Ideas and Theme

I’ve known for a while now that I’m pretty insensitive to some subjects that other people feel strongly about. So when I heard about last week’s shootings I felt pretty much nothing and just read a reddit thread about it (that’s how cool I am, yeah!). As expected, some people were angry and saying how terrible the shooter was for shooting children (because shooting adults is totally okay!); others were going on about how 24/7 media coverage encourages more shootings, which is probably true; most people were just terrified and sad that something like that happened.

Very few people, though, talked about why someone would do such a thing or tried to imagine a situation in which that kind of act would’ve been sort of justified (it will never be justified, but putting yourself in the shooters shoes, can you imagine how you would’ve gotten to that point?). So that stayed in my head for the day… Later the compo started and the theme was released: “You are the Villain”. I knew right away that I wanted to make a game about the shootings and explore the reasons why someone would do that. I also knew that, in those cases, people usually do have their own reasons, mostly because I had read a very interesting blog post (sorry I can’t find it anymore) some years ago about the Virginia Tech shootings explaining in detail the events that occurred that led the shooter to do what he did. According to that blog post, from what I remember, a lot of stuff that is said in that Wikipedia page I just linked are only half truths. For instance:

Several former professors of Cho reported that his writing as well as his classroom behavior was disturbing, and he was encouraged to seek counseling.

Written by Cho’s classmate, the post says that some teachers would just not accept Cho’s writing because they deemed it too disturbing, while the student who wrote the post thought it wasn’t a big deal. Also, some teachers would “force” Cho to speak out loud and express himself better in class when they knew he had issues with that… Anyway, it’s a lot of stuff and I don’t really remember the details. What I’m trying to say, though, is that those types of massacres are usually not without any type of reasoning behind them. It’s very easy to say someone is crazy and get it over with, but analyzing the whole situation regarding someone’s mental health, social status and whatnot is considerably harder, trickier, and may even make us feel bad about ourselves. I mean, who wants to feel like they are directly responsible for someone’s eventual mental breakdown and indirectly responsible for the death of others?

With all that in mind I decided that the game would be about a boy/girl/person who keeps going from interactions inside video games and interactions in real life (and by real life I mean the environment outside the game, but inside it… !). Their interactions in real life should be as terrible as possible, in an attempt to justify the ending (killing everyone) and their interactions inside the game should be also pretty violent, in an attempt to justify the game’s title. But this is more of a joke than anything. I don’t actually believe video games cause mass shootings! I had a bunch of ideas on how the real life interactions would be: you get to speak to your mom who hates you and resents having you around; you get excluded from a group of friends for some reason; your girlfriend breaks up with you; you get humiliated, ridiculed, bullied by a group of people in school (there’s a variation of this one when this happens as you’re confessing your love or whatever to some girl you like (and there’s a variation of this one too where the girl is in on it and she makes you believe she likes you only to get you to confess to her so that others can make fun of you (kids these days…))). I had very few ideas on how the games would be but they didn’t really matter. This was a more story focused game and if the games (the ones inside the game) themselves were fun that would’ve been great, but it was definitely not necessary.

What Went Wrong

The game itself was not fun at all. In fact, some people felt bad while playing it. While I feel pretty great that I made other people actually feel bad with something I created, I wasn’t aiming for that completely. I thought I had made the little children that you get to kill inside the games pretty funny and entertaining, but not cute and relatable to the point where players would feel horrible killing them, after all, they were just squares! My goal was to get the player to feel bad in the ending when you have to kill children in the game’s real life… I guess I’m just bad at emotions. ;_;

I should have thought way more about what I wanted the game to be. Instead of spending 20/30 minutes fixed on the idea of making the game about the shootings, I could have spent some hours trying to really nail down a creative and interesting idea before jumping to code.

I didn’t scope it properly. While I managed to finish the game, I had no time to see if it was fun, to add music or to just playtest it with other people. I spent the first day building the basic systems (platforming, enemies, guns, speech bubbles) and the second day creating content. I realized I do not enjoy creating content (compared to building systems), so it took me a lot longer to get stuff done on the second day. I also had no time left to polish the game as much as I wanted. There were no particles, music or just overall juicyness. Those are pretty simple features that really make a big difference…

The game looks terrible. I’m not an artist at all so I have to rely on primitive shapes, mainly squares. But I’m not at the point where I’m familiar enough with shader magic so that I can throw a bunch of squares at the screen and they’ll look amazing.

