It's ALIVE! the Blathering Keep is ready for download!

Welcome... to The Blathering Keep!

It's here! As I mentioned in the little announcement post, this is a teeny tiny, itty bitty little proof of concept for a dungeon crawler with no combat: you just get assaulted by corporate jargon when you run into the blathering speech bubbles. That's the whole concept and the whole thing really (that and talking to the beleaguered statue employees on each floor), but hopefully this is as fun for someone to sink their cool 2-5 minutes into as it was for me to put together!

I'm going to pop this up as a sort of artist's statement/postmortem, because, hey, this was 80% learning exercise and sometimes I learn best by reflecting on the experiences within. So here goes!

Making a little thing based on my own art!

My intent here was to first actually make *a tiny thing* actually based on my own spritework. Since last winter (and last spring more formally), I've been learning to draw pixel art, mostly so I can make my own assets for my games, yes, but also to improve my design and visual communication skills overall. I've been making a small game (The Tunnel!) for a long time, and I just couldn't find any existing assets for sale that worked, so, hey, so be it. At the tender age of 39, I decided to learn to draw. It's been wonderful, actually, and doing daily challenges and other regular practice projects (as well as slowly learning to define the visual style I would like for The Tunnel) are among my favorite activities each day.

I also wanted to learn to do a little more with Yarn Spinner, the primary tool I used here. I used it to make a dialogue system, yes, but also to build a simple inventory system (sort of a very simplified version of a point and click adventure inventory, just using simple yarn command handlers), which was also great fun!

My third intention here was... therapeutic. I've been struggling with some of the gnarliest depression, anxiety, and burnout of my life, and matters in the media world have been... bleak. This is absolutely nothing compared to the horrors going on in the world (if you need to know my politics at this point, particularly on Gaza, it's *cease fire now,* and supporting the messaging and actions of Jewish Voices for Peace). But I can speak directly to just how disgusting and bleak things are for journalists in the US, here in the week that Jezebel, one of the best-read sites that covers crucial topics like abortion rights in America, got canned because of BRAND SAFETY. I feel, scarily often, as if I picked a field that means a great deal to me, and as I've climbed the career ladder, I've watched it utterly crumble to dust around me. Sad for me, yes, sadder for the world, which needs a robust free press and strong support for journalism more than ever given... the state of said world.

In my own corner, sitting here in the media world and also riding the waves of brutal layoffs in the game industry, I don't know how not to be extremely depressed, exhausted, flabbergasted, and enraged by the forces of corporate greed and enshittification. I took half the lines for the game directly from just ads and stupid jargon on my own (hallo)linkedin page. It (corporate jargon) means nothing, it IS nothing, and yet, it represents the poison we all rely on to keep going each day.

(I tell people, with no exaggeration at all, that I enjoy volunteering on an ambulance in the NYC 911 system, with by far the busiest call volume in the US, for a *refreshing change of pace* to the headlines we look at all day in media. Also, EMTs should be paid much, much better.)

Here's a fun screenshot with all of the speech bubble lines and COOL E-BOOKS FROM THE LIBRARY in the game. Yes, it's a simple array, don't laugh at me too hard. It just shows a line randomly when you bump into an enemy or touch the colliders on the bookshelves.

So, yes. My 2-5 minute dungeon crawler proof-of-concept is partially just a creative outlet for me to be angry and shouty about corporate America in 2023.

Which leads us to the next point...

Waiting for (me to decide when it's finally time to switch to) Godot

(No one has made that joke in the last six months! Nope!)

The Unity kerfuffle has made it a case if when, not if, I'll be switching, despite playing mostly in Unity's sandbox, game dev wise, since around 2010. I'm just frustrated because, well, I've been making real progress. I know it will carry over, but ever since the Fanbyte Apocalypse, I've been very, very focused on making more games. I don't have much free time for development (I have a full time job as the EIC of Game Developer, a part time job teaching game design at the Berklee College of Music, the aforementioned volunteer gig on the ambulance, and a fairly busy training schedule in my sport), so any time lost (say, in a switch to learning a new platform) is very painful. I have The Tunnel well in the works, and a still small-but-slightly-more-ambitious dungeon crawler project, which The Blathering Keep here *is* the very proof of concept, and both of those are Unity-based for sure.

But we'll get there. We'll learn and figure it out and keep making small games.

Also, plenty of things went well here on this project, including art production! I felt very comfortable making the simple assets here, particularly with the aid of this lovely tutorial, which inspired the original drawing that made me want to do a teeny dungeon crawler in the first place. I had a fairly easy time learning Unity's tile tools, and making small adjustments in Aseprite, then bringing new sprites in. 

Here's a look at the tileset I drew here for the project. 

I'm also proud of my scripting in the project. It's very simple, absolutely! But I'm pretty happy with the enemy movement code, the little inventory system and the fact that I wasn't too scared to dip my toes just a bit into PHYSICS here. As a little slice of a game, I'm pleased with how everything works, and I'm happy with the dialogue and story elements here as well. 

So there it is, friends! My tiny game and my thoughts on creating said tiny game, with the promise of many more to come. If you do play it, feel free to leave comments, thoughts, or (constructive, please) critiques! Thank you for reading, and thank you very much for playing, if you do!