By now, you’ve probably already heard that I went to Global Game Jam 2012 to make a strange horror game. It so happens to be that the game was inspired by another free, indie hit, Yume Nikki. Be warned: this game is not for the weak-hearted. It is a terribly bizarre, alien, and grotesque game that pushes the boundaries of human comprehension.
I’ve actually mentioned Yume Nikki in one of the Weekly Game Music post. The story behind Yume Nikki is similar to Inception. Madotsuki, a psychotic, shut-in girl is unable to or unwilling to walk out of her apartment. She takes refuge, instead, in her dreams where she travels around her scary subconscious. You can’t talk to any characters, and there’s no real enemies to speak of: Yume Nikki isn’t a fun game. If you search hard, however, you’ll find plenty of experimental implementation of horror that will linger in your memory for a long while.
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Games-I-made-in-Global-Game-Jam ramble, part 2. In 2011, I just moved into Maryland. To get used to things, I decided to take a supporting role in a team, rather than work by myself. Our creation was Boomshakalaka, a bomb-dropping game controlled by dropping objects on the keyboard.
The theme this time was “extinction.” A seemingly deep topic. In fact, the five of us literally wrote out every dictionary definition of it, and attempted to outline every possible game idea on the whiteboard. This process was…excruciating. We sat there for 3 hours, just thinking. Since I’m a gameplay-over-graphics kind of guy, I finally proposed that they make a game that uses an entire keyboard. Each key can be hit only once within the game, thus acting as the primary resource of the game. We’ve finally decided on a tower-defense game where you detonated a grid of mines as the monsters approached your base.
But like last time, this entire idea was thrown away. It was Ruben Brown, this time, that came up with the final game idea: drop whatever on the keyboard. This eventually evolved into a bomb-dropping game under his direction. I remember vehemently rejecting the idea, not because of it ruining my original game design; but rather, the physical harm the control scheme could do to the precious keyboard. Yeah, I’m a stickler for my computer. Regardless, Ruben assured that only his laptop would take the abuse.
In the final runs, we started having merging errors working with Unity and Subversion. Sadly, the explosion effects all disappeared; none of the courses and assets got added in, and the only thing that compiled was the one level displayed in the web link above. It’s a bit sad, really, as we had tanks, jeeps, and mannequins models to completely destroy. Regardless, the game turned out to be a simple casual game that many not into intense gaming could enjoy. It’s simply the lack of content and special effects that really hindered us badly.
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Since I’ll be going to Global Game Jam this week, I might as well ramble about the games I made there. First, back in 2010, I had an assignment where I had to prototype a game by myself. This is what it came out to be: Trip Trap.
For info and source-code, check out the Trip Trap page. I’ve only successfully ran it on Linux. Download SDL, Ruby 1.9 and Rubygems (typically, Ruby 1.9 comes bundled with Rubygems) using your operating system’s package manager or installer. With Rubygems, install RubyGame (gem install rubygame). If by some miracle, the above procedure succeeds, run “ruby trip_trap.rb” in the folder the source was unzipped in.
I have a funny story about this game. The theme was “deception,” so I had an idea like Left Arrow Moves Left where you’d fight words in a 2D Zelda game fashion. At the same time, I wanted to experiment with the scripting language, Ruby (excellent language, by the way; very intuitive).
This wasn’t a good idea. At all. I attempted to learn and understand how to program with the RubyGame library, but that took up the entire first day of the event. I panicked. Eventually, I came upon a sample script that controlled a white block with floaty controls…and ended up copying-and-pasting it for all the game elements. Thus was born the prototype, Trip Trap: a game where you are chased by bees, and need to maneuver around traps in such a way that the chasing bees — unable to stop — will fly into it. The hit-detection, enemy behavior, and physics all had to be programmed by me alone.
The gameplay turned out to be compelling…when it worked. I’ve made a lot of levels where the game seemed to have ended prematurely, but a few struck as well-rounded and action-packed. That was enough to convince me: last year, I finally got started on revamping this concept into a full-fledged game. I’ll be talking about it in the near-future, so keep your ears open for more news.
Edit: You can make it work on Windows! It’s complicated, though. You need to install Ruby and DevKit first. Then install RubyGame.
Hello, blog followers! We’ve been keeping this a secret for a while now, but my colleagues at E4 Software are finally ready to reveal the game we’ve been working on for about 9 months:
As mentioned earlier, I’ll be participating in the Global Game Jam 2012 next weekend, so I’ll be late on my updates next week. Soooooooo…since we won’t have a video next week, lets talk about Catherine, a tastefully sexy game. It’s a mature (as in, thoughtful) game about relationships, and cheating. Here’s Stray Sheep, by Shoji Meguro, Kenichi Tsuchiya, Atsushi Kitajoh, and Pablo de Sarasate.
Catherine starts with our “hero,” Vincent, converses with his girlfriend, Katherine. Despite being in relationship for five years, Vincent is in loss for words when Katherine pressures him to marry her. He drinks himself away in The Stray Sheep bar, until he meets a young and beautiful girl named Catherine in the middle of the night. Vincent then blacks out…and wakes up the following morning in his apartment, in bed, with Catherine sleeping naked against him.
Meanwhile, in the local news, there are rumors that people are having a seemingly common nightmare. Within that dream, if the said person fails to escape from the hazard presented in that nightmare, they die. It was incidentally that fateful night, when Vincent realized he made a horrible relationship sin that his life-destroying nightmare literally begins.
Catherine is a story-driven puzzle game. During the nightmare phases, Vincent — in his pants, no less — is forced to climb a tower made entirely out of blocks. Below him, the tower is falling apart, sometimes due to some unspeakable monster; and above, are the unknowns. Regardless, Vincent must pull and rearrange the blocks to create steps to climb higher and higher up the tower, until he escapes from the entire chasm and into the safety zone. At the very end of the safety zone, you’re given a difficult question in how you would deal with a certain relationship problem.
Outside of these nightmares are the story, which unfortunately isn’t related to the the choices that you make earlier, and consists of nearly half the game. The cutscenes attempt to fill in on what kind of person Vincent is, and how he attempts to resolve these issues. Once at the bar, you can control him to converse with other people, text Catherine or Katherine, and even play the arcade to practice the next puzzle.
The puzzles in Catherine requires quick-thinking, and are quite difficult. It isn’t for anyone, as it covers controversial issues in a gothic art style. This game doesn’t hide it: sexual, bloody, and religious themes are readily available in this game. Regardless, the puzzles are the highlight of the game, so that’ll probably be the determining factor in whether a person will enjoy the game or not.
Catherine was released on Xbox 360 and PS3.
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