I was terribly unprepared. Like I said, I spent the first day getting the basic systems to work when I could have done that in less than ~6 hours had I prepared beforehand. There were many common patterns that arose as I wrote the game that I should have noticed, too. I also went in without any clue as to how I was gonna get music in. I play the piano, so I know how to compose decent (or so I think) music, but I’m not familiar enough with any tools to create a song in such a short amount of time.

What Went Right

I actually finished it in 48 hours. I created a list of things that I needed to implement and kept a pretty steady pace on day one. On day two I was sort of tired and the work wasn’t that interesting to me anymore, so I took a bit longer to get things done, but I managed to keep on keeping on (however slowly) and finished it. Also, my original idea and what the game actually turned out to be were pretty close to each other. Some details were different, but overall I didn’t compromise anything like I usually do (i.e. if something is harder to implement than I originally thought I’ll change the feature a bit so it’s easier to code).

Given that people said they felt bad while playing it, I’d say that the theme was handled pretty well. I also really liked using the sepia shader to differentiate between game and real life. It created a decent mood whenever you’re in-game. If I had a bit more experience I could have tried a more video-gamey shader, but the one I used did the work pretty well, so I guess it’s fine.

Conclusion

This was definitely a really good experience. I wanna continue participating as long as I’m ALIVE! Just the fact that there are so many games there are super duper a lot better than what I could possibly hope to create one day gives me enough motivation to keep trying to improve myself. It also reminded me how much deadlines help with getting stuff done!

Ideas

I knew from the start that no matter what the theme was I was going to create a simple clone of the game I’m currently working on. This is obviously not the spirit of the competition, but I really wanted to see how people responded to the basics of my game, since I only have the gameplay systems in place but no design yet (i.e. there is no win/lose condition, no goals, no story, no graphics, …). This is the current version of the game and displays what I thought to be a very interesting system:

Basically, you can create new weapons/attacks by combining the most basic elements that make up an attack. So, in the case of the video above, the two basic elements are projectiles and areas. Projectiles can deal damage, fork (vertically or horizontally), pierce through enemies, reflect on walls, slow enemies, and so on… Areas can deal damage, slow enemies, explode, …. If you combine an area with a projectile, the area will be bound to the projectile’s position (or if it has an explosion modifier, then the area will explode once the projectile comes in contact with an enemy or a wall) and they will both apply their modifiers separately. The main idea is that you can combine all modifiers between projectiles and areas to create new and amazing attacks. Since I really like the idea of combining things, naturally I thought that this would make a great feature in whatever game I created. I’m not sure if I’m entirely wrong or not, but the competition helped me explore some of the issues with it.

Execution

In the first 24 hours I got most of the combinations working with only a few bugs left. I devoted the second day entirely to creating the actual game rules, additional touches and fixing bugs. The rules of the game were simple (or so I thought): you can create whatever weapon you want by combining different modifiers; each modifier has a cost, such that if you go for the most OP weapon ever it will cost you more; the more your weapon costs the bigger your score gets over time; the goal is to kill all enemies while maintaining the lowest score possible.

Back then I should have realized that if it took this many words to explain the basics of the game, it probably was too complicated. But I didn’t. Anyway, I managed to implement this whole deal and this is what the upgrade screen looked like (you can also see the game on the background):

What Went Wrong

The game was too complicated. Usually games have scores that are one layer removed from the things that happen in the game: if you kill an enemy and your score goes up, there’s one level/layer between game action and score number. Ideally you want your game to have no such layers at all as the player should experience the rewards and punishments directly, not through a point system. My game had a three layers deep score system (weapon cost leads to higher score increase rate leads to higher score)! With so much abstraction it’s not a surprise people didn’t understand it!

On top of not being intuitive, I didn’t spend much effort into easing the player into the game. I pretty much said: “here, take all these and have fun!”. A better approach would have been to have the player unlock different modifiers as enemies are killed, or have the player start with all modifiers possible and gradually remove them (which would be really on theme). There are a number of other ideas that would have worked better than just giving the player everything and letting him decide what he should use or not.

