Another Klik of the Month, and another game made in two (and a half) hours. This time it’s an audio game, no graphics. To tell the truth, the idea for this game seemed much cooler in my head than the result, but what am I going to do. I might make a more involved game with the general idea for this game in the future. If you play it, please, excuse my poor diction.
A few weeks ago, Matt showed me a preview of a song he was working on, called Volcano. I liked it so much that I decided to make a video for it. After I graduated, I finally got around to making said video. And now it’s done!
In the meanwhile, he released the EP the song is a part of; it’s called Moonfish Moon. I recommend you give it a listen if you liked Volcano.
This was about a week’s work, shooting around the neighborhood, here in Santiago, Chile. I filled up almost three miniDV tapes of footage, which seems to be a lot for under four minutes of edited video, or maybe I’m just not used to this kind of stuff. I also discovered only yesterday that this Handycam that I used has a manual exposure setting, which would have been useful for many of the earlier shots, but such is life.
I also got myself a new bycicle a week ago, which can be partially seen in one of the shots. It’s a cheap ‘beach cruiser,’ but I love my new bike.
A first: I finished my Klik of the Month Klub entry within the time limit. It is, sadly, a step down from last month’s. This time I didn’t really know what to do, until I just decided to go for this idea of exploding fireworks I had at some point. I didn’t feel particularly inspired. The result is not really a game, more like a short-lived toy. Matt helped out with the music, once again, and it really fits.
I made a very quick game (though not quite as quick as the Klik of the Month ones) for a competition that is due today. The game is called The Lake, and it’s for the TIGSource Commonplace Book Competition. The objective was to create a game inspired by one or several of the brief ideas that H.P. Lovecraft jotted down in his Commonplace Book, most of which never got turned into full stories. This is what I did; my game is not ‘based on’ as much as it’s just ‘triggered’ by one of these ideas, though.
My goal was to create a game that would not take me too long to make. I wanted just a full day’s work, it ended up being three, but that’s quite okay. It was created in Construct, which truly is a great promise for the future, but so full of bugs for the time being. I managed, though. The end result is more of a short interactive story; it’s completable in about a single minute, which is a common factor for all my games so far, but in this case the experience is more focused on the narrative. I’m pretty proud of the fact that everything in the game was created by me (well, except for the engine, of course), though I wish I had the time to do something more with the sound design, which was part of the original plan.
As I mentioned above, the idea for the game just came to my mind as if it was a dream when I read one of the entries in the Book. This sounds pretty romantic, but rather than describe the creative process, I want it to be apparent that I applied very few filters on this initial flash. This is why the game may not be very coherent, or have a palpable meaning; nevertheless, it’s there, and I tried to make it as close to this initial spark as it was possible in the time that I had available to do it. I think I’ve just always had a thing for surrealism and their techniques, and this is why I like this kind of pure, unadulterated slice of subconscious, which I oftentimes value more than very produced and over-thought pieces of work. There’s more to life than logic, is what I say.
Last saturday I participated again in this month’s Klik of the Month Klub. This time I didn’t use Klik & Play to make my game, because I had heard of a different software, modelled around Clickteam’s own (creators of Klik & Play), but improved, called Construct. It’s still in beta, but it’s a very complete package nonetheless. Much like last time, I used that very day’s afternoon to learn to use the software, scribbled a few notes on the game I was going to make, and in the evening, proceeded to spend two hours figuring out how to do stuff. The resulting game is more complex than last time’s Runaway Blast, simply because Construct is so much more capable than K&P.
I am forgetting something. Before the event had started, I told my friend lofi that he should participate too. He didn’t want to, though, so I asked him to make some music for my game instead. Luckily for me, he agreed! Truly, the game has become worthy of people’s time just because of the cool music that he provided.
What you see above is how the game looks like in its second version. Download Where and play it, if you feel like it (Windows only). This is a much improved version of what I originally submitted an hour after the deadline (because I had some trouble getting other people to hear the music; other than that, I finished it only ten minutes past the deadline). Since the original suffered from some issues I didn’t have the time to fix, I spent several hours figuring out how to do so afterwards. What I didn’t have the time for, in the end, was improving the collisions, but that’s comparatively minor.
In Where, I just wanted to make some radical decisions. I basically wrote down the first few ideas I came up with, but since it was going to be a very small game, in order to make it memorable, some radical choices needed to be made. This is why I decided to obstruct the player’s view with large floating text, and use a psychedelic selection of colors. Since these contributed to a non-harmonic experience, I decided to make the gameplay conceptually frustrating as well: descending a ‘tower’ with an avatar that can’t stop jumping. The text used itself also helps to heighten these principles. And lofi’s music felt right at home when I first played it with it.
