Farewell, Waker

This is four years overdue, but I am formally declaring that I've abandoned development on Waker.

For those of you unfamiliar, Waker was a fantasy narrative adventure game that I was largely developing by myself from 2012-2014. The talented Ashton Morris was handling audio. It was to be a full length game with distinct puzzles and a branching story. A fair amount of people (strangers, even!) were excited about it. Folks were asking to collaborate. The game was blogged about. I never had as much engagement working on a project in the years since.

What lead to the demise of the game wasn't the scope itself as much as the fact that I had outgrown the project - my skills had improved considerably over the years I spent working on it. There are still a few really neat things happening visually and narratively - I still love Sue the Poggle.

During a couple of years following 2014, I had thought that I would one day return to and finish the project. While this possibility had rapidly dwindled since then, the release of Danger Zone Friends last winter was the final nail in the coffin. DZF became the full-length magnum opus that Waker was once meant to be, rendering Waker obsolete.

The last build I created is now publicly available in the Posterity Archive. It consists of about half of the planned story. The game ends abruptly when you reach the castle of Eldria, which I never populated.

Again, lots of y'all were really excited about the project, and I appreciate it. Thank you for your support.

Cecil Con Updates

Underground Arcade Collective is returning to Cecil Con this upcoming Friday and Saturday! Woo! Stephen, John, and I will be showcasing FIFTEEN VIDEO GAMES this weekend! Which is a lot! It's a lovely event and we are thrilled to return.

The games on display will include:

• Soul Eater
• Danger Zone Friends
• Star Kid
• Monster Hug
• Invasion Versus
• Aaargh! Condor 
• Koi Puncher MMXVIII
• Diablow
• Monster Truck Power Fantasy
• Ungrateful Birds
• Gewgawlicious
• Astro-Path
• Bloodjak
• Fungilluminati
• Digital Toilet World

As is always the case leading up to a con, I've updated some games of mine in preparation for the event.

Danger Zone Friends Update!

In response to player feedback, I've improved the tutorialization in the introductory level of Danger Zone Friends, better explaining JRPG fundamentals to players who may not be familiar with them. The tutorialization was not something I handled gracefully as the game's audience shifted from one person (my partner who has played JRPGs before) to a general audience (who includes... everyone). Hopefully this makes the game somewhat more accessible.

The new version can be downloaded here!

Exclusive to people attending Underground Arcade Collective events is a special demo version of the game that features a demo exclusive boss! The demo exclusive boss is called Demo Exclusive Boss. Yes, the Demo Exclusive Boss is a palette-swapped Screaming Tortoise Sword who can shoot lasers and turn invisible. No, the Demo Exclusive Boss will not be available as paid DLC for the full version of Danger Zone Friends. You have to come to a live event to fight Demo Exclusive Boss. Those are the rules.

 

The Danger Zone Friends demo starts at the game's introduction and concludes shortly after the first dungeon. In the context of the full game, the first dungeon itself doesn't need a climax, but as a stand-alone episode, it badly does. Hence, the creation of Demo Exclusive Boss.

Bloodjak Update!

Four years after being asked by several people to add gamepad support to Bloodjak, I've finally done it! I've resisted buying a gamepad for a long time on account of being poor. I now own a gamepad, but I am still poor.

There is a mechanical difference between playing with the keyboard and playing with the gamepad: the gamepad joystick uses vector math, while the arrow keys do not, meaning that, when playing with a keyboard, you will travel faster diagonally than you do orthogonally. However, the advantage to the keyboard player is slight and does not outweigh the extra finesse granted to the gamepad player.

This difference in diagonal speed would not normally be ideal, however, the physically incorrect keyboard movement has been present in the game for four years. It can be hard to walk the line between updating a game in a way that respects the original work and doing it in a way that fundamentally changes it, and improving the keyboard movement falls in the latter category. Meanwhile, adding physically correct gamepad movement is easier than having it match keyboard movement. Purists can still play with a keyboard if they want the "true experience," but if you own an Xbox controller, that is now the best way to play the game.

You can download the latest version here. Someone please beat Teapawncha’s high score.

Danger Zone Friends Soundtrack

Thank you so much to everyone who's played Danger Zone Friends so far! If you liked it, please share it, and rate it on itch, Game Jolt, and rpgmaker.net. If you didn't like it, please share it anyway, but maybe don't rate it! (that is a joke)

The game's soundtrack is one of my favorite aspects of it, and serves as the emotional core for the experience. You can stream and download the tracks here:

Danger Zone Friends: Now Available

Danger Zone Friends is out! It's a JRPG about two roommates on a grocery trip gone awry. You can download it for Windows from itch.

Agnes and Lulu set out to make a simple errand, but along the way, they find themselves taking a wrong turn into the Danger Zone! Will they be able to survive the hazards of the underground world, return to the surface, and complete their shopping trip?

2+ hours of JRPG adventure, featuring tactical combat, an original score, and jokes.

