I really do intend to write Radical Plaything posts at least on a bi-monthly basis - my apologies for their absence over the past nine months. Let's get to this month's recommendations.
All of my freeware game picks for this month are from the Indies Vs Gamers jam at Gamejolt (a jam in which I entered Bloodjak, which placed in the top 10% of entries and got a little mention in Fireside, by the way)! I'll be focusing on games that didn't win the jam but still have a ton of character.
For me, game jams are often an excuse to create experimental, personally expressive, and/or ugly games and get away with it. So, this isn't a list of what necessarily I think are the best games of the jam. Instead, this is a list of games from the jam that, in some way or another, deviated from my usual experience of what a video game is, either mechanically, thematically, or aesthetically. Here we go:
Alien-Stalker from Pluto by Jord Farrell
Heres the finished game. Finished with 5 min left so there might be bugs Controls: X to Capture, C to Kill, Arrow keys to move around
I've heard people who've played video games before the 1990's describe retro and arcade games with a certain nostalgia and reverence that, as a young twenty-something, I've never been able to relate to. There's a level of abstraction in archaic games that leaves a lot of potential for your mind to fill in the missing spaces and go wild with your imagination in a way that you can with reading a novel - for whatever reason, most old games fail to realize that potential for me.
I don't know what it is about Alien-Stalker, but its crude pixel labyrinth and the monsters that inhabit it somehow seem more real than the labyrinths from similar games made in the early 80's.
Move Mr. Pigcat by using 'ARROW KEYS'.
Shoot/Puke using 'Z'
Press 'X' to use special when available. Increase your score during the special attack by smashing the keyboard!
Be aware of burdocs, hoovers, waterballoons and red lasers!
You're a fucking Mr. Pigcat who vomits on things. The game has screen shake in it. It also requires that you smash your keyboard. Any question?
(Also, I'm currently the highest scoring Mr. Pigcat player in the world!)
The Secret World of Arcade Game Repair by the Wzzard
TSWOAGR is a 2D infinite procedural wave shooter bullet hell nightmare game! Play with a gamepad or keyboard! Get the High Score by destroying glitches. Grab powerups to help with your repairs. Try again when you can't dodge any more!
At its core, TSWOAGR is a standard, but well done, side-scrolling shmup game. Aesthetically, it's a real treat. Stuff's flashing and shaking and blowing up all of the time. Many of the songs from the soundtrack kick ass.
Claw Champion Earth by Taylor Bai-Woo (FromSmiling)
Do you want to become a champion?
Maybe even a claw champion?
Please, search no more for your ride to becoming the champion of claws. A fierce claw-battling campaign. Climb your way up to becoming a champion and beat as many other claw-playing-opponents as you possibly can. The champion's throne awaits you.
You know those bullshit claw game machines they have in restaurants and amusement parks? Imagine a world in which there are competitive, multiplayer claw machines. Now imagine a world in which you can be a champion of the competitive claw machines. This is a pretty seductive world we're talking about, right?
Claw Champion Earth is charming, humorous, and well written. I wish most video games had just half the heart that itdoes. I'll take genuine, goofy stuff like this over Gears of War any day. Download Claw Champion Earth for Windows, Mac, and Linux!
First off, Toilets, Meat, and Drugs, as you might have noticed, is now named Monsterpunk. Less syllables, easier to remember, less toilet references. Also, sexy.
Secondly, I've been working on the game's soundtrack over the past months. It's my second attempt ever at creating digital music (the first time being for Digital Toilet World), but I'm feeling pretty good about the results so far. I'm about halfway done composing music. It doesn't make for the best casual listening, but it is video game music. It does what it needs to do.
Thirdly, I've been experimenting with recording gifs of game footage. Being a punk inspired game, it looks a more impressive in motion than in stills, so it's important for me to have some video to show off!
Violent conflict. People say sad things when they die.
Flirting! Right click on people and hearts fill the screen!
Eating a meal in a graveyard.
More flirting!
More violent conflict :(
Pooping!
The game's getting pretty close to completion - I'm aiming for a September release date. I've finished re-writing most of the dialogue, have implemented a user-friendly tutorial, and am constantly tweaking and balancing everything. I still have to write the endings, finish composing the music, and implement a needlessly complicated and over-the-top secret easter egg side quest. Not that you heard anything from me about it.
