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I participated in Ludum Dare 33 over the weekend. More precisely from Friday at 6 PM PST to Monday at 8:20 AM PST. I’ve worked in video games for over a decade and made little games in Flash and Director a long time ago, but it isn’t until a Twine game from last summer that I returned to making my own games and interactive stories. I saw LD as an opportunity to keep trying and to leverage my current desire to create visual art.

The theme–not revealed until Friday–was “You are the Monster.” I was naturally uninterested in a literal interpretation of the theme. I began thinking about a story and design that evening and continued pondering in my notes until Saturday night. There were a number of design ideas before settling on one, including a concept involving a little girl in a hospital waiting room whose brother had a mysterious accident. (I really liked this one.) In hindsight, this time spent on design ate up too much development time, i.e. time that should go to getting a functional game.

I was committed to making an adventure game after my last jam experience with Twine and my recent work in the genre. Twine is great, but I wanted more art and interactivity for this one. Just walking around in an environment with no need to click on anything if the player wasn’t in the mood. This removed the possibility of using a game development tool called Construct 2, which I have experimented with for a few years. It’s a wonderful tool that makes it easy to script some kinds of games, but not point-and-click adventures.

My next option was Adventure Game Studio, with which I was also familiar from previous experimentation. The greatest limitation of AGS is it only exports for Windows PCs, so players on other types of devices would be out of luck. I really wanted to make it playable in a web browser (which Construct 2 allows with its use of HTML5). So, I also spent a large part of Saturday trying decide on a engine. I finally found a tool called Adventure Game Engine that exports to web browsers using Unity, but I was too unfamiliar with the engine to get what I needed in 1 day. I plan to return to AGE at a later date if I decide to make another adventure game.

So, by Saturday night I had a design, an engine, and a rudimentary room with a character walking around. I technically had until Monday to finish, but due to work I really only had until Sunday night.

I did minor setup work in AGS on Sunday morning and then charged into Photoshop to work on the visuals. Art and animation was a lot of fun. To see your idea come to life is amazing, which is true of any form of expression but particularly exciting to me when it’s characters and environments in a game. Animation is another area I’d experimented with many years ago and I was happy to try it out again. The minimalist white and black art I’d created just to test the AGS tool became the primary visual style, and I believe the funky animation benefited from the hand-drawn Microsoft Paint look. I spent Sunday morning and some of the afternoon working solely on art and animation in Photoshop. But as I once again learned, it’s a classic mistake to work on the art before your game’s scripting and logic are in place.

Scripting and logic was a bummer. Some of it was painless thanks to the pre-defined behaviors and tools in AGS, but I felt pretty bad by the end of Sunday on account of some advanced logic hurdles that I could not quickly surmount. In the end, I was missing the logic for multiple endings (merely a different message at the ending screen), NPC animations didn’t play properly, and the game crashes when the player reaches the end. It is also missing all sound, which for my game would have been footsteps for the player character and a violin track for one of the NPCs. I considered not even submitting what I had, but I felt better about it on Monday morning. I’m happy with the result considering none of it existed when I woke up on Friday morning. It’s just a step, after all, like anything else I’ve created.

My biggest takeaway from this experience is that I enjoy visual development. I’m exploring art and I’ve been worried that exploring something like this at age 32 is going to be difficult, particularly if I want to pursuit it beyond a hobby. I’m going to keep exploring and take classes. Hope something comes of it.

The (not quite final) game is here, called ‘p good’.

Resonance is really good so far, which isn’t far at all. I have played as a single dude who lives in a shitty apartment and is a scientist of some kind, and a streetwise cop who walks into dark alleys because he plays by his own rules. This screenshot is the beginning of a third character’s introduction. It’s the best thing I’ve experienced in a video game in a long time.

