I'm making a game! Purely for my own enjoyment. I highly recommend it.
For the moment, I'm calling it: "Wake up, dead kosmonaut!"
IT'S GONNA BE WEIRD.
This is what it looks like (and more importantly, what it sounds like! …Half of my motivation to make this thing is just to have an excuse/storage place for all of my hallucinogenic-acid-synth-rock-organ-space-electronica. I am particularly proud of this piece, which is the result of me making a battle track or two a day for a week and then throwing out all the ones that were garbage, which was everything but this one.)
The other half of my motivation is this: I want to make a game story like Defender's Quest, which is the first game ever wrote professionally, and my favorite out of the lot of them. I want to write something that I'm truly proud of, something that I know I did to my utmost ability, after 15 years of working on other people's stuff. I want to go out on my terms.
Unfortunately, a game story requires a game.
I'm not gonna try to sucker someone else into making my baby for me, I'm sure as hell not going to pay someone to do it, and I'm not going to try to badger/manipulate AI into doing it because I hate fighting with technology to get it to do what I want and working with a contractor who has no taste or vision and reading words on a glowing screen and typing, and also I don't want to train myself to be a sociopath.
So! Time to solo dev it up!
Naturally, the first thing I did was come up with a story idea.
THIS IS COMPLETELY WRONG AND BACKWARDS.
As a professional working on other people's babies, I always, always, ALWAYS started with the gameplay and worked backwards from there to derive a narrative premise from the mechanics. I gave a whole talk about it at the GDC Narrative Summit one time. (Which you can find in all its poorly recorded, jet-lagged glory here.)
It's just good contracting: get the client's requirements for the project and then design your narrative from them.
Well, I ain't a contractor. It's my party, and I can do narrative design backwards if I want to!
By which I mean decades of swirling inspirational chaos soup burst through the containment field around my subconscious and thrust themselves upon me.
What inspirations? I'm glad you asked!
The pensively religious (and recently cryogenically frozen) gulag-prisoner protagonist from the novel The Aviator.
The dying sun from the novel Shadow of the Torturer.
The colony ship from the novel Litany of the Long Sun.
This strange image from a Vincent Price movie that I’ve never seen.
The weird, melancholy way that the band Steam Powered Giraffe moves.
The weaponized bio-engineering in the novel Borne.
The not-entirely-human people genetically designed for their roles in the novel Hull 22 (and another colony ship!)
The universe that I desperately wanted to explore in the strategy game Masters of Orion II (instead of being stuck with this zoomed out 4X game that I sucked at.)
The rusty, mysterious, pre-rendered skeuomorphic menus in the first person stealth game Thief: The Dark Project.
Vague memories of the arcade game Galaxian.
Equally vague memories of the aesthetic of Sega Saturn bullet hell shooter game Galactic Attack (divorced from its bullet hose, reactionary gameplay.)
The three-weird-things method of character design from the TV show Farscape.
The culturally inescapable (and very strange belief) that technology can save the human soul.
The Sega Saturn CD player music visualizer.
The starship patterned cloth on my cheap childhood bed’s not-box-springs.
The memory of putting on skeleton makeup (inspired by the above Vincent Price image) and dancing with such enthusiastic aggressive weirdness (inspired by the latent spirit of chaos to which I am only a host) that I cleared the entire dance floor except for this one girl who was probably supposed to be my soulmate but I was too devoted to chaos to stop and dance with her when she tried.
The story I wanted the Attack of the Clones movie to be when I was a kid.
The very, very different universe presented in the original Rogue Trader 40000 RPG book (which is a much more mysterious and undefined place than the 40k world we all know.)
The concept art from Jodorowsky’s Dune, a film too weird and drug fueled to exist (by a man who seems the same.)
The emotion of this picture.
This swordfish that I drew in Paint.net for A Curiosity at the Establishment of Madame Z.
Oh, and here's the player fantasy that I'm working to capture:
Be a spaceman.
Be a resurrected spaceman in a colonized system crumbling into savagery, where the sun is failing, and the dwindling resources are fought over by the technological horrors and genetically engineered living weapons of the fallen past… and the erratic, psychic whims of The Man Who Is the Sun* (who hunts you for reasons known only to himselves**.)
**Some of (t)him, at least.
Now, I have to actually make it into a game. BY MYSELF.
…I mean, what the heck genre would that even be?
Fortunately, I know a couple of requirements.
That's right, we're going to flip the tables and design our mechanics to meet the narrative's requirements!
So, what are the problems that we need to design around?