You can read more about the game here! The trailer is below:

As many of you know, this game is special to me for many reasons. I've been working hard for the past seven months, and at the end of it, successfully produced what is arguably my first full-length game. If you only ever play one of my games, please have it be this one.

I normally offer more thoughts about my projects upon release, but I'm comfortable letting this one speak for itself.

Gamejolt and soundtrack releases soon. Thank you for playing!

In other news, American Wallrunner is now on Gamejolt and itch, with downloadable HTML builds for those of you without Windows. Enjoy!

American Wallrunner and Other News

American Wallrunner!

Angie is a disgruntled former CIA agent with uncanny parkour skills. After quitting her awful job in an inglorious fashion, she attempts to earn some money by working some side jobs - jobs that require an experienced wall runner. But nothing can prepare her for the truth of her very existence...

Another year, another Glorious Trainwrecks Secret Santa game! American Wallrunner was created for mbtzl, who asked for a game that featured parkour with a Cold War aesthetic, among other things.

Currently, you can download it for Windows from Glorious Trainwrecks. A web version will be on Gamejolt and Itch soon.

Post-Mortem

I spent about half of the past five weeks developing most this project from scratch, splitting my attention between it and Danger Zone Friends,  the Bloodjak Phillytron port, grad school applications, and holiday mirth.

The most unusual aspect of this game's development is the soundtrack. A day before the game was due, it had no sound! So, I dug through my hard drive and found a series of bass recordings, most of which I made back in the fall of 2016. During that time, I hadn't yet found other people to play music with, was trying to develop a solo act for open mics, and recorded instrumental song ideas that I could reference later. Ultimately, I never developed a solo set, but I was glad to have finally found a use for the recordings!

I spent more time developing the mechanical aspects of the game than usual. Many games have featured wall jumping, but wall running? In 2D? If there's a similar game I could have referenced as I designed and programmed American Wallrunner's movement, I had never heard of it.

This game combines the movement logic of 2D top-down games with that of 2D side-view platformers, and it needs to switch between them on the fly. The problem with this is that, in top-down games, the player only collides with the walls. As far as game logic goes, floors do not exist - they are defined by the absence of anything rather than the presence of something. However, in side-view platformer games, the player collides with both walls and floors - floors are defined by the presence of floor rather than the absence of wall!

As I made American Wallrunner, I began with the logic of top-down games, and added platformer logic later. This meant that floors were defined by the absence of wall instead of the presence of floor. So, when the player lands on platforms suspended on walls, their character is checking to see if they're making contact with nothing. In theory, this sounds simple. In practice, this is the complete opposite of how game collisions are supposed to work, and it's provided a series of technical design problems to numerous to fully document.

What I'm trying to say it, the game's movement seems straightforward on the surface, but it's terrifying under the hood. Take my word for it.

As is the case with most games, but especially games of small scale, I didn't get to implement as much content as I would like. While this is often invisible in the rest of my projects, the foundations for systems and events I wanted to add later are a bit more plain. For example, the whole game was structured around having a good handful of odd jobs for the player to complete before they could unlock the ending. While the final game works well with the two jobs that exist, the game's structure would have made more sense with at least one or two more. I also had planned for nearly every statistic displayed in the player menu to have some sort of bearing on the game world, especially hunger, thirst, and bladder. I laid the groundwork: the numbers are there, and they're dynamic, it's just that only a few of them have any sort of practical significance.

Overall, I'm happy with this! Part of the reason I do the Secret Santa jam every year is that it pushes me far outside of my comfort zone and forces me to make design decisions I never would have considered. Who the hell makes a 2D top-down game with wall running as the main mechanic, set during the Cold War, with fantasy creatures as the supporting characters, that casually condemns American foreign policy? I do. I am that guy.

Other News

Well, would you look at those control prompts on that there menu? Are those... buttons? Yes, folks, it's true! Bloodjak has been ported to an arcade cabinet! But not just any arcade cabinet - it now lives on Philadelphia's community arcade cabinet, the Phillytron! While I was unable to attend MAGFest myself this year, the Phillytron and its assortment of local games did. Thanks again to Philly Game Mechanics for encouraging me to port the game to the cabinet, and showcasing Bloodjak as part of the collection.

Speaking of conventions, I am excited to announce that Underground Arcade Collective will be returning to Cecil Con this April! We had a lovely time last year. I hope to see the rest of you mid-Atlantic nerds there!

Finally, after I finish porting American Wallrunner to the web, I will be able to give Danger Zone Friends my full attention, and release it this month. Stay tuned.

Danger Zone Friends Trailer

Danger Zone Friends is going to be out soon! What does that mean? I don't know!

In any case, here's the game's trailer! You may seen a bunch of screenshots by now, but I am fairly proud of the animation work, and especially proud of the music composition and sound design, so I'm very excited to finally show just a little bit of that off! 

