I think there's something wrong with me.
I mean beyond the transexualism and generalised anxiety in doing mostly anything. I'm talking about writing itself. Again. This notion's been turning itself over in my mind, and it's one I've mentioned a few times before.
Do, genuinely, none of you enjoy doing this?
I have not spoken to a single person who likes it. Every part of this. Who devotes themself to the art and craft of pure joy.
"The worst part of writing is writing."
What the absolute fuck are you talking about?
Do you not feel a great Need to create and share stories? A rush when you discover a new one? Climbing up the cliff, by far the hardest part, and the relief hitting the summit? The zen flow when everything begets everything else, or that release when it's all done? Do you feel none of that? Do you feel all of it, and still hate it? Which part? The work, a small pain, for such a great joy?
Are you normal? Am I normal? Are you normal for hating the process, or am I normal for enjoying it?
Can any writer be normal?
Can anyone?
Anyway.
This is a write-up about CHILDREN OF HELL. A filthy little thing I had a lot of fun pulling together, and what will probably be the final jam I do, baring some tiny ones.
I realised something while I was making it. Jams have exhausted their utility for me. Before, it was a fantastic way for me to get into the habit of regularly creating things. I pumped out things non-stop during 2022. It was great. Not so much for the other hobbies, but, I got that job in the end.
Now... not so much. I'd kind of noticed this before I committed myself to the jam. For one, I've got that many ideas that I'm more applying ones I've got already to a jam theme, rather than using them to come up with something new. And, I'm so used to pushing out a text-heavy narrative game it's almost second nature. I'm not really flexing anything new, while I've got a whole stack of skills I want to try chipping at, and next to none of them overlap with what I do for jam games. And then, where my dev work is shifting doesn't really fit the scope of jams anymore. My games are getting longer; the ideas I have are getting more ambitious; I am—and I will, I keep chanting to myself—going to break the barrier and make something not bound to a webpage and in full 3D.
I'm fully stuck in this now, and it's a wonderful feeling. I can look at everything I do and go, yeah, I'm definitely A Video Game Developer. The day job is pretty similar, and without breaking every part of my NDA, I'm looking at the stuff I'm doing and not feel like I'm drowning whenever I see the Unreal logo. Ideas are coming without prompt, and those ideas that aren't one-shot demos need more than a few weeks to make.
So, Zack Jam rolled around in the Sacred Veins community, and I thought, fuck it, why not. I'll make a big send-off of the thing. I've got several ideas kicking around and the requirement of "name a character something similar to Zack" was so loose meant I could use practically any of them.
But, one thing I've been desperate to do more with, is a little connected world I've been working on for longer than I should.
This world (of which, pending a title I'm happier with, is now called Immortal Starstreaker) follows one basic principle: when someone dies of unnatural causes, there is a fraction of a fraction of a chance they are reincarnated as an immortal. Immortals have innate magic powers, heal rapidly when able to produce blood, and, as the name implies, can never die.
Works in ImSS set out to answer questions that arise from their existence. How do these people continue their lives. How are they impacted by this. Is immortality a curse or blessing. How would society shift around it. Why this even happens in the first place.
But I'm not here to spoil all that for you. You'll just have to wait until I get round to the rest. For now, you've got this one.
First elephant in the room, the name of this game is lifted from a MUZZ track. This was back when he was called Muzzy, even, before he was served a cease and desist by a green fuzzy alien who taught migrant kids how to speak English in the 70s. No part of this is a lie, except for it being penned by Muzzy personally. He's too good-natured to know what copyright law is.
The point, I have this bizarre thing that happens when listening to certain music. I'll sit there, and then stories will pop into my head. Sometimes a sequence is in perfect time, sometimes not. It's a reasonably common phenomenon, as far as I can tell from people talking about all the incredible AMVs they make up in their head when listening to 2000s nu-metal. For me, I have the great experience of listening to some old albums from my teen years, then suddenly entire storylines will flood back into my immediate memory. Fastest Crash's been stuck in there for a decade.
However long ago it was, the story from Children of Hell was this: immortals are used as a tool by an authoritarian government, who employ them to kill monsters, suppressing both as a secret from the general public.
