HEYYY the Steam Summer Sale has concluded, so I can finally share all of the fake game art I got to make for it!! Woo
The idea for this sale was to design a bunch of relatively convincing key art to hide in the Steam storefront, but that would be a little weird on second glance—Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton came up with the names/descriptions for all of Clorthax’s fake games, and then I just tried to match their energy in the final art.
This ended up being a whole lot of work for everyone involved, but it was such a blast!
Super fun trying to make plausibly polished logos in a whole bunch of different styles/genres. I hope everyone got a kick out of finding each of these as much as we did making ‘em
😎👍🏼
@g-a-y-g-o-y-l-e asked for all the game descriptions from the sale, so WHY NOT:
It’s Probably Fine You’ve got 37 unpaid parking tickets. You just got pulled over for speeding. In your defense, you were texting your sister about how drunk you are. Plus there’s all that blood on your windshield. Obviously you know it’s deer blood, but the police officers walking toward your vehicle don’t. Still, in the time it takes them to figure that out, maybe you’ll sober up. Or escape on foot! Either way, it’ll probably be fine.
User Tags: Poor Choices / Story Rich / Multiple Endings / Parkour
I just finished playing this and it’s a fun little romp, but it’s interesting how straightforward it is for something that is so lauded. I feel like many of these older games are remarkable for what they accomplish in their time and place but coming at them from a modern sensibility just means they don’t hit the same way.
Super exciting Bloodborne Kart dev post today, seeing that I worked on the post battle results screen today, meaning that we now have a first playable for battle mode!
On top of that I also fixed some bugs, like the bug where deaths from rope molotov mines didn’t count towards score, or the order of operations bug which resulted in AI karts not using their power ups in specific instances.
This all leads to a fully functional and competitive game loop in this team-based battle match. Which team do you think will win? Place your bets before watching!
Has anyone written about the distinction between vibe holoprograms vs. narrative holoprograms (aka holonovels)?
And tangentially how video games are so often pushing their linear narrative at the cost their vibe spaces (if they even have time/bandwidth for that), reducing them to minimal simulations of vibe activities like darts or pool, with the NPCs having little to say or do beyond their role as set dressing.
Because a vibe holoprogram like Sandrine’s has those holodeck versions of high fidelity but minimal simulations of pub activities, but their holodeck characters are far more fleshed out (so to speak) and interesting to interact with without the linear narrative trappings of the holonovels.
So anyway, here’s me wishing for better vibe spaces in video games, the closest we can get to holodeck in our times.
NekoNecro, my hand-drawn monochrome platform game, took four years to create.
And in that four years, I was hired and fired, started an apprenticeship in tattooing (hopefully to help pay the bills?), was promptly bullied out of it (guess that didn’t work, then…), injured my drawing hand, recovered, moved to the other side of town, caught COVID, recovered, and so on and so forth.
And it is undoubtedly the best thing I have ever created.
Before this, I’d never worked four years on anything. Not solidly, anyway; although I’ve had a comic project called Trashfield circling my thoughts like a hungry vulture since the mid-2000’s, I’ve never really worked on it for an extended period of time. And you can tell that what little I did do of the comic, and the skills I learned from it, were leveraged into NekoNecro. As well as everything learned from my music GCSE some 20+ years back, my three years of BA: Animation at university, almost every creative skill I have has been combined in making this, my biggest project ever.
No, not ever, yet. My biggest and best project yet. I look forward to whatever I do that beats this, in either scale or quality (hopefully not both, four years was enough without potentially doubling that development period).
Moya Horror, an international game dev group making a game about the year 2000 in rural Finland. Studio head Amos Sorri lives in Japan and that might be bit of an influence on things we do. We also do a bunch of weird cool projects with HauntedPS1 community. New to TUMBLR no clue how to drive this thing, but we’ll get there.
One thing about me as a worker in video games is I’ve always cared about being credited. Early on, when I didn’t know what a career was or that I’d ever last this long in one, I felt like all I’d really have in the end is my name in the credits. There was the incontrovertible record that I was there, I existed along with all those other people and we all contributed to that single work. Whether the game was good or weird or boring or whatever, that didn’t change the fact of the record that it happened. My accidental understanding of legacy, I suppose, and perhaps a misplaced fixation. Real people know me, shouldn’t that matter more than some list of names in a video game that strangers will ignore? And yet.
In any case, over time I realized that I was getting my name into at least one new game release a year. I didn’t plan for that, it’s just how it shook out. And naturally, I fixated on that as well. The nice, steady sequence of years, starting in 2004. (My work previous to that was websites or online walkthroughs and credited to one of my many pseudonyms). Most game devs will tell you that it’s not realistic to ship at that pace, but for some workers in the marketing or game test disciplines (and anyone working on mobile or episodic stuff), it’s just reality. Their efforts require them to contribute to many games at a time, particularly working at the publishing level like I have. While some may not concern themselves with what they’ve worked on, I really do care. It’s just important to me to care about what I’m doing on some level. How could I work on these things, sometimes under difficult circumstances, with no sense of attachment or ownership? What’s the point if it’s all just a paycheck? This has to matter, if only to me. There has to be a record that it mattered.