Remember that idea I had of making a round-robin webcomic? Well, I’ve finally launched the site, with a strip to start things. It’s called The Ants Parade, a name that, I believe, illustrates what I want to achieve with the comic: collaboration, a succession of authors, whose works, together, contribute to a bigger opus. Not that big, of course –we’re not talking elephants here–, but hopefully worth everyone’s time.
The first strip is already almost not a comic strip, which is how I wanted to steer this from the beginning. Not that I mind traditional comics, but I wanted the project to explore vastly different ways to make a comic. If we’re talking many authors with so many liberties, the least we can expect is radical diversification. So I hope that my first strip, regardless of its quality, can inspire future contributors to go wild.
The site incorporates one rant per strip for the author to voice his thoughts, as long as they’re vaguely related to the comic. There’s also a blog, which, honestly, I don’t foresee getting used much, but it’s there for the different contributors –who might not even know each other– to discuss anything at all. Anyone can comment on posts, and I can promote registered users so that they can create new posts. It’s almost a message board, really, but those are generally too hermetic to outsiders, so I wanted something that was transparent, with a quicker flow.
The technology I use is Pixelpost for the strips and Chyrp for the blog. I had used Pixelpost before, and it’s as easy to set up as ever–even if it lacks versatility, reason why I had to edit the script’s code at times. Chyrp, on the other hand, I will admit, was a big pain. Its theming language is really poorly documented, and the little documentation there is seems to assume that the reader is familiar with Chyrp’s code. Errors in the themes’ syntax don’t even receive a helpful error message from the parser, which just breaks, so bug-catching is a slow process. In all, the experience was pretty terrible, but once the language (called Twig) gets some decent documentation, it might become very usable, since it’s quite flexible–but hell if I know how to tame that flexibility right now. The engine itself is very economic, with none of the bloat of WordPress, but, then again, with the limitations one would expect, which are partly offset by its modules (add-ons). What that means is that the blog can be exactly what you want it to be, with none of what you don’t need; in theory, because it’s rather difficult to get it to be what you want it to be in its current form.
But the site is up now, so whatever happened in the process doesn’t matter. It still needs to be improved and polished, but it’s perfectly usable right now…, I believe. All it needs is some more strips.
What happens if you mix a group of people, an old and crippled game-making software, and two hours on a Saturday evening? Awesomeness happens, that is what. It’s the basic premise of the Klik of the Month Klub; you grab Klik & Play, a buggy, limited and old (from 1994) software that is nevertheless endearing and fun to use (also free,) then make a game with it during those two hours. The results are often broken and nigh-unplayable, but hilarious or even enlightening.
You can’t do a lot during that short span of time, so not being overly ambitious is key. Last saturday was my first time participating in the monthly event, and I thought that I was going to have about an hour’s worth of time to work on my game, since I was supposed to go visit some photography exhibitions, which in the end didn’t happen. Given my lack of familiarity with the (at times esoteric) software, my humble aspirations were, nevertheless, extremely helpful. My design document, if we can call it that, was scribbled only a few minutes before the two hours started. Sadly, I ended up going 40 minutes over the deadline, which is not actually enforced, since it’s all just in good fun, but still. The end result is a game I called Runaway Blast; you can download the slightly polished version of the game, or, if you’re feeling adventurous, the original from the official thread of the KOTMK #14, though you’ll need some DLL files only included in the other package.
It was an exciting experience, being there in the IRC channel, everyone making terrible games together, sharing advice (or asking for it, as I was doing) and just having fun. Afterwards, everyone trying out each others games, sharing praise or anecdotes. I will certainly try to be there next time too.
So, my game. The main idea was to make it a tense pursuit, to be outnumbered and with little resources, that is, only your wits (and some timed bombs) to aid you against the brainless mass of enemies. Which is not unlike a zombie game (survival horror,) now that I think about it. The map that I drew in my sketch illustrates this, but being surrounded from every side would have made it difficult to be strategic. The resulting mechanics are not too bad; not incredibly original or engaging, but for a first attempt, and for having been made in under three hours, it’s not a half bad result. Of course, what I’m not mentioning here is that the game is broken: you can go through walls, even though you’re not meant to. The limitations in the software made this unavoidable; attempting to overcome them would have costed me too much time, and I’m certain that it would have been worthless, considering the scope of my efforts. Had all conditions met, my character would have actually followed the pointer with a specific velocity, which would have fixed the wall-crossing bug and also made the game more challenging, since you would not be able to outrun your enemies quite as easily. The game will stay as it is, though, so we will all have to learn to live with that.