With it, I remembered something about it being slightly post modern-day tech, guns being a big thing, and each character associated with a single defined colour. But I'd had plotlines come back from nothing when listening to other songs, hadn't I? Why would this be any different? I set myself up, and with great intent, listened for what threads it would sing to me.
...Nothing.
There was nothing else. All I had was a vague concept and a jam to squeeze it through.
Works for me.
I wanted to fuck about.
That might imply I haven't been doing nothing but fucking about for the past 2 years, but this was fucking about with purpose.
I decided to approach Zack jam in the most rule-bending twattish way I could. Zack would not be the name of a single character in this game. It's an acronym of all their names! Aren't I so wonderfully clever? And incredibly annoying?
But the rest of it, given there were no other rules to break (besides distorting the required songs to hell and back before throwing them in), I wanted to do new things I hadn't done before. If jams weren't a utility for getting me to create point-blank, at the very least I could use them to try pushing some limits, even if the new restrictions were entirely self-imposed.
The characters came about from a similar thread: trying things I haven't tried. Corrin's painfully Northern because I wanted practice writing my home accent. Alleton exclusively uses neopronouns because I haven't done that yet. Zyra is a he/she lesbian because I like making people mad.
Then I wanted to see if I could go further. All the games I'd done previously focused very much on you, as in, You, the Player, making the conscious choice how to advance the story. Sure, in some of those cases like in Quinn & Flynn, "You" is just a character you're playing into and not necessarily You the Player. But there was still that sense that the player was definitely guiding the character in some capacity. It's not like I have an issue writing a character with a defined personality when the player's in control, but I wanted to play with that distance.
This was a thread I pulled for a while, thinking, what's the furthest length I could put a main character and the player, while still letting them make meaningful choices?
So, it's videotome, and when I do videotome, I do non-blocking choices. The problem, going back to my main goal of this project, is I've done them before. They're really fun to play with, so I don't want to stop doing them, but how can I make it fresh for myself? Is there a way to smash that together with taking a different approach to character agency?
This then brought about the idea of a dialogue system where you never actually see what you're saying. Instead, you're given a single option, and that option lets you say something. What something? That's for the character to decide. All you get to pick is when they say that something.
This puts the distance of player agency and a character at ends I haven't been able to toy with yet. You're essentially flying blind, because as much as you control Kestrel and have immediate agency over their actions, every decision is a prediction of what they'd do in this situation, rather than a direct choice. Or, perhaps, just seeing what they would do irrespective of anything else. More like you're a witness than a direct participant.
When you're prompted to tell a truth or lie, do you know what either is? You don't. But Kestrel does. The only choice you have is when Kestrel should reveal something about themself, if at all.
And, it let me commit entirely to Kestrel's characterization. On previous projects, I had to try guiding every player choice into something that made sense for an existing personality, which could be very difficult if a character, say, is someone who talks non-stop and comments on everything, and perhaps his name is Flynn, the fucking twat, and the player decides to say nothing.
Now, I've put together a narrative that's pretty close to watching a story develop in standard media, while still being interactive. I didn't give a shit what player agency might influence here, because, at least compared to other things I'd done, it practically doesn't matter. The only questions I would be asking myself were more analogous to a "what-if" than "how would the player react if they chose this, and the character, in their steed, said that". Given that the story is semi-linear (ie, your choices and ultimate branches are more for flavour and replayability, than finding entirely new endings to reach), those what-ifs are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. The freedom it granted was thrilling.
A nice bonus was the visuals of this system worked surprisingly well. The "interject" option stays on the right of your screen, seemingly unchanging for lines at a time. But behind the scenes the choice is almost constantly being updated with different branches and new ways to reach them. It worked very well for the original design intent, making it even more obfuscated when some content's been skipped over and continuing onto the main branch.
That said, a lot of these jumping points are obvious. Someone says something Kestrel (and by extension, the player) doesn't know about, and they ask about it. A greeting is offered, and Kestrel returns it. Something weird is happening, and Kestrel comments on it.
Others are more subtle. Kestrel is a socially awkward mess, so sometimes interjecting will ask a redundant question, or a response to something that happened a few lines ago. There's also the matter of conversations themselves just shifting gears every few lines. It's not even something I planned for, and more something that just happens with dialogue in general, and I found myself working with it quite naturally when writing rather than fighting against it.
