scampie!!

I've copied much of this from my launch devlog, but I love posting this kind of stuff on my Cohost, so here goes!

It's here! As I mentioned in the little announcement post, this is a teeny tiny, itty bitty little proof of concept for a dungeon crawler with no combat: you just get assaulted by corporate jargon when you run into the blathering speech bubbles. That's the whole concept and the whole thing really (that and talking to the beleaguered statue employees on each floor), but hopefully this is as fun for someone to sink their cool 2-5 minutes into as it was for me to put together!

I'm going to pop this up as a sort of artist's statement/postmortem, because, hey, this was 80% learning exercise and sometimes I learn best by reflecting on the experiences within. So here goes!

##Making a little thing based on my own art!##

My intent here was to first actually make a tiny thing actually based on my own spritework. Since last winter (and last spring more formally), I've been learning to draw pixel art, mostly so I can make my own assets for my games, yes, but also to improve my design and visual communication skills overall. I've been making a small game (the Tunnel!) for a long time, and I just couldn't find any existing assets for sale that worked, so, hey, so be it. At the tender age of 39, I decided to learn to draw. It's been wonderful, actually, and doing daily challenges and other regular practice (as well as slowly learning to define the visual style I would like for The Tunnel) are among my favorite activities each day.

I also wanted to learn to do a little more with Yarn Spinner, the primary tool I used here. I used it to make a dialogue system, yes, but also to build a simple inventory system (sort of a very simplified version of a point and click adventure inventory, and just using simple yarn command handlers), which was also great fun!

My third intention here was... therapeutic. I've been struggling with some of the gnarliest depression, anxiety, and burnout of my life, and matters in the media world have been... bleak. This is absolutely nothing compared to the horrors going on in the world (if you need to know my politics at this point, particularly on Gaza, it's cease fire now, and supporting the messaging and actions of Jewish Voices for Peace​). But I can speak directly to just how disgusting and bleak things are for journalists in the US, here in the week that Jezebel, one of the best-read sites that covers crucial topics like abortion rights in America, got canned because of BRAND SAFETY​. I feel, scarily often, as if I picked a field that means a great deal to me, and as I've climbed the career ladder, I've watched it utterly crumble to dust around me. Sad for me, yes, sadder for the world, which needs a robust free press and strong support for journalism more than ever given... the state of said world.

In my own corner, sitting here in the media world and also riding the waves of brutal layoffs in the game industry​, I don't know how not to be extremely depressed, exhausted, flabbergasted, and enraged by the forces of corporate greed and enshittification. I took half the lines for the game directly from just ads and stupid jargon on my own (hallo)linkedin page. It (corporate jargon) means nothing, it IS nothing, and yet, it represents the poison we all rely on to keep going each day.

(I tell people, with no exaggeration at all, that I enjoy volunteering on an ambulance in the NYC 911 system, with by far the busiest call volume in the US, for a refreshing change of pace to the headlines we look at all day in media. Also, EMTs should be paid much, much better.)

Above right there's a fun screenshot with all of the speech bubble lines and COOL E-BOOKS FROM THE LIBRARY in the game. Yes, it's a simple array, don't laugh at me too hard. It just shows a line randomly when you bump into an enemy or touch the colliders on the bookshelves.

So, yes. My 2-5 minute dungeon crawler proof-of-concept is partially just a creative outlet for me to be angry and shouty about corporate America in 2023.

Which leads us to the next point...

##Waiting for (me to decide when it's finally time to switch to) Godot##
(No one has made that joke in the last six months! Nope!)

The Unity kerfuffle has made it a case if when, not if, I'll be switching, despite playing mostly in Unity's sandbox, game dev wise, since around 2010. I'm just frustrated because, well, I've been making real progress. I know it will carry over, but ever since the Fanbyte Apocalypse​, I've been very, very focused on making more games. I don't have much free time for development (I have a full time job as the EIC of Game Developer, a part time job teaching game design at the Berklee College of Music, the aforementioned volunteer gig on the ambulance, and a fairly busy training schedule in my sport), so any time lost (say, in a switch to learning a new platform) is very painful. I have The Tunnel well in the works, and a still small-but-slightly-more-ambitious dungeon crawler project, which The Blathering Keep here is the very proof of concept, and both of those are Unity-based for sure.