I’ve played several other games lately, more so than films or books. In particular: Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3. That is also a ranking of the most to least interesting of that trio. Lara Croft’s trek was an interesting build-up, but Booker Dewitt and the Far Cry 3 guy (I call him “bro”) are not as interesting. All three characters are placed in certain peril and yet only Lara’s story really stuck with me. It’s as if her own term as innate badass has been washed away, replaced by a vulnerability that makes her more relatable in spite of all the extreme survivalist shit she pulls off. Her deaths are also cruelly graphic, which ups the peril factor. Bro is certainly a vulnerable character in the opening scenes, but they ramp him up almost immediately. You’re hunting boars and taking down army Jeeps full of natives in the first half hour. And Dewitt, hell. He comes in as a down-on-his-luck private detective who’s out to snag a bounty in exchange for a pardon of some kind of debt. Guys like that are hurricanes. There’s no doubt in his portrayal.

I’ve yet to finish the latter two, so perhaps I’ll change my opinion. My gut just kicks in early on with such things.

There’s a big loud voice out there that says video games have to appeal to certain aspects of the psyche. Kind of like what they say about comic books. People—mostly guys—want a power fantasy. Big muscles, hot and nearly-naked girls. Always the hero or the anti-hero. Never the (serious, not comical) villain, or the weak, or the NPC who appears as a background automaton. I don’t agree with people who believe such characters are just not interesting. Who wants to play as a powerless nobody?

I’m left to wonder why scenes like this one from Resonance or Lara’s struggles across the island make me feel more immersed and interested in these games than in others. I really have no answer. What I understand at this point is that vulnerability can make me feel powerless, and so I do not admit vulnerability. I do not feel powerless. Perhaps this whole thing—these kinds of video games, all those years of stories, and the kind of intimate fiction I admire—it’s an attempt at something. Trying to connect to a node which remains nameless to me. Just trying to feel, maybe.

That’s what art is good for anyway.

It’s been a long winter. Colder than expected, even compared to that one in Oregon. Too long for some pursuits to remain wrapped up in nylon inside a garage. The boat’s now in the past and it takes tremendous will not to ride away to the desert somewhere and blow loads of money. Well, money better saved and spent elsewhere.

Instead, I think of jobs I can take on for the weekends. Whatever I must do to hang onto my certain pleasures.

Local enjoyment. The joys of one’s home turf. How do you do it?

johnisdead:

spoiler alert via vgjunk

I have a Nintendo Entertainment System in my apartment. Two controllers, the orange gun, all that. I found it in a black plastic garbage bag, which was in storage along with most of the rest of my stuff. I don’t know where this NES came from, but that’s how things are. You get stuff and forget about it.

I was kind of excited, you know, for nostalgia reasons, but I was bummed when I saw no cartridges or game cases in the bag. There was nothing in the box, either. An NES and no games. The torture.

But something everyone always did was forget that they left the cartridge in the console, and sure enough, there was a good copy of Batman waiting to be played. I never completed this when I bought it at an Inglewood yard sale years and years ago. I didn’t think I’d finish it that day, but it was a chance to bring back old memories. Old memories are the best.

The lesson I took away from that five minute ordeal was that satisfaction is assured. The universe abides.

I played some Batman (really, just level 1), and it was pretty great. Then I moved on to something else.

Separately, I watched House of Cards through to its conclusion and enjoyed it. Still tasting it, so I’ll reevaluate when it’s digested some. But it did well by me in the way The Wire and Deadwood did well by me. Characters are personable even at their most despicable. Violence becomes political, sex is doled out tactically. The dialogue can drop some good lines every now and then.

Here’s the kicker: it’s only season 1. Season fucking 1. Had you told me that this would not be The End I would’ve waited until they were done. It was even right there in between the jumble of other words that aren’t PLAY, but I didn’t allow myself to see it.

My point is to be careful, all you speed readers out there. You keyword searchers. Too much of that high-level stuff will stunt your comprehension, cause dyxlexic flare-ups, and lead to the kind of existential unhappiness that only a season finale can rile up.