A couple examples. One is when the team is driving to their first job with Kestrel.
Here, you can choose to lie or tell the truth. What they actually are is irrelevant here, and clicking either starts a new conversation about how monster sites are hidden from the public.
However, click through a few times, and Zyra tells Alleton some directions. Alleton contests them, and they start arguing.
Try answering now, while the dialogue boxes look the exact same, prompts this instead.
This is one of my favourite results of this system. It's such a tiny thing, but accomplished the exact thing I wanted from it.
Another isn't even focused on dialogue. During the first job, it's possible to stay crouched down and never actually see the monster everyone's fighting. If you never hit interject, Kestrel doesn't stand up from the barricade, and instead a vague description of what's happening, or at least what Kestrel can hear, plays out.
You can, at any point, choose to jump up thanks to the constant presence of the choice, and the content continues from roughly the same point as Kestrel's description, with the interject choice leading to the "standing up" content changing to starting points further and further along. It was annoying to set up, given that videotome's scripting is absolutely not designed for things like this, but I don't care. Worth.
There's also a nice meta-narrative to how this system works in regards to story, largely down to the wonderful narrative device of making the main character know as little as the person engaging with it. Given, well, the general blindness of player choice here, it all wraps in on itself quite neatly. Always love when things slot into place on their own.
Beyond this system, which takes a majority of the game, there's two variables that COH tracks. One is "chattiness" and the other is "trust". These are tied to Interject and Truth/Lie respectively. The more you interject, the chattier Kestrel is, and the other characters will notice if you are or aren't. Trust is tied to how often Kestrel tells the truth or lies about themselves, in other words, how much they trust to give information away, which certain people might catch onto.
Skipping the question entirely decreases trust and is the only place where chattiness is marked down, the idea being dodging a question would mean Kestrel doesn't trust enough to answer, and you're actively not saying something in response to a direct question, rather than simply not joining in on a conversation. Equally, answering a Truth/Lie choice doesn't increase chattiness, as you're not engaging in something ongoing, and instead only responding to someone asking you a question.
It's a pretty standard way to branch off a game, and, like every single time I do this, I always think I could have done more. Most of that is definitely down to videtome not being designed for line-level conditionals. It didn't stop me in places where I thought it would be a nice touch, but culled a lot I had in mind while I was writing. Again, not so much a fault of videotome, and more me starting games writing proper in ink and never being able to leave it behind. Thanks Ingold.
My usual way around having lots of these tiny line-by-line changes in engines where it's cumbersome, is to make two or three alt branches that hit most of the same beats as each other, converge back into the same ending, and mostly leave it at that for some replayability. In COH, this happens while Kestrel is sat by the river. If they aren't chatty, they'll stay alone and talk to themselves. If they are, depending on how much they trust the group, either Alleton or Corrin will come to chat. I'll let you play through the rest of the game after that point yourself.
It's hitting this point that I realise that I never did a writeup on Quinn & Flynn and my time modding that, also being in videotome (albeit a different version). Or more, I did, but then I deleted it at some point because I got bored.
The actual thing I want to talk about, is that for Q&F, I went in with the idea that I had to modify the engine in some capacity. This wasn't even an idea. It was a must. To put that game on Steam meant many quality of life upgrades and features that would be a requirement if I didn't want people who paid five dollars mad at me. The big ones being a setting menu and, the bane of all banes, saving. To get it on Steam, I had to cross that barrier into the unknown.
And this is definitely down to videotome itself being very limited scope, and easy to tear apart to understand how it actually works, but I was still shocked that this was... possible? I could actually do it? This isn't some untouchable realm that only Real Programmers could reach?
I cannot stress how, coming from the high-levels of game design, how liberating it is to think of something you want to do, fiddle around a bit, and suddenly have an engine do exactly what you want. It's not like basic programming is something I shied from before (coding out html by hand being where I started, and is really still my comfort zone), but even the idea of looking into an engine's guts and shuffling things around was sickeningly daunting.
But now, with COH, the strict limit of videtome was gone. I could do whatever I wanted. Make a video show up even though the engine doesn't support it? Add a new tag to change the size of fonts? Make sections autoplay in little cutscene montages before giving back player control? Done, done, and done. Waow.