But we'll get there. We'll learn and figure it out and keep making small games.

Also, plenty of things went well here on this project, including art production! I felt very comfortable making the simple assets here, particularly with the aid of this lovely tutorial​, which inspired the original drawing that made me want to do a teeny dungeon crawler in the first place. I had a fairly easy time learning Unity's tile tools, and making small adjustments in Aseprite, then bringing new sprites in.

I'm also proud of my scripting in the project. It's very simple, absolutely! But I'm pretty happy with the enemy movement code, the little inventory system and the fact that I wasn't too scared to dip my toes just a bit into PHYSICS here. As a little slice of a game, I'm pleased with how everything works, and I'm happy with the dialogue and story elements here as well.

So there it is, friends! My tiny game and my thoughts on creating said tiny game, with the promise of many more to come. If you do play it, feel free to leave comments, thoughts, or (constructive, please) critiques! Thank you for reading, and thank you very much for playing, if you do!

IGF Judging's just about over so it's time for this year's IGF Games I Want To Talk About post!

For those who aren't familiar this is my yearly tradition where I bring up a selection of games I played as an Independent Games Festival judge that I thought were interesting and deserved further highlighting. You can find last year's thread here: https://cohost.org/MOOMANiBE/post/671297-igf-games-i-want-to

A reminder, as always: Games on this list don't necessarily map to anything related to awards voting - this list focuses on stuff I think is unique, might be overlooked, deserves signal boosting, or that just makes me really happy on a personal level. They're games I want to talk about! I hope they catch your interest the way they caught mine :D

Final Profit

I never thought I'd say this, but this RPG Maker game was pretty unequivocally my favourite to play this year. A surreal, parodic shop sim, Final Profit's premise - you play an incognito queen who feels she can only root out corruption by becoming a shop owner herself and bootstrapping her way to the top - makes it clear from moment zero that you are in for a very, very silly ride. The game could have contented itself with just being very funny (which it is) but it's somehow managed to be really, really addictive in the process as well.

A simple-seeming first shop quickly gives way to an endless pile of wild gameplay twists - a massive tax and loan burden will see you selling loot boxes, commiting postal stock fraud, selling your blood to a vampiric owl, traversing an apple-based skill tree, and fast traveling around using the terrifying Horse Dimension, whose effects are so upsetting there's an options setting to turn them off.

Every single person I know who's tried this game ended up saying something along the lines of "I only meant to play it for 30 mins or so, but then suddenly 6 hours had passed." I literally cannot wait to go right back to playing this game once the compo is over. It's that good.

Oh! and as a bonus, it's already out! You can just play it right now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1705140/Final_Profit_A_Shop_RPG/

Price of Flight

What if you took Mario Party, and made it into a surreal, horrifying and comedic singleplayer game about birds resisting an oppressive human regime via a game show? And it had RPG combat? Such is the absolutely bonkers premise of Price of Flight.

I'm genuinely kind of unsure how to describe this game in a way you'll understand how it's so exciting, other than to say that it is GREAT and WEIRD. Equip your party of four birds with a variety of moves and equipment. Decide whether to spare or kill your human enemies - or your bird friends - for power, money, or whatever morals you have left. Roll on a variety of upsettingly-themed game show implements. Fight a boss fight, lose, and play an extended sequence where you play as the boss mourning your deaths? ??? ? ??? that actually happened to me

THE GAME'S WILD

Check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2636710/Price_of_Flight/

Reality Break

Speaking of odd premises, here's another one for you: Diablo. Spaceship shooter. With... idle-game style reset progression mechanics. Yup! That's reality break!! A looter-shooter where every so often you'll reset the game and use the points you got from "breaking reality" to reshape it completely, granting you buffs, entirely new game mechanics, and who knows what else. And then you restart the game from the beginning. But maybe this time... some things will be different? I showed this game to Zandra and she ended up getting so addicted she played it for 25 hours even though it's not even finished yet.