Technically, the game was too complicated for two days. While I managed to make it work, I should have had more time to polish it. Adding some neat shaders, playtesting, maybe trying for a better graphical presentation? I don’t know, I just felt like it would have been better if I spent less time working on the gameplay system and more time polishing. 50/50 for each is definitely not the way to go, I think.

The game looks bad. Again, I’m not an artist (at this point I’m feeling like I should spend some time learning how2pixelart) so I’m relying on squares. Many people can make it work. I’ve played lots of great games that also use only basic shapes (especially this LD, given the theme), but somehow I just don’t have the skills to do it like them… I need to work a lot more on my presentation!

While I was more prepared than in the last LD, I should have prepared even more this time. A lot of the first day was spent building a system that I could have build in half (or maybe less) the time. Since I decided to use box2d I spent a lot of time rewriting some wrappers and basic box2d stuff. I should just really make all this into a library somehow. I also didn’t really have a way of making music. Luckily, I was watching quill18’s stream and saw him do it, so I just copied it. He used atrk-bu.py + SchismTracker. I also didn’t read my previous “What Went Wrong” list beforehand. I repeated some of the same mistakes because of that.

What Went Right

I managed to finish the game as I had it in my mind. Again, lists worked to great effect. Although this isn’t that remarkable at this point, since I can probably, technically, finish a lot of 2D games I can think of in 48 hours. The problem lies in polishing and on game design. It’s hard because it’s super highly impossible to remove yourself from being a creator and putting yourself on the player shoes. You can’t possibly realize if something is gonna work or not unless you have some experience.

On that note, I also learned a lot of lessons! I explored some paths and failed, but I definitely have more experience now. Which leads me to…

Lessons Learned

If your game can’t be explained in a simple sentence, there’s *probably* something wrong. It doesn’t mean that it won’t work, it just means that it could be simpler. Also, people won’t read text. Don’t expect them to.

Presentation matters a lot. People will not feel compelled to play your game if the presentation isn’t amazing. This sounds obvious when I say it but it’s easy to forget. You’ve worked so hard on all aspects of your game that sometimes presentation feels secondary, but it is one of the most important things you can focus on. Don’t forget it!

Fail often. Suddenly the advice from Edmund McMillen in the video below makes so much sense. Only through failure you’ll have enough experience to know what works and what doesn’t. This further increases the value of things like One Game A Month and Ludum Dare itself. Make lots of games so you can learn a lot!

Community

The LD community is usually super fair and nice about their comments. I’ve mentioned previously how sometimes it gets too nice (i.e. feedback isn’t really feedback, it’s just people saying what they liked about your game, even though they may have disliked way more things), but there’s nothing I can do about this. Most people do try to give valuable feedback so it’s not so bad.

The one issue I’ve noticed on this particular LD was the cheer number of people who simply didn’t understand what they were supposed to do in a game. I’ve mentioned in the previous section how people don’t read text. That’s okay, sometimes I don’t really read text either and just jump in to try to play the game. But some games are really simple to understand and still a lot of people don’t seem to get it. A great example of this is 0 by Cosmologicon, which had this exchange in its comments section:

I’m really surprised that game developers have this much trouble understanding some simple games. I can’t really imagine what it’s like to release a game for real for thousands of people, only to have a huge number of them simply not get what they’re supposed to do. And it’s really annoying to play games that hold your hand too much too. So I guess, again, it’s a matter of experience in knowing how much should be explained and how much should be left as exploration to the player.

Conclusion

This was a great experience. I certainly learned a lot of stuff and took from this LD way more than from the previous one. If there’s one thing I should remember is that I should release more games. Of course, I’m just not gonna release some shitty games just because, but it helps to set deadlines (say, 2 months) so you have to experience having to cut stuff and having to work with what you have. Hopefully I’ll have more experience and I’ll be more prepared for the next one! See you there! Or not, I mean, any one of us could die at any point… That would certainly decrease our game making abilities.

There are few games that use the gaming medium as the powerful force of change that it can be.

