Editor-in-Chief at GameDeveloper.com, Berklee College of Music game design lecturer, BJJ Purple Belt 🤼‍♀️, hobbyist game dev, beginner pixel artist, sometimes screenwriter, fitness dork, volunteer EMT. She/her.


IndieGamesOfCohost
@IndieGamesOfCohost

With INDIE INTERVIEWS, I talk to the game developers hanging here on Cohost to learn more about new games you might love.

What do you get when you combine a love for writing, character illustration, and fighting games? You get the work of @millardcrow, novelist, FGC tournament player, and game dev. Millard makes visual novels on itch such as GHOST ECONOMY and has also begun work on an indie fighting game, codenamed Shooting at the Sky. Even playing fighting games is daunting enough to me, designing and developing your own sounds downright herculean. I asked @millardcrow how he got into this scene.

You can find GHOST ECONOMY on itch.io

You can find THE NEXT GREAT DEITY on itch.io

Introduce yourself for everyone here on Cohost: Who are you?

Hello Cohostians, I'm Millard Crow. I am an artist, writer of weird things, game designer, and professional fighting game player/commentator. My hands won't stop making things and it's far too late for an intervention.

Is there a project you're working on currently? Tell us what's next for you.

I have two major projects right now that will consume my 2023:

A) I am working on a 2D sci-fi fighting game which is mechanically inspired by stuff like IamP and Plasma Sword, and scenario wise is somewhat of a marriage between Asimov's "Caves of Steel" and the movie "Reservoir Dogs." Which is to say, it gets violent and funny and serious all at once, and also has robots and aliens and maybe, just maybe, if i play my cards right, robot aliens. I'm doing all the art and programming for it and I'd like to believe my experiences as a player and a maker are going to result in a very unique thing.

B) I am working on completing the third novel in my surrealist/comedy book series "The Next Great Deity," which is a book series I've been publishing since 2019 about various forgotten deities competing on a reality show to re-obtain godhood. The Internet is a contestant and Jesus and Cthulhu have bitchy arguments with each other. I hope that gets your foot in the door.


How did you find yourself first getting into game development?

I have been intensely resistant to getting into game development despite years of wanting to make games because... well, I am going to hit you with some real debbie downer shit that no one wants to hear but someone probably needs to. I had convinced myself both due to a miserable american education and my own depression that I simply couldn't make games. I'm an older, queer man that grew up in an abusive religious family in the deep south in the 80s/90s, and I think anyone with any history of that time and place can probably suss out the sort of damage that has done to me and my development as an adult without me giving you the gruesome details. Finding self worth is a struggle every day for me, despite how much better I'm doing. And since programming had... fuck, /has/ this air of being for smart people with the ability to do math, I had convinced myself that it was not and never would be for me. I put a barrier that didn't need to be there. That's a character trait you'll see in my journey more than once. Sorry, dear reader.

And as far as actual programming, like the real big-boy programming that more than a few of your readers are probably capable of, I'm still confident that's not for me. But I lived, bitch, and I lived long enough to see game making tools that allow people with big ideas and hearts to actually make things. That's one of those things I just didn't think would happen. Gamemaker, Ren'py, Ikemen, they are all so approachable now. And what's great about that... look, there isn't a huge intersection of people that are accomplished tournament fighting game players, and are also queer men that cried over "Giovanni's Room" before watching an episode of Kamen Rider. I can make the stuff now that I want to see, that doesn't exist or exists in extremely limited quality. When I realized a few years ago that the art that I was already making could easily be transitioned into game development that even my anxiety-powered clump of grey matter could be proud of, there was no turning back for me. It's still hard, but I am finding new ground every day that makes it worth it.

Or, for a tl;dr: it gets me out of bed.

Your visual novel, GHOST ECONOMY, is a sort of prototype adaptation of one of your novels. Tell me how that process went. What were the highlights, and the obstacles, of adapting one of your stories into an interactive format? Did you find yourself changing anything about the story in that process?

The original novel of GHOST ECONOMY was and still is an intensely personal project that I am wildly proud of. So much so that when I made the decision to start making games, it was kind of no brainer for me to use it as my starting point, since so much of the ground work was done already. Since the work for the narrative and setting were long-done, it allowed me to focus exclusively on finding what I need to do to make the head-movies appear on screen. It also gave me the opportunity to brainstorm other what-if scenarios, which I think GHOST ECONOMY's story (which is a horror-romance with a largely grounded story with supernatural elements corroding over time) lends itself well to. A big element of the novel is the main character's puppet shows/live streams, which were fun to write originally, but -exceptionally- fun to turn into interactive mini-games for the player to risk their playthrough on to see how much lurked underneath it. There's quite a bit of options in the prototype to play around with in the two live streams he does, and I giggled with the creation of each new one just a little bit more than the last.