Anyway, I'm really excited for this one. You can find it at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473060/Reality_Break/

Isles of Sea and Sky (formerly Akurra)

I'm pretty sure Akurra ended up on one of my IGF lists a few years back. It's here because I finally got access to a nearly-complete build of the final game this year and I can unequivocally say it's the best puzzle game I've ever played. Sporting a Baba-Is-You-esque difficulty curve that teaches you new mechanics with every single puzzle and makes you feel like an absolute genius when you solve something that feels unsolveable, Isles of Sea and Sky adds to the dynamic with a zelda-esque dense overworld that means some puzzles won't be doable until you enter from the right direction or find the right item, and features a ton of secrets to boot. I can't wait for yall to get a chance to play this, I absolutely could not put it down.

You can find it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1233070/Isles_of_Sea_and_Sky/

In Stars and Time

Is it cheating to have a game from a dev I'm mutuals with on here? Eh, not the first time it's happened. I got to play what I'm pretty sure is a near-final build of this and I'm 1000% sold. I've played a lot of time loop games over the years but what sets In Stars and Time apart - aside from its INCREDIBLE character writing - is the way it feels like it puts you in the protagonist's shoes.

Very early in the game they introduce a "skip dialogue" function that lets you "Zone out" during conversations you've already heard. The trick is... zoning out doesn't stop when it hits new dialogue. Why would it? You're the one not paying attention. The result is a game that truly evokes the sensation of looping; do you care enough to listen again to see if anything is different? Wait, did they always say that before? Why is walking down this one little narrow passageway resulting in so much new stuff every single time I do it?

I've never in my life seen a game so densely packed with writing, one that rewards players who are really interested in feeling in-place and who play scenes over and over again looking for new bits of interaction. And on top of that, the combat is really solid and fun, continually feeling strategic even after the 10th, 20th loop. Real excited to go back and finish this after the compo is over.

You can find it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1677310/In_Stars_And_Time/

Anthology of the Killer

What if indie games met indie horror? A truly incredible set of small slasher-toned walking sims focused heavily on dialogue and humor. Unbelievably great writing and a surreal and incredible sense of pacing, space, and when to fuck with the player add up to a game that (thankfully for me, a coward) isn't that scary but has the exact tone of a horror b-movie you invite your friends over to laugh along with. Also, all the art was drawn using a weird plugin that lets you draw directly within unity which lends it an INCREDIBLE wiggly hand-art feel. I truly, truly enjoyed every moment of this. The screenshot really says it all, don't you think?

Find the first 8 episodes here (for free?!): the last episode (and the compilation of them all) is still in production: https://thecatamites.itch.io/anthology-of-the-killer

20 Small Mazes

It's exactly what it sounds like. It's 20 small mazes. Each of them is very different. There's some very silly gimmicks. It's the epitome of a game you play for 40 minutes and are like "that was really fun!".

It is really fun. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2570630/20_Small_Mazes/

Harvest Island

I posted about this already but I wanted to highlight it again because it's so fascinating and unique. A farming sim premise gives the developer the ability to create the world's slowest-burn horror game - you may go hours without anything scary happening. The game holds its cards close to its chest and is content to wait until you decide to disobey your father and explore the tiny island you live on, to reward that curiosity with both information and scares alike.

And there's no "big twist" where it's not actually farming! It's actually normal, non-scary farming! You milk cows! The game's trick of framing your farm as a "safe zone" your parents tell you never to leave is incredibly effective both thematically and at building tension. And the bevy of systems, from crafting to energy, that accompany a traditional farming game also help build tension here; running away from something is much more terrifying when you're on your last legs of stamina meter. I'm SO curious where this one is going to go once I have time to finish it off.