As for the game itself, it just needs a tad more tweaking. I've spent the past couple of months refining the game's balance, tutorialization, and user experience, and I'm completely done with that!

Finally, a quick note while I'm here: I've boasted in-person and online that a playthrough of the game takes about 3-7 hours. To improve the game's pacing, I recently decided to reduce the enemy encounter rate, which brings typical playtime closer to 2-4 hours. It was for the best to trim that excess fat and better focus the core experience. My apologies to anyone expecting an epic, but the game is better this way, and it is still freakishly huge for a solo effort. I am continuously excited to share this project with the world; thanks for watching!

Danger Zone Friends & Other News

Announcing: Danger Zone Friends!

This is older news for those of you who follow me on Twitter, but for the rest of you, I am pleased to announce my next game... Danger Zone Friends! It's a JRPG about a turtle and a pantsless otter who make a grocery run for shredded cheese, but take a wrong turn into the DANGER ZONE. As our heroes attempt an escape from this strange and dangerous land, rumors spread of the return of an ancient evil, the Dairy Demon, Cheelzebub...

Spoiler alert - it is.

This is, undoubtedly, my greatest game to date, featuring some of the best encounter design, art, storytelling, comedy, and music I've ever produced. 3-6 hours of playtime, 20 minutes of original music, over 25 enemy types, so on and so forth. It's been an undertaking.

This game was originally made for my girlfriend, who asked for a "cute game" for her birthday with animal characters. She plays a fair amount of Persona and Pokemon, so I thought she would appreciate a *cough* short JRPG. As a supposedly casual project, it seemed like a good excuse to dust off the copy of RPG Maker VX Ace I got in a humble bundle a while back, and just have fun making something without having to code original mechanics from scratch. Many of my favorite RPGs of all time - Off, Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle, and Space Funeral - were vanilla RPG Maker games created without a lick of original code. It felt like a rite of passage to produce my own RPG within the (very limiting) constraints of the tool.  A lot of folks question the legitimacy of RPG Maker as a development suite, and while I know it was the right tool for the job, I still feel self-conscious about using it. At the end of the day, though, you can't argue with the results.

Despite my aspirations for this to be a tiny, casual, and sloppy game, it quickly turned into a serious endeavor. It became clear, after I had drawn, written, and programmed the initial cutscene that I was onto something special. I started development in June, missed my girlfriend's July birthday deadline, and continued to work for the following three months, pushing myself to push myself as an artist, composer, and writer.

As this game was made for my girlfriend, it includes a number of elements - inside jokes and scenarios - that will only truly be understood by the two of us, making this the most personal, expressive, heartfelt game I've made, strangely enough. However, the game should be just as enjoyable for the rest of you. Remove the insider knowledge, and what remains is an unusual story filled with non-sequitur humor.

But if you didn't know that about Astrodon Johnstoni, that's okay.

The combat is mostly what you'd expect from an RPG Maker game, building upon the default turn-based battle system. What sets Danger Zone Friends apart from other RPGs is the increased importance of non-damaging support skills, namely, abilities that cause buffs, debuffs, status effects, healing, and MP manipulation. Out of the three characters in your party, only one of them is any good at dealing raw damage. The game places more emphasis on providing adequate support and changing the flow of battle. As a result, battles are slowly paced, thoughtful affairs.

Despite having the same core battle system as nearly every other RPG Maker game, I attempt to make combat in Danger Zone Friends deeper than in other games in its genre.

All in all, the game's loaded with jokes, cool monsters, and a rockin' soundtrack. Currently, my girlfriend is about 80% through her playthrough. As soon as she's done, I'll start preparing it for general release. I'm also going to wait until a lot of the hype around (the admittedly fantastic) Deltarune starts to die down - it shares a lot of tonal similarities with Danger Zone Friends, and there's no use in competing with it.

Anyway, the most important thing is, I love Danger Zone Friends, and I hope you will too!

Updates to Monster Truck Power Fantasy and Bloodjak!

In other news, both Monster Truck Power Fantasy and Bloodjak have gotten patched! There's minor bug fixes with both, but the largest changes are that Monster Truck Power Fantasy now has a subtitle option, and Bloodjak now runs at a constant speed, regardless of its framerate. These were mostly made to address technical issues when showcasing the games live, but for those of you who are hard of hearing, hopefully the subtitles allow for you to better enjoy Power Fantasy.

Baltimore Game Collective: Now Featuring John D. Moore!

Tomorrow night, Stephen and I from Baltimore Game Collective will be showcasing our collection of work at Colorspace Labs' First Friday Indie Arcade in Philadelphia! What's new this time around is that we'll also be showcasing some games by our newest member, John D. Moore. John is a prolific developer whose diverse creative output spans over two decades. We'll be featuring three games of his this time around: Monster Hug, Dr. Creepinscare's Pumpkin Patch Match, and Ungrateful Birds. Happy to have you on board, John!

That's all for now. Please stay tuned for the release of Danger Zone Friends later this month.