I want a dialogue-driven story, because funny/compelling dialogue is my strongest game writing skill. So, we need a party or cast of persistent characters.
I need a largely linear game, because I ain't gonna deal with non-Euclidean a-chronal narrative antimatter. I knew it wins awards and gets the "GAMES ARE ART" crowd all hot and bothered, but I want to make the best story that I can, not play with the fabric of the medium.
I need to be able to do all of the programming, art, and music myself… despite not being a programmer, artist, or composer.
(I am, however, a snob, which is, like, 90% of my creative power. I hate bland, forgettable janky crap so much that I will teach myself whatever I have to in order to create shocking and memorable janky crap.)
So, what tools can I use to make this game?
A DQ mod is out – I have no idea how to handle that code at the full conversion level, and I'm not sure that mod support even works in the game anymore. (It is, to be fair, completely ancient at this point.)
I do have Game Maker Studio (the first one – I ain't signing up for no subscription give-us-infinite-money baloney.) I've messed around with the various versions over the ages, as my folder of 7 million abandoned projects will attest.
(I even finished one once! It's called Zombies Drank My Beer. I did it… 18 years ago.)
I even once dabbled in the occult arts of using the GML programming language instead of just the drag-and-drop interface. I'm reasonably confident in my ability to Vlambeer the heck out of simple action gameplay.
Game maker is not geared towards menus and turns and that crap: it's here to deliver action games. It's possible to do other stuff, but I'd be swimming against the current. Also, I'm terrible at balancing things and math and numbers and spreadsheets and crap, so – as cool as it would be to make a squad-based tactics game or DQ style "tower defense, but your towers are persistent RPG characters" type affair, it's just setting my sights far too high for what I can accomplish by myself.
In my folder of shame, I have abandoned platformers, RTS's, maze games, first-person shooters, Metroidvanias, this psychotic stealth action revenge farce that accidentally predicted the plot of John Wick except with a goldfish instead of a dog and had a part where you fight mummies in Flashbackistan and then machine-gun a village of puppies and nuke their corpses and – hold on.
Look at that deranged character design. I love it. PUT IT IN THE INSPIRATION SOUP.
Where was I? Right. What genre can this thing be?
I suck at finishing all of them, apparently. So, what would be the easiest thing to actually finish? What could let me have simple, Vlambeer-able action gameplay at its most basic form while fitting with my insane space world?
…
Scrolling space shooter is the obvious choice.
It's benefits are clear:
It's in space.
The gameplay is incredibly simple and driven by objects and collisions.
Spaceships have no walk animation. Heck, they have only a single frame.
There's no environment art to speak of, just black, stars, and clouds if I want to get fancy. I know I'm good at all those things.
There's no pathfinding.
There is no enemy turn or strategizing.
The cast of characters can be you and your wingmen. Or, heck, one big ship with some gunners and turrets. Either way, I can have my cast of persistent dialogue-spouting characters.
It was perfect.
There wa only one caveat…
I, um, am not really interested in scrolling space shooters.
Well, crap.
Making a project you don't actually like is a recipe to make something, you know, you don't actually like. (Itself a recipe to not finish.)
So, instead of listening to the demon of self-sabotaging ambition permanently perched on my and screaming for me to abandon the idea and turn to totally unfeasible projects, I just took a piece of paper and asked myself:
What would make a scrolling space shooter interesting?
A reason to not shoot: ammo & resource management.
RPG style ship upgrades: either DQ style downtime leveling up or in battle roguelike cards.
Meta-progress: short levels with a level map that saves everything that you've unlocked.
Side guns: different weapons on left and right to encourage tactical broadsides.
Load out: choosing different weapons and power ups at the start of a mission for multiple strategies rather than just "get good."
Meta-goals/meta-exploration: an overworld map to scan across (big reticule controlled with the arrow keys) and select planets to travel to – traveling creates a scrolling shooter level (based off of distance and location) that you have to pass to reach the destination. Destinations could have cargo to move elsewhere, story missions, etc. This could get kind of Skyrim-y if I wanted. Destinations would unlock nearby points of interest, etc.
By the time I was done with that single hand-scrawled page, I discovered that the idea of a scrolling shooter was really, really interesting.
So, I'm making that. (Well, some of that. Plus whatever the demon of feature bloat, er, I mean, SPONTANEOUS INSPIRATION shouts into my ear as I go.
Here's what it looks like so far:
At six months and, I think I've set a personal record for sticktoasinglepersonalprojectiveness.
...I'm very excited to enter the vertical slice phase.
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