Well, that steady release cadence got bunted when Dead Space 2 didn’t ship in time for the 2010 holiday window. Instead, it was delayed until early 2011, which meant that for the first time, I experienced something closer to a typical developer’s time on a project. I joined that team in November 2009 and ended in February 2011. A big ol’ gap in the shape of 2010 that I’d never forget, again, as meaningless as all of this is.
But the annual cadence resumed and I had a good run from 2011 to 2021. Now, again, I’m looking at a gap in 2022. No new games shipped this year. Just reflecting on what’s come before and what’s ahead. Combined with hitting my twentieth year in video games and my fortieth year of being alive, it just feels like a bit much. I’ve lost the rhythm that comes with perpetually shipping a game. I’ve been using the extra brain bandwidth to study new things, consider how I might spend the next ten or twenty years. The usual considerations of arriving here.
And still, as ever, I check my mobygames profile. I sort the list of games to my name by year. I look it all over, maybe reflect on memories of working on a particular game or two. Then I get back to work.
The Legend Of Zelda Collector’s Edition for the Gamecube turns 19 today in North America!
Shoutout to the kind/indifferent Gamestop employee who shrugged and handed this to me when I said “uh hey you’re probably gonna say no because I’m sure this is a very exclusive item but could I buy one of the Zelda collector’s discs off you?!”
A few months back we released a demo for a game I’ve wanted to do for a while: Occult Case Files. What started as a simple mock-up went on to become one of our most successful games!
This was done specifically with games like Uninvited, Shadowgate and Deja-Vu in mind. I really enjoyed the style of those games, along with the horror elements found in Uninvited! Although nowadays it isn’t really all that scary, I’m sure for it’s time it was as scary as it could get though. With that in mind I sought out to make a similar styled game that actually IS scary.
Overall, I set out to see how far I can get in development over a span of 2 months. I’ve really been trying my best to scope properly and manage time wisely. After a few years of doing this, I’m starting to feel more and more confident with these things. Yet… I still need more work on them haha.
Accessibility
From the mock up to the final build, a lot of things were moved, changed, removed, etc. I think this UI layout is properly fitted and wont have to be adjusted anymore in the long run. Although with that said, accessibility was and is something I’m always willing to fine-tune.
One major complaint I received overall was the constant changing of the selectable actions. Folks didn’t like having to select an option, go back up to the main screen, then going back down to select another option. So to combat that, I had it so hitting “Select”(Shift) would bring the selection you made back up. When that wasn’t enough, I made it so hitting it again would cycle through the options. When THAT wasn’t enough I made it so hitting CTRL would cycle backwards. And when THAT wasn’t enough, I had it so hitting the numpad will bring up the respective action as well.
I may sound pessimistic about the above, but overall if it makes the experience for someone that much more manageable then I’m all for it. I get it, some of the design choices back then compared to now are a little archaic and there’s no reason not to improve upon them now. I think the only thing I can do to make it even more accessible is to have the mouse itself be able to act as the cursor as well. I’m kind leaning towards not implementing that though, unless of course there’s a big demand for it.
One thing I really loved about developing this is art didn’t take me too long! The frame in the top right is 116×117. Smaller than the Game Boy’s resolution, but still enough room to work with. I’ve seen folks say I should make that part bigger (One guy suggested I ditch the entire UI and make the screen just that frame) but in the end that just increases my workload and its something I’m dead set on. The size of that part of the screen will remain as is.
What’s Next
I was not expecting the reception this game got. It seems like folks really dig it for what it is and want more of it. It was something that came from a love of retro games, Japanese horror and an excuse to make some creepy art with a larger palette (Getting kinda tired of just using 4 colors hehe) and I’m glad folks are behind it. I was going to use the demo to gauge how folks felt about it, and depending on that figuring out whether I should put it on the backburner or give it priority over other projects. There’s so many games I want to make, and such little time. But thanks to the positivity folks have expressed over the project, it’s been bumped up on my list.
I have an plan for story beats, locations and scares all in mind. I’m in the process of gathering it all up and writing it down so that when the time comes to ramp development back up, I’ll have everything laid out and read to work and expand upon. To give a brief idea of what to expect, the game will take place over a week. As a student, you’ll attend school, talk to classmates and folks around your community as well as explore your neighborhood and a number of locations surrounding that. From local shops to shrines in the woods, I hope I can really give life to these locations and give folks something cool to explore.
Once The Third Shift is wrapped up, Occult Case Files will be up next. It won’t take as long as TTS has, so hopefully it’ll be following it up shortly after. I’ll be sure to post progress here when the time comes, and I hope you all look forward to it.
If you’d like to try the demo, you can find it on itch here: https://teebowah-games.itch.io/occult-case-files I’d love to hear what you think! Is this game something you’d be interested in seeing us finish? Let us know! In the meantime, please take a look at this marvelous cover art that our friend
@sombrepainter painted for the game. They did a phenomenal job with it and it’s safe to say this project wouldn’t be the way it is without their contribution.