As an outsider to the genre, I'm fascinated by fighting games. Rarely does a type of game foster such a strong community and following as fighting games do. What is it about the games, and the community, that draws you in to it personally?

I don't know if my path is going to make a lot of sense to... anyone, really, but it's mine! The aforementioned religious family did not allow game consoles in our house because they were the people of the 80s/90s that you see videos of thinking that all electronics are Satan. They're real people. I can confirm this. So I didn't get to play fighting games until my senior year of high school, when I had a car and could leave when I wanted. I just... went to the arcade one day, and saw some people I knew from school playing SoulCalibur II.

And if that had been it, that may be the end of my story. As a person, I mean. But what really set me down this path was that they had printed movelists with frame data. Frame data! In 2002! Printed on real paper. I didn't know what frame data was. I can't do addition half the time. But when someone explained that the +1 on block stun meant that, when the opponent blocked a move that I recovered one frame before they did, let me tell you. Looking up at the screen, watching it happen, and understanding how what I just saw on screen related to that sheet of paper, it was like looking into the matrix. My life changed in an instant, as did my interests in games. Talking with people about the way these games worked and finding out what the best strategy was fulfilled a need I didn't know I had, a competitive need for refined gameplay, and fulfilled a social need I had longed for. I was, maybe unpredictably given what you see above, a bit of a loner. That arcade, that first real experience of camaraderie, saved my life. I'm sure of it.

Which is not to say that being in the FGC is some magical beacon of kinship. It's a gaming community. It is as good and bad as every community that has ever existed, ours just happens to be around pressing the buttons in a way that we find enjoyment in—and for a huge variety of reasons. Some want to win tournaments. Some want to do the cool thing in the video game. Some want to just find glitches and weird tech in different games and show it off. Some just want to have a good time. There's a lot of reasons to be in the FGC, and I think I've been around long enough to have been each of those people at one point in time.

I know you probably can't share specifics, but when thinking about making your own fighting game, what would you say is your driving design philosophy? If you're putting your own stamp on this genre, what do you want to embrace, improve upon, or change completely?

I grew up with a 3D-fighter heart and soul, which, unfortunately, that particular subset of fighting games does not have as good set of game engines to make games for. Yet. That's why you don't see many indie 3D fighters! I've instead tried to leverage some of my favorite concepts from fringe and forgotten fighting games, and to use that as a basis for something that is fun and unmistakably me. I'm not ArcSys, you know? I'm, statistically speaking, never going to have a triple A budget. But I've drawn my whole life. I know how to animate, I'm stubborn as hell, and Ikemen GO just got rollback netcode. I have -enough- to make something small, passionate, weird, and unmistakably me. As long as I can make something that I'm happy with that also fascinates other people to the extent that they want to research what I've made in the same way that I'm researched other fighting games, that's all that really matters to me. I want a reaction. The best thing that you can do for a creator is have a really strong opinion about something they've made.

Any advice for people out there thinking of making their first game project?

You are not going to live forever and you live in a far better time than I did. The part of your brain that is telling you can't make something, is wrong. I am living proof of it.

This isn't the sort of magic answer anyone wants to hear, but I've lived long enough to see so many new tools and advancements in technology that I simply didn't think would ever happen. I suppose some real advice I can give is to treat game making like art—sketch. Be messy. Be wrong. Revel in being wrong. Make projects that no one ever sees. Make bad games. Make every mistake, learn why it's a mistake, then use that information to make a better thing. There really isn't a better teacher than failure. That's true in fighting games, in painting, in life. And lord knows I've had a lot of lessons.

Lastly, are there any indie games out there you've been playing recently? Any favorites to shout-out?

For indie games as a broad genre, I have to shout out "A Day Of Maintenance", which is a relaxing puzzle game about gay robots that also may have some painful existential dread in the margins. I love to cry! ADOM loves to make me cry! It's a good fit for me. Looking over my recent history, I've also been playing quite a bit of "Broken Reality." I think I might just like robots and spiraling, dissociative worlds too much. I also played, beat, and loved "Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy" recently. Criminally underrated RPG made in, of all things, OHRRPGCE.

For indie fighting games, Arcus Chroma, Merfight and Punch Planet exemplify the sort of imaginative grit that I love to see in game development. They have carved their own paths outside of the direction of mainstream fighting games and done so in ways I quite admire.

I could fill the rest of your page with indie game suggestions, though, because I think indie games are this beautiful, subversive wild west of imagination right now. Play and make more small, weird games, please.

You heard him, folks: play and make more small, weird games! Those sound like words to live by, to me. Thanks for chatting, @millardcrow! For everyone else, follow Millard's work on itch.io and follow him on Cohost for more fighting game updates! Until next time!


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