I'm in the process of moving, which I am excited about. For the past week I've felt emotionally ready to move and in a short span of finding a place, started to grow real tired of my current apartment.
Since 2021, I've been living with a good friend from work and a good friend from highschool. We butt heads, but the decision to depart was amicable. Also , I was in a relationship that seemed like it was going well, until this year, it didn't. Actually, I'd include the previous year too. So you could say that this is just the end of a chapter in my life. To me, it's an end of familiarity. "Familiarity breeds contempt" was a phrase that for some silly reason, just didn't expect to be real. Unfortunately, it's so true. As much as I tried to deny it, I felt stuck. I felt for granted.
The place I'm moving to is moreso out of a personal want and need. My roommates are complete strangers. The new place I live in is more trendy, and there's so much stuff to do around here. Earlier this year, my mentor I'm no longer interested in acting for others, but I want to do things for myself from now on.
When making Distopia, a game that I immediately thought of when I made the generator item was "E.T. the Extra-terrestial" for the Atari 2600. A game that has been crowned "worst game of all time". To give context, in Distopia, the generator is an item used in game that the player or their dog can carry to the houses on the map. Any house within the map causes score to go up by 1 (ex: 4 houses = 4 points)
The risk? The player carrying the generator CANNOT bring it into a body of water, or they'll get electrocuted. Getting the generator wet causes it to be destroyed, puts the player/dog in a down state and you lose the chance to get higher score. This is a design choice made by a sick sick man. Special note: I don't even explain this to you in game, but my thinking was 'well the player would surely catch on...right?"
Unfortunately for you and I, it doesnt work like that. The first thing for getting good at a game is understanding the rules. Without rules, players wouldn't know what to do in certain situations, common or unique. That generator mechanic is an insane thing to add. As soon as I put it in, I was immediately reminded of the pits in E.T.
"E.T the Extraterrestial" for the Atari 2600 was developed within 5-6 weeks. The (roughly) same amount of time it took to develop Distopia. Howard Scott Warshaw (HSW) infamously rebuked Steven Speilbergs "Can't you just make something simple like Pac-man?" When I pitched Distopia to my mentor, Professor Ricardo Miranda, he stated that I should make a tabletop game instead, then said that my game should just be a narrative game instead of a systems based one.
First, I think Spielberg and Miranda are NOT wrong. Their reasoning makes a whole lot of sense when you're working with deadlines. Why make up a whole new type of game when you don't have much time to design it? For example, the excellent shit-stirring musician, Kirin J Callinan, made the album Return to Center, where he would buy his recording equipment at Guitar Center, make an album with it, then bring the equipment back under return policy (30 days!). Callinan went with the choice to make it a cover album, with only one song being original(it's an "ambient" one, so no lyrics or major chords, just vibes) If Callinan were to write original material for the album, he would not be able to complete it within those 30 days. Songwriters can write a song in a day or two, but it takes time for the song to get in the RIGHT position for all elements to work. Additionally, Songwriting, like game design, can be a very intuitive and iterative process.
SO, what was HSW thinking? His reasoning for making E.T the way it is makes sense to me:
ENERGY is a really cool system in the game. E.T uses up energy to do EVERY action in the game, including walking. Each action has a specific energy cost (walking is 1, using Zone is 19, etc). It's also your health, so once it hits zero, you die. ZONES are a really cool feature in E.T. and somewhat of a hold-over of how items work from ROTL. Holding the action button depending on the icon on the top of the screen gives a contextual action E.T can do. He can teleport, eat his reeses pieces, send his enemies back to their location and detect which pit a phone piece is in.
The energy mechanic gets a bad rap. It's something that seems unfair and punishing for newer players. A lot of people would immediately call this bad game design. However, I implore you to view this as an intentional aspect. Moving in E.T. is all about intentionality. Does the player understand the game's map? is the player moving around haphazardly? Would i spend energy on teleporting away from enemies? People take movement in games for granted. E.T. made the really cool but unpopular choice of making a basic mechanic risky. This mechanic in conjunction with the game world, mechanics and end goal is integral to playing the game.
Some of my more personal thoughts about E.T.
I am sad. r/destroymygame has in fact...destroyed my game. I made a post on there because A lot of criticism that I got was that people weren't sure what was going on.
For a few weeks now, I've thought about quitting making games. I have unfortunately made the habit of comparing myself to other developers. They all seem successful and much more on the ball then I am. It was easy to create in the flash days, because I didn't have to seek validation. I'm just upset that in what I thought I made were smart decisions, may have been just dumb ones instead. Maybe next time, I should stick to making games for the web and just stop trying to promote things.
I spent this wee early morning playing Asura Buster on the Internet Archives arcade page. First, this game is awesome. It's the sequel to Asura Blade, Honestly, with how the game plays, I'm pretty sure I can 1CC this one. It feels very nice to play and mashing out a combo feels real nice. The only boss character that gives you absolute trouble is Vebel. King is surprisingly easy for a final boss, just be patient and hit his left gauntlet when possible.
I stayed up till 4 am, woke up at 7:30am to get ready for class and my college alumni presentation. The presentation went well. Class sucked. Spanish 102 has been kicking my ass this whole semester. professor has tried to help as much as she can, but this wouldn't have to happen if I didn't take up an honors class and decide to start doing Full-time work + full time school. My number one foolish decision.
with that being said, I have made up my mind in that I will be looking to transition from the job into something else. Speaking of jobs, I'm adding some little new things to Distopia. I am thinking of shopping the game around to some small-scale publishers to see how I can bring it to a wider audience. Currently working on the itch.io page for it now...
Will end the Diary with this: Anatomy of A Fall was really good. After watching I started playing Golden Axe for the first time and damn, that game is hard. I'm so used to the streets of rage 1-3 grapples and item pickups. What surprised me about Golden Axe is that a lot of screens have enemies that FORCE the player to be mobile. Standing still is a death sentence and with the inclusion of beasts you (AND YOUR ENEMY) can ride, battles are more so about trying to not let the enemy team get a beast. I appreciate what it's going for but it's gonna take a while for that game to start synching with it.