug fixes?
• Better explanation of what's actually going on.
• In-depth monster info (names! level! actual HP numerical value!)
• Have monster growth be determined more by play style than by player health.
• MUSIC!

Now with double the monsters!
(Yes, I've changed the image slightly from earlier today)

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs: Bug fixed!

Some of you who've been trying to play Toilets, Meat, and Drugs may know about a save bug in the game.  Basically, the game would be unable to save until after you close it for the first time. I am so relieved to say that I have finally fixed the bug.

Here's the technical explanation of what happened. When you save progress a video game, the game itself is unchanged. Instead, a separate data file is created that contains all of the relevant information, such as the player's status or location. While game developers usually create save scripts from scratch that target the information that needs to be saved and ignore the information that doesn't, Game Maker has a single function, game_save(), that automatically stores all information to a file. While this function is overkill and only recommended for beginners, it's really convenient to use for a jam game, when time is not a luxury.

The function has worked wonderfully in past experience, with older versions of Game Maker. But when Yoyo made the switch from Game Maker 8 to Game Maker Studio, the file directory system changed so that Game Maker games could be ported to platforms besides Windows. Which is great and all, except you don't get the benefits of this change unless you pay $100+ dollars for a professional license. The standard license, which I have, lets you port games to Mac, but that requires going through a holyshitton of hoops that I don't ever want to go through again.

Anyway, Game Maker Studio used to have the game_save() function removed altogether. It's since been added back in, but doesn't work as its supposed to with the new file directory system. Basically, the function doesn't actually create a directory in which to store save files until after you close the game for the first time! What the hell?!
 
What this means is that people who played Toilets, Meat, and Drugs for the first time would lose all of their progress upon dying or quitting the game. This is incredibly frustrating for the player, and even more embarrassing for me. I also wasn't able to detect the bug during development at all - the directory was created well before I even implemented the save system. It was a much unwanted surprise when I found out that I published a broken game!

Let me tell you, for a developer, there is no worse feeling than releasing a broken game. I would rather release a bad game than a broken one. I feel no shame about releasing games with crude, hastily draw, graphics, or a game with overly simplistic game play, or a game with missing music, or a game that I made in middle school. However rough these games are, they still have some sort of appeal, and, goddamnit, at least they work. Technical competency is the baseline, the absolute minimum standard a game must meet. Releasing a buggy game is like releasing a song recording that can only play through shitty laptop speakers - technical incompetence ruins the art.

I've been incredibly anxious over the past few days trying to figure out the cause and solution to this bug. Just this evening, after the deleting the game's directory and keeping an eye on Windows explorer as I played the game, I finally was able to identify the problem. Finally, by using a piece of code that creates an empty dummy folder when the game starts, I've tricked the game into actually creating the directory before the player closes the freakin' game. Cripes.

Fuck you, Game Maker. Fuck you. This extra stress was the last thing I needed.

But thanks for allowing me to create games for the past nine years.

Toilets, Meat, and Drugs is now available on itch.io and Gamejolt. And thanks to Warpdoor for featuring it on their site!

Monster Mash 2014: Final Entry

I need to sleep, so I'm not going to write another blurb about it, but it's worth noting that Toilets, Meat, and Drugs can now be downloaded for the ol' Windows PC.

Please don't be shy about feedback! I would love to hear your thoughts.
I'm so looking forward to playing the other Monster Mash entries this week!