And, like, it's not like I'm about to jump into the source code of UE5 and bend it in any which way imaginable, but it's the principle of the thing. It's another skill barrier jumped.
Most of my big successes were ported directly from my mods for Q&F, namely the saving, which I keep mentioning because holy fuck is saving fucking awful. This one Touhou ripoff I did ages ago had the saving as the absolute worst worst part of the whole process. I wasn't even tracking that much. You never realise why old games just had passcodes and why autosaving is a recent invention until you have to make it from scratch yourself.
My biggest success for COH in particular was creating a whole tag for variable operations. This little guy takes whatever variable, whatever number, and slaps some other number onto it then updates it. How cool am I?
Yes, it can literally only handle adding and subtracting, but that's all I needed. This is code efficiency, you see.
And, and, I have a loading screen!
Look at it.
LOOK AT IT.
It's in there. Very shittily, and probably inefficiently, yes, but I don't care. It's in there. Bask in my glory.
Following the trend, it was doing something I hadn't done before.
So, well, here. I feel it speaks for itself.
I do look at it now, and think, "I could have gone harder." COH very intentionally borders on hyper-violence, as a thematic take on immortals never being able to die physically, constantly being thrown into the worst situations you could think of regularly, and how immunity, in a sense, to physical violence doesn't make you immune from the mental. Of course, I didn't want to go full bore on the introduction to the concept, along with not being able to show those scars after one or two bouts. Which begs the question of where it might go from here.
I have exactly one (1) key scene that happens after some amount of time after the ending. We'll have to wait and see if the rest of it follows.
But pulling this together, without spoiling the entire story if you haven't played it yourself, I realised something with content ratings. I could try waxing on this, but my own in-the-moment post tells it better than I could reshape it.
Kestrel tongue-fucks Zyra's swussy and drinks his blood-cum-vaginal discharge. How Quinn & Flynn gets rated higher than that because of an exposed dick is beyond me.
I do wish I had more to say on the story, but I feel that's a problem of trying to reflect on it so soon after it's finished. I really just want to talk about the narrative system behind it to get it out of my skull. My bad.
Even then, the wider ideas of ImSS are still rattling around my head, probably for the worse. "Immortals" as a concept is just something I feel I can tap endlessly, let alone the One Big Story I've got planned for it. I love it. I really do. And then I feel bad promising anything more because it needs more time in the oven. Then the oven needs time in the oven. I'm going to be working on this for the rest of my life.
That godforsaken rhythm bullet hell demo. One day.
With the main theme of this whole thing being to fuck around and do something new, it feels appropriate to throw this out.
I'm "done" with jams. As in, I'm no longer going to be scouring the itch page for them or hunting down ongoing jams in communities. I've got enough of my own stuff to chip into now and doing that feels like a recipe for disaster. Or more, a recipe for more getting sidetracked off the stuff I really want to do right now.
That said, I've got a tiny one I'll be joining out of a spite in the near future. You'll see what I mean.
For projects for the rest of the year, there's two I'm definitely sinking my teeth into. First is Spring Thing, because I mentioned an idea to Dagny and she's been nipping at my ankles to make soundscapes for it. The second is IFComp. I was planning on a RotK game, but, an idea happened, and now I'm doing the idea. It's going to be a fun one, and a proper entry into one of the most prestigious interactive fiction competitions rather than stumbling into it by accident.
Now, between those? That's up in the air and, more likely than anything, will be me doing portfolio stuff. I've been in the industry for one year and my portfolio currently shows exactly zero of what I've learnt in my current role. That is hilarious and also a little terrifying. You might get some enjoyment out of those but unless they spin off into their own thing they'll mostly be cubes glued to other cubes smashing into another cube. Anything else major that I'll actually be inclined to boost will be post-IFComp, at the earliest.
Well, that's about it, isn't it? I haven't got much else to say. I need to start chipping through that media backlog. Turns out being without your PC for 7 months then immediately jumping into developing and releasing a Steam game throws you out of sorts.
See you for the next one.
Did you like this post? Tell us
Leave a comment
Log in with your itch.io account to leave a comment.