I will leave you today with this question. Or, rather, this poop monster will:
Changelog:
-High scores can now be viewed in-game
-Spawn patterns are slightly less random, especially in the early game.
-Player is invulnerable during the last 1.25 seconds of jacking out (this is when the screen flashes)
-Points awarded upon destroying enemy ships are now displayed
Hopefully, the new spawn patterns will make the game more interesting for less skilled players. The ability to view the high score table in-game is an essential feature that I simply ran out of time to implement during the jam.
I've been debating making changes to the game's difficulty, especially during the jack-out sequence, and have tried out some potential solutions. However, I am not comfortable making any drastic changes to the game without live play testing. The game's difficulty is part of what makes it what it is - it's probably going to continue to be a challenge.
I would eventually like to make a Mac build and add Xbox controller support - however, making Mac builds in Game Maker is a pain, and I still don't have a controller of my own.
Surprise! I made a game last weekend! It's called Bloodjak.
It's a fun little side-scrolling arcade shooter set in cyberspace. I made it in 72 hours for the Indies vs Gamers jam at Game Jolt (voting is still underway this week, so be sure to play some games and vote for your favs).
I outsourced the music to a fellow named Geoff Backstrom, and I'm glad I made the decision. The game sounds kick ass.
It might possibly be the best complete game I've ever made. It's also the most conventional game I've ever made. This is not the sort of game that idealistic teenage me wanted to make. In fact, it's a very radical departure from the sort of games I was working on when I started this blog, and is personally significant for that reason.
This isn't the first time I've written about how I've felt weird about the games I make. But it's a different sort of weirdness than I felt when I made The Void Hero Blues, thankfully.
Look, if you just want to play and enjoy the damn thing, stop reading and do that. You should play it. It's fun. It's hard. It looks cool. It sounds great. I'm really proud of this one, and I think it'll do well in the competition. But if you want to read about what the game means to me, well, get comfortable. This might be one of the more self-indulgent things I've written. I don't care.
Things have come full circle in the strangest way. Let me explain at the beginning.
Making Games as a Child: In Pursuit of Fun
The earliest games I made as a pre-teen were mostly shooters and fledgling attempts at RPGs. Run-of-the-mill stuff - imitations of the mainstream games I was playing at the time. It was 2005. The contemporary indie game scene was barely forming. The artgame, notgame, Twine game, and altgame scenes were, as far as I know, totally nonexistent. Communities for hobbyist game development around certain tools, like Game Maker, existed, but those communities were isolated.
By 2006 or so, I got pretty good at making shooters, for a scrawny 13 year old boy. Me and a bunch of other 12-14 year old boys were making first person shooter games with this software called Silent Walk (the original, low tech version that we used is hard to find nowadays). In retrospect, I was probably one of the more prominent of the young game designers in that community. I was the first person to have created a game in Silent Walk with original 3D models (they looked like shit), and also had a reputation for being one of the few people who made a game with stairs in it (it was a big deal). Silent Walk, while very accessible,wasn't very powerful, didn't require code, and was used by a bunch of preteens. The quality bar was pretty low, but I surpassed the bar, damn it.
I owe a lot to that community. Just thinking about it reminds me of how magical the internet felt back then.
Point is, I gained a ton of experience making action games during my first 3 years of game dev as a kid. I think that experience greatly influences my game design today. They were formative years.
My design tendencies changed around 2009. I was 16, and was finally learning how to think for the first time (still trying to get it down, honestly). Tale of Tales released The Paththat year, spawning the artgame and notgame movements (near as I can tell) and changing what many people believed was possible with interactive media. I was one of those people. "Wait a minute, you're telling me that I can create interactive art without goals, challenges, violence, competition, risk, or any of the things that have made games what they are until this point? And it can actually be good? Sign me up!"
Making Games as a Teenager: In Pursuit of Emotion
Notgame design philosophy fundamentally changed my mission as a game designer. My goal was no longer to make games that were fun, but games that were profoundly emotional. I am still trying to meet this goal - it's six years later, and I do not think I have yet succeeded.