Currently, there exists a diverse selection of games that someone could choose to play: from simple platformers about heroes saving princesses to first person shooters about gangster rap on Venus. Yet, this diversity is extremely constrained to subjects that ultimately do not matter. Where are the games about social anxiety, dropping out of college, falling in love, losing your parents or feeling jealousy? There is a whole array of experiences that are common to most human beings that are not being explored by the medium. There is also very little discussion (through games) about global issues that are relevant today, such as global warming, consumerism, privacy or hunger and poverty. How amazing would be it for a game to clearly show the relations between people’s lives and world starvation? How buying an iPhone affects underage workers in China? Or how not caring about things that don’t affect your daily life (such as the NSA spying issue) can lead to decreased freedom of expression and freedom of choice?

There is a prevalent idea among game developers that games are supposed to be fun. Most players agree with this notion, but it doesn’t mean that games have to be devoid of any humanly or globally relevant subjects. It’s not a binary situation, an either/or type of deal. Games can be interesting to play and at the same time explore issues deeply (Papers, Please is a great example), but this takes effort and risk. The chance that people will not understand what is being said, the chance that a game won’t be financially successful, the chance of being called “pretentious”… And so, collectively, game developers choose to go for an easier path of certainty and fun. Quoting Alan Moore:

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

The gaming medium has the unique capacity for making certain feelings emerge in the player, and therefore has a higher capacity for empathy and projection. Game developers should abuse this uniqueness more. The industry (especially the indie scene) shouldn’t strive for dealing only in fun, but also in experiences. Fun is not the only thing you experience in life. So why should fun be the only thing that you experience in games? There’s a great podcast episode about this on the Infinite Ammo podcast. It’s episode 20 with Kayla Kinnunen and (if you wanna skip) it starts at 1h 43m 30s. And there’s also a great talk about this from Jonathan Blow (he’s immensely better and more organized in his thoughts and in the way he makes his points than me, so watch it!):

Drain

With all that said, for this Ludum Dare I decided to make a game that talked about population growth, consumerism and global warming. The idea is pretty simple: there is a planet (where gameplay takes place), there are resources and there are beings. Beings need resources to not disappear and to reproduce. The goal of the game is for society to thrive (have lots of beings alive at the same time) before the world becomes too poluted or before there aren’t enough beings alive for it to be feasible that that society survives.

The goal that I had as a designer was to make sure that the game made it possible for people to more easily see the relations between the three topics I wanted to talk about: population growth, consumerism and global warming. I think I managed to do this in a number of ways:

• A being connected to no resources will eventually disappear, saying that if people don’t consume things they cease to exist (this can be interpreted (in my head at least) in two ways: directly, people who don’t eat will die or indirectly, people who don’t consume objects are not, in a way, part of today’s consumption based society).

• When a being connects to a resource the being grows larger, and if a being is too large it creates another being. This says that people need resources to create more people and that, if that new person doesn’t want to die, they will also need to consume resources.

• When a being connects to a resource, the resource grows smaller, and if the resource is too small it will disappear. This says that resources are not infinite and that people consume them in order to survive.

So far the points made are pretty obvious, but at the same time it’s nice that there is a clear way of stating those obvious truths about life on earth as gameplay mechanics. Using those obvious facts as a base, I suddenly can say more complicated and nuanced things (much like you can start from axioms and go on to prove all sorts of crazy stuff in some mathematical system):

• When too many beings are connected to one resource a city is created. This city randomly spawns more resources and beings. This tries to talk about how having some reserve of resources can bring more people together to some specific place (basically how the rise of agriculture (renewable resources) led to the rise of population centers).

• Growing your population to the final goal of n beings means that pretty much all resources in the planet need to be used, that some beings will overuse some resources (and therefore some other beings will be deprived of that resource) and that the planet becomes a complicated mess of connections everywhere that makes it harder to see what’s actually happening (much like we fail to see the connections between our lives and the environment).

• Many beings die because the player simply didn’t have enough time to get to all of them, since they start becoming smaller (and therefore harder to click) as they go on without being connected. This talks about how sometimes (or most of the time) the problem isn’t much about resource consumption but about resource distribution.