Harvest Island is already out, so you can check it out now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1292500/Harvest_Island/

A Highland Song

It's not as if an Inkle game is going to go overlooked, but I couldn't resist highlighting this because I'm SO impressed by what they've done here. This 2.5d exploration game starts with a pan back over seemingly endless parallax layers, and when you hit the end, the monologue suddenly makes it clear; everything you've seen is the land you must travel. Your goal is where that pan started. Thus begins a game that manages to have the "you can go anywhere you can see" sensation of a 3d open world game but somehow is entirely planar 2d.

I want to be clear here; that picture above? Every single layer of that parallax background is fully traversable by the player. Yes, even the one way in the back. The result is a complex and INCREDIBLY sprawling hand-painted world that truly evokes the sense of something way bigger than yourself, and it's a blast to explore. They're also interestingly iterating on 80 days somewhat here - though in the platformer genre - with a sort of "play over and over for different endings/routes/characters" type dealie that I didn't have a chance to fully dig into, but I'm very curious where it's going to go.

It's really a neat concept for a game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1240060/A_Highland_Song/

Horticular

Horticular manages the fascinating trick of being a game that is about the player building pretty landscapes but also has a deep, strategic sim laying underneath,

A basic 'economic' sim of purifying and growing out wasteland is made complex and interesing thanks to a system of building correct biomes for different animals to move in (like an evolution on Terra Nil's concepts). Because biomes for animals can overlap, there's a ton of optimization play in using your limited space effectively. And then they stack on top of it some really strange and unexpected concepts, like.... gnome tower defense..? Kind of???? I'm not entirely clear on why evil gnomes want to kill my plants, but you can recruit gnomes of your own or blast them manually with spells when they attack at night.

When you add that to the simple satisfaction of making visually satisfying landscpaes, it's a blast to play. I'm always really happy when an indie sim gets to be both pretty and mechanically deep.

You can find it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1928540/Horticular/

Ebitapes

This was a really short demo but I'm INCREDIBLY enamoured with the concept of an adventure game where you solve puzzles by creating mixtapes. Find sounds throughout the world and then mixtape them up and play them anywhere you want to elicit various unexpected reactions. Once you start getting more tapes you can even begin layering the sounds, and it's really cool to reach a point where you realize that you're solving puzzles with stuff that genuinely sounds good. Kind of hoping they submit a longer build next year, because I can't wait to dig into more of this.

You can find it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2221850/EbiTapes/

Honorable Mentions

This section is for games I liked but didn't make it to the main list, either because I didn't have as much to say about them, or felt they were already fairly well known.

Small Saga: I got to play an unfinished build of this thru to the end. It's SO charming and the music is incredible. I do hope they have time to polish up some of the climactic scenes before shipping tho.

Little Goody Two Shoes: This just came out and WOWWW the art. Wow. Wow. Also gay dating? Gay horror princess raising sim dating?? ?? ? ??

Terranova: Zandra watched me play this and described it as "Emily is Away for livejournal roleplaying teens" and it basically is. As someone who lived that, the writing was so realistic it made me want to cringe into a ball constantly. But that's a good thing, really! It's charming and memorable.

Rhythm Doctor: Man, what a brilliant take on story-based rhythm games. That said, I wish it had a little more chill - I used to be the #4 player in the world at Osu! and I can only barely clear the act 5 finale.

Crypt Underworld: What if Weird Indie tried to make elder scrolls? That's kind of this game. Everything in the entire game has HP and a unique drop table. You can kill NPCs willy nilly with no consequences. There's a Frog God. I ate so many Pills that I could jump 10000km into the air

Alcyone: The Last City: This was a REALLY early build but it's a narrative game that's explicitly inspired by fallen london so that alone is enough to get me excited

Windy Meadow: I fucking loved Roadwarden so I will absolutely take "tiny slice of life visual novel roadwarden"

OKAY whew that's the post!!! Now I need to go lie down. (After I repost this to mastodon)
Thanks for your time, yall. Happy to answer any questions in the comments as always.