How to Flywas the first notgame I created. You play as a bird who flies around eating mosquitoes in mid-flight. The more you eat, the larger you get. However, by the end of the game, you shrink back to normal size, then are transformed into a mosquito for some reason, before getting hit by a truck and dying. Your score is reduced to 0. The game is full of symbolism, the original meaning of most of which I have since forgotten. In retrospect, it's a pretty game, and one that I appreciate, but it's not the emotionally profound masterpiece that my teenage self set out to create.
How to Fly
I remember presenting the game to the Game Maker Games community and it was immediately shot down. Everyone there hated it for it's lack of traditional game elements. My ego was crippled.
Later that year I created A Day by the River, a game made for a high school English class project about the importance of civility. Notgamedesign philosophy also guided this project. However, this game had also failed to meet my objective of emotional maturity. In fact, the game I made was about as emotionally immature as I was. The game was supposed to be serious and dark - instead, the class laughed most of the way through it. I didn't realize it at the time, but the game is actually quite ridiculous.
For the next three years, I would struggle to complete any game projects. Wakerwas one of the last project that I started with artgame or notgame design philosophy in mind. It was one of the last times I attempted to create something with deep emotional significance. The game has been in development hell for 3 years now and counting. Making people feel things outside of tension and fear through video games is hard.
Making Games in College: In Pursuit of Thought
Two things happened during my college career that resulted in another large shift in my design tendencies. The first was that I got a little better at thinking. The second was that I became exposed to games and writings of "punk" game developers: developers associated with the queer, Twine, and most recently, alt games scenes. These developers were not only conscious of the social and political themes in games, but in the social politics surrounding the creation and play of games.
Whereas artgames and notgames, traditionally, held themselves to high aesthetic standards, punk games usually were less concerned with aesthetics and more concerned with ideas.
This isn't to say that art games aren't about ideas, or punk games aren't about emotion (indeed, all of my attempts at artgames have been very message-driven). But I think that my exposure to punk games prompted me to focus primarily on the ideasof my games without trying to purposefully evoke emotion through aesthetics.
My mission as a game designer had expanded: not only did I want to make games that made people feel, I wanted my games to make people think. I didn't necessarily want may games to be fun - but if fun happened along the way, I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
Empty Chambers, Digital Toilet World, The Void Hero Blues, Mandibles: Change is Coming, and Monsterpunkare all games in which I attempted to communicate ideas through narrative or mechanics. Most of them purposefully disregard typical aesthetic standards in games, and, as a small act of rebellion, none of them feature white male protagonists. Chambers and Void Hero both criticize traditional conventions in first person shooters. Mandibles has overt political themes, and Monsterpunk subverts gender expectations and has themes of environmentalism and pacifism. Even Digital Toilet World has underlying themes about religious zealotry and the futility and dangers of human progress (it's not just a poop joke)!
Monsterpunk
Over time, you can observe my game design become more conventional with each of my creations. Among Chambers, Toilet World, Void Hero, and Monsterpunk, Chambers is the most mechanically subversive, giving the player a gun and then rewarding them for not using it. Toilet World and the Void Hero, while emphasizing their anti-game quirks, are more conventional, featuring and encouraging shooter-based combat throughout. This was especially problematic in Void Hero, a game which attempted be both a criticism of first person shooters while also trying to provide Quake-esque gameplay. Monsterpunk is the most game-like of any of these, featuring layers of complicated rules and mechanics and traditional win conditions.
Bloodjak is the conclusion of this trend towards convention. The Indies vs Gamers jam had two requirements for its entries - the game had to be arcade themed, and the game had to feature online high score table support. While it is possible to create experimental works that meet these criteria, I had trouble coming up with a good artgame or punk game idea that did within such a short time period. So I made a shooter.
It is not a game designed to make you think. It is not a game designed to make you feel anything beyond tension, fear, and excitement. It is a game that is meant to be fun.
I'm back where I started.
Making Games Now?
Bloodjak's been out for a few days now, and it's already becoming one of the most well-received games I've ever made. People have been telling me that they love it. One person's already enthusiastically competing for the first spot on the high score table; a kid's already recorded four minutes of gameplay, threw it on Youtube, and gave the game an astounding recommendation. The game's received more ratings on Gamejolt than anything else I have on there, and not one of them has been negative, which is unusual for me.