• The more time goes on, the higher the number of beings you need for your society to thrive. This talks about how complexity and specialization of labor in our society makes it so that there is a higher amount of knowledge (and therefore people) needed for us to maintain life at our current levels of comfort.

• The more time goes on, the darker the map gets. This talks about global warming/pollution. The more those people are there consuming resources, the more they’re producing waste and changing the environment.

And so, with those simple rules I said some pretty interesting things about the world. People who weren’t aware of those things before may become aware after playing the game, and hopefully they’ll start changing their actions so that they more closely reflect this new knowledge. This probably doesn’t happen that much (it’s hard to imagine that everyone who played it got all that from the game), but it’s nice to imagine that someone got it and that that someone changed their opinions or actions about one or more of the subjects talked about in the game,
as that is the ultimate goal: being a force of change for good in society.

What Went Right

• Presentation was not bad. I’m not an artist at all, but I managed to make basic shapes look rather interesting. My inspiration came from this game:

• Gameplay was simple, I had enough time to finish it and make it visually interesting. Contrary to past Ludum Dares, where I chose an idea that was way too complicated, barely managed to finish it and had no time for “details” (making it visually pleasing, play test, tutorial, sounds, etc…).

• Some guy wrote an article about the game. This really caught me by surprise because I wasn’t particularly pleased with the game (it really isn’t that fun to play and the main mechanic isn’t that interesting either, despite having a good message), but apparently games with strong messages resonate a lot with people, so that’s pretty interesting to learn!

• With only two sounds I created a pretty fitting and good mood for the game. The heart beat makes sure the player is connected to the beating planet, beings and resources (they all have a very visible “beating” effect to them), and the background noise makes sure that there is a slight sense of urgency (at least in my head) present.

• I managed to make a reaaaaally decent tutorial (probably even better than the game itself). Compared to other Ludum Dares, where I gave no instructions whatsoever.

What Went Wrong

• Bad camera controls. I didn’t have enough time to test the game with other people, so while I knew that the camera controls weren’t good, I sort of pushed it down the stack of things to do and in the end forgot to pop everything. Lately I’ve been trying to avoid doing this and getting to problems/bugs as they happen instead of pushing them for later (in a depth manner instead of breadth), but it’s hard sometimes.

• The game isn’t fun. I said that games don’t *need* to be fun, but it’s better if they are at least a bit engaging/challenging/fun. My game doesn’t have any of that. It’s simply there to be played once/twice and to make a point. I know that games about connecting things can be engaging (because I’ve played similar ones, even though they ultimately had very different mechanics), but I didn’t have enough time to figure out how to make that in two days…

Lessons Learned

• Presentation matters A LOT. Make sure your game is visually pleasing. I’m a terrible artist, but I managed to make something that is kinda OK to look at by simply playing with tweens and alphas. Make sure to try out lots of different ways of drawing simple shapes so that you always have some tricks that make your game stand out a bit.

• Meaningful messages resonate strongly with some people. Even though your game will probably not be of massive appeal if it’s about depression, it will resonate very strongly with people who are/were depressed. So in a competition like Ludum Dare, don’t be afraid to talk about subjects that aren’t of massive appeal. People are forced to play and rate your game, so it’s a more concrete way of ensuring your message will be heard by at least a few people.

• Experience! I’ve been programming games pretty much every day for this past year, so it stands to reason that I have more to pull from when I have to participate in competitions, which ultimately means that it’s easier for me to get something “good” out there. So the more games you make, the better your next games will be (if you challenge yourself, of course).

Conclusion

This was a pretty fun one. I’ve seen lots of games that are really interesting and polished. The one thing that always bothers me about LDs is how nice people are. People have a huge tendency of not pointing out obvious issues and only focusing on positive feedback. You can’t do anything with positive feedback other than feel good for a while. You can only improve through “good bad” feedback, the type that points out your mistakes and ways to solve them. So, don’t be afraid to be a bit negative sometimes. If you can see an obvious way to improve someone’s game, say it! If someone can’t handle getting criticized then they won’t improve, and if they don’t want to improve then why participate in the competition in the first place? Why even be alive if you’re not levelling up? why even bother playing games when you will just die and forget them