I'll start with the bad news. My old computer died a couple of weeks ago, and while I've been able to carry over all of my important data to the new machine, I have, of course, had to reinstall a much of my software. One of those programs, Game Maker Studio, is my primary weapon-of-choice for game development. Between the day I originally installed GMS and the day my computer offed itself, YoYo, Game Maker's developer, changed its licensing system. The old version of GMS allowed me to export games to both Windows and Mac - the current version only allows me to export them to Windows. Regaining the ability to port games to Mac will cost me a $150 upgrade. While I would like to purchase this upgrade, I really can't afford to until I find a god damn job.
Long story short, it's going to be a real long time before you'll be able to play Bloodjak and Monsterpunk on your Macs. I hate it that most of my creative work isn't going to be playable by a significant portion of the desktop computing population, but that's the way it is. It'd be an understatement to say that I'm deeply unimpressed with YoYo for stealing a piece of paid software from me.
However, a more pressing matter than my GMS downgrade is my loss of the previous version of the software, Game Maker 8. Game Maker 8 lost all technical support ages ago - even if you can find an installer and have a legal product key, the servers through which you'd register the program are long gone. Unfortunately, GM8 is the version of Game Maker that I had used to develop Waker.
Waker
Waker
I haven't touched Waker in nearly a year. Student game projects and an undergraduate thesis occupied my attention for most of the past 12 months, and completing Monsterpunk has taken priority over Waker, being the smaller of the two projects. However, I've changed a lot since I started working on the game in 2012, and I have doubts as to whether Waker is the sort of game I still want to make.
My plan has always been to revisit the project, polish it up for new demo build, and then decide whether I wanted to see the game to completion or dump the unfinished version as is, and then move onto something more creatively fulfilling.
As I said, the game was originally developed in the now defunct GM8. While it is possible to continue working on the game in GMS, it would require me to recode a very large part of the game. A lot of GM8's features are incompatible with GMS because the latter is designed for multi-platform publishing, while the former could only export Windows builds. It just so happens that Waker depends on many of those obsolete features.
It doesn't mean the death of the project, but it's completion is less likely now than it ever has been. If I don't complete Waker, it'll be due to a number of factors that are well worth writing about, but only worth writing about once. I hate to repeat myself, so I'll save the (possible) post-mortem for later.
Okay, here's the good news.
Monsterpunk
Monsterpunk
Monsterpunk'sdevelopment is nearing its end. I need to add a couple more songs to the soundtrack, I write the endings, finish implementing a couple of side quests, and playtest and polish the thing. But everything else is done.
Speaking of the soundtrack, I recently composed a new loop for the game called "Prom 1999." It's probably some of the best digital music I've written so far, give it a listen.
I'm currently in the middle of programming a mini-game for Monsterpunk. It's a birdwatching sim in space. You flip through the pages of your guidebook and correctly identify space birds. It looks like this.
VIDEO GAMES
And, as if I weren't busy enough, I'm ready to formally announce a project I've spent the past month working on.
Digimon Red: A Pokemon ROM hack
Digimon Red
That's right kiddos, I'm hacking Pokemon FireRed and am replacing all of the Pokemon with Digimon. 179 Digimon, to be exact. Deal with it.
Why do this? Well, Digimon fans really never got a good Digimon game besides Digimon World (and even that is disputed), and the original Pokemon Kanto campaign holds a lot of meaning for us 90's kids. It's been a lot of fun so far to redesign and reinterpret a classic campaign and breath some fresh life into it.
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood your question. You're really asking: why are you spending hours of your life replacing the characters of a game from one highly commercialized children's franchise with the characters of another? Not only that, but the other franchise in question is one that everybody stopped giving a shit about when they turned 10. Aren't fan works inherently immature anyhow?
I'll begin to answer these questions by introducing Gargomon. Gargomon is a Digimon. He's a fat dog that wears jeans and has machine guns for hands.
Gargomon is a Digimon. Gargomon is a fat dog that wears jeans and has machine guns for hands.
You know your favorite character from your favorite fiction of choice? Sydney Carton? Mal Reynolds? Bigby Wolf? Is that character a fat dog that wears jeans and has machine guns for hands? Oh, sorry, is that a no? Then that character ain't got shit on Gargomon.
Also, most internet users spend their time masturbating to memes of pop-tart cats who are actually John Cena. Most of the media we consume (and like) is trash. We're all in this wretched pit of consumer media shit together. Not all of the media I consume is trash, but of that trash, Digimon is my favorite.
Finally, regarding the stigma against fan works: it's mostly a byproduct of copyright law. When you use characters such as Robin Hood, Snow White, and the Big Bad Wolf in your stories, you're a "creative genius" who's taking advantage of the pre-existing narrative meaning inherent to them. By contrast, when you use Darth Vader, Pikachu, and Harry Potter, you're being "creatively immature." All pop culture characters have the potential to be folk characters - however, copyright law makes the usage of those characters in mainstream culture difficult, resulting in terribly amateur representations of those characters outside their source work, resulting in the general disdain for fan works.
I'm not going to be too pretentious about this project - it's just me screwing around. But it's some of the most fun screwing around with a computer I've had in a while, and I might as well share the end results of that labor with the rest of the world. While it won't be legally possible for me to distribute the hacked ROM, I will be able to distribute a patch you can apply to your (legally) obtained ROM of Pokemon FireRed.
I'll talk more about the technical and creative challenges of this project later on. For now, here's some screenshots.
Disclaimer: Pokemon and Pokemon FireRed are property of Nintendo; Digimon and the Digimon sprites are property of Bandai. This project constitutes fair use: work is transformative, noncommercial, and has no impact upon sourced work's market value.
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.