Don't get me wrong: I'm really glad people are enjoying the game. I enjoy the game. I'm really glad to have made the game! At the risk of sounding arrogant, it's a good freaking game. However, Bloodjak is not the sort of game I expected to be making at this point. My mission as a game designer for the past six years has been to tell meaningful stories, stories about politics and human experience, stories told through games that are accessible to both gamer and non-gamer audiences. I've had mixed success trying to do that, and perhaps am now having great success not doing that.
Hopefully, the creation of Bloodjak will give me the room I need to finally tell those stories I've been wanting to tell. Most of the games I've been over the past two years have straddled the line between convention and experimentation - I wanted to change people's perceptions of what video games could be, but felt a need to prove to the world that I already understood what video games were. I felt as though I needed to demonstrate not just a willingness to break the rules, but a complete understanding of them.
Bloodjak, I hope,is proof that I can design a conventional game, and do it well. Now, maybe now, I can give myself permission to start making stuff that's more beautiful, nonviolent, personal, political, and experimental than the games I've made up to this point. Or, at least I can try to.
In the meantime, blow up shit and have a good time doing it.
I keep making things. Today, I am sharing two of those things with you.
1) High Transit
High Transitis a team student project for which I was the primary programmer and level designer. In the game, you get to jump on fast moving trains in the sky. That is pretty cool. What's not cool is that it's loaded with bugs and rendering issues.
I feel incredibly conflicted about the game - more so than I usually feel about my projects. It is not the most polished, personally expressive, subversive, or experimental thing I've worked on. However, it does feature some of my best mechanics and level design, and is a blast to play.
2) Cuties Killing Video Games: Gender Politics and Performance in Indie Game Developer Subculture
I spent the past year writing a 200 page thesis about how online communities and noncapitalist modes of game production make feminist politics in gaming subculture possible! I figured it might be of interest to some of you in such communities who use such modes of production to perform such politics.
I just finished writing a 200 page thesis called Cuties Killing Video Games: Gender Politics and Performance in Indie Game Developer Subculture. To celebrate, my thesis advisor and I collaborated to create our first Twine game!
It's called Mandibles: Change is Coming. Look around a room. Don't get your head bitten off by an ant. Start a revolution.
We created it an hour. It is amazing regardless.
With the completion of my thesis, work on Toilets, Meat, and Drugs is picking up again. I might have something else cool to show before then.
Sorry for the continued silence on this corner of the net. I am unable to work on my personal game projects at an ideal rate - my thesis and student development work continues to take priority - but some progress has been made! Character dialogue in Toilets, Meat, and Drugs is nearly complete. In fact, now whenever you flirt with characters in game, they'll say something cute! Or they'll reject your (probably) inappropriate advances.
Oh, and now when you take pills in the game, you'll hallucinate! I really want to drive home the negative aspects of drug/medication dependence in this game, and it was difficult to do that without adding an explicitly negative consequence to popping pills in game. Not only will hallucinations visually impair the player, but the longer you've been taking drugs in game, the longer the hallucinations last. I think the new feature makes the in-game decision to take drugs a lot more interesting, and adds a ton to the game's flavor.
I myself have had horrendous experience with ADD medication, and wanted to capture how awful that experience can be through a game. Being able to better explore themes of drug dependence, both recreational and otherwise, adds a greater degree of personal relevance to the game that makes it more engaging to me, and hopefully to others too.
I've only just now noticed how suggestive this screenshot is. Eh, the hallucination is randomly generated, what can you do?
I was worried for a long time about whether I was spending my time wisely continuing to work on Toilets Meat and Drugs - I've spent nearly nine months now on something that should have been a side project, and the jam version of the game was one of the most poorly received games I've made. I've spent a lot of time on a project that had a very real potential to be unenjoyable to a general audience, but now that I'm reaching the end of development, I think that the risk is going to pay off. The game has so much soul. If I were a video game, I would be Toilets, Meat, and Drugs.
I've pushed the expected release date to summertime. Sorry for making everyone's Christmas miserable by not releasing the game by then like I said I would. This year's Christmas will be better.
