Did the title get your attention? Good. It’s supposed to.

Now, before you get all huffed over yet another blog about the failures of Maxis, I’ll tell you the good news: This isn’t about SimCity.

It includes SimCity, but SimCity isn’t the focus. It’s just a symptom of a far greater problem. Like herpes sores.

Yes, SimCity is broken. Yes, PR is trying to blame the consumer. But this is, at its heart, not the reason we should be concerned.

SimCity, frankly, should not exist.

It boggles my mind that this game was even released. Ever since it was announced, every single piece of information released on this game was deeply troubling. Intentionally limited city sizes, always online single player, removal of important game elements from previous entries such as landscaping... every time something came up I was shocked. That limitations would be considered a feature of something as creatively uplifting as SimCity had to be a joke. It was as if Maxis was intentionally trying to hamstring its own game.


It's not ok that this is expected.

And yet the media ate it up. Consumers pounced on it from Day 1 and the number of players are still, even after all of this controversy, still belaboring the servers.

SimCity has revealed something fundamentally wrong about the direction the games industry has been taking in recent times. It reveals both a troubling trend towards a bleached, bland center and an overwhelming apathy of the consumer market in regards to how this hobby is being treated.

I’m going to do something that might seem really shocking.

I’m going to agree with Maxis.

Yes, SimCity is a tumor, but it’s a tumor that we created. It is our fault.

We have no excuses. We’ve been voting through our purchases for years now. Every re-polished Madden release, every Call of Duty, every Blizzard release in the past 9 years has been setting us up for this day. For always online, watered down, fast food gaming.

I’m not blameless either. That’s why this irks me as bad as it does. I paid for Diablo 3 even though that little voice in my head warned me as well. I even talked my girlfriend into buying it as some kind of validation that maybe if we had fun together, it would be worth the shortcomings the game had.

Spoiler: It wasn’t.


Blizzard admitted this was a bad idea. Even after the cashalance.

Here’s the thing though, the thing that I didn’t notice back then.

It’s not about fun anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. Games need to be fun. There’s no reason to play a game if it isn’t fun in some sense, but it’s about the big picture now.

Every one of us wants our hobby, gaming, to be taken seriously. To become art. To spread out and bring us all kinds of new and exciting experiences. We don’t want repetitive garbage. No one wants to do the same thing over and over again for the rest of their lives. Sooner or later, you’re going to get bored.

Unfortunately, every time you buy a Call of Duty game, every copy of SimCity that is purchased, every Dead Space, Bioshock and Resident Evil that slowly creeps its way from meticulously crafted horror to rock-themed, gun slinging action sends the industry one message: Don’t change. Stay exactly as you are. Kill off your Mega Mans, your Morrowinds, your System Shocks and give us something less brilliant.

Capcom didn’t kill Mega Man or Resident Evil. We did, when we proved we were willing to mindlessly shell out money for mediocre games like Lost Planet as long as they were pretty or gritty or brown. We’ve turned the videogame industry into the food industry, and the consumers are getting fat off empty, cheap cash grabs while the creative and the visionary gourmet designers choke and sputter in a market that just can’t be bothered to try something new.

It’s true, too. Name a AAA title in recent memory that was an original IP. Something quirky, like Katamari Damacy or Okami or Shadow of the Colossus.

Now, I’m not necessarily implying that this is due to the ‘dumbing down’ argument. X-COM is an exceptional example of slimming down a game system and making it something elegant. But there is a trend and it is not good. Take Skyrim and compare it to Morrowind. It’s prettier, the combat mechanics are far improved but what did we lose? There’s no magic creation system anymore. There’s only the barest hint of an enchanting system. The world is more clean and prepackaged. You have only a tenth of the creative freedom you did before.

I mean, really, would you buy your Lego sets already constructed? What the hell happened to us? We have all this processing power, all this development funding and our games feature less than the ones that came before it? How does that make any sense at all?

Look at game developers like DoubleFine, who continues to make unique and fun experiences like Stacking and Psychonauts, even if they struggle with poor sales and limited backing. Think about Reverge Labs and Skullgirls. They fought over a mound of obstacles, including the layoff of most of their staff to produce a fighting game that is artistically stunning and meticulously balanced.

Most notably, pour a drink out for Thatgamecompany, who bankrupted themselves to produce Journey for no other reason besides believing that strongly in the artistic and emotional value of their production.


And it shows.

There’s a clear disconnect between the AAA juggernauts and the consumer. The top shelf release that was created on dreams and vision is a rarity now. Hell, consider Konami, stating that it will not patch the Silent Hill HD collection for the Xbox 360.

Read that sentence again. They told their customers that they will not support the broken game that they released.

This is why I’ve become so interested in Kickstarter. For one thing, it shuts that gap. With Kickstarter, it’s impossible to ignore the consumer. The fate of the developer and the fate of your investment are directly tied. It creates a sense of responsibility that you see in pledges, promises not to make something prettier or gorier or shinier, but promises to add content to their product that directly benefits us. Look at Project Eternity, with a goal of $1,100,000 that aims to build a fantasy experience in line with classics like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Large scale, isometric, sprite-based RPG’s haven’t been seen in over ten years and they managed to not only meet their goal, but exceed it to the tune of $3,986,929.00. That gives me chills. Nowhere has a more powerful statement of consumer desire been so clear.


Project Eternity

I’ve spoken before about indie developers and how to me, they represent a gleam of hope in a disturbing future. But I also believe that AAA developers can turn things around. I can’t bring myself to believe that companies like Capcom or Square or Blizzard have lost their drive to create something new and exciting. I’m aware of the excuses, of rising development and production costs, but seriously, the video game industry is a giant right now. We have more people working in this industry than ever before. There are creative, passionate people in this field and they are having to fight to stand out amidst the mediocrity that chokes it.

I’m not saying that these properties don’t have a place, or that they don’t make a truckload of money, but our industry is still in its infancy, and it’s far too soon to get pigeonholed the way we are. We need to think before buying games, consider the long term message we’re making and not our immediate satisfaction. We need to take responsibility for the monster we’ve created. We need to teach it right and wrong just like you’d teach a misbehaving puppy. We don’t need to kill it... there’s certainly a place for the Call of Duties and Maddens, but we need to make sure it understands that we don’t want it to stagnate. We want it to learn and grow and become something we can talk about with pride.

Otherwise, we’re in for a lifetime of being teabagged. Not just by preteens, but by the industry as well.


I’d like to hear your thoughts and your comments about this, more than any of my other posts. Angry or impressed, critical or not... is there something I’m missing?

“Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo and never, ever cut a deal with a dragon.”

Those are the words that every shadowrunner knows by heart. To some they were the first words that greeted them when they cracked open a rule book or looked on the back cover. To others they form a mantra.

Those last 8 words are also absolutely true.

To a teenage mind, those words were like a fishhook. Shooting? Ammo? Dragons? How could you stay away? Imagine The Matrix, if Trinity was an elf and the machines were some kind of omnipotent megacorporation. Imagine trolls on motorcycles. Imagine if Smaug ran Halliburton. Imagine if Lord of the Rings had guns and cybernetic body parts.


We’d be screwed. So very, very screwed.

That’s a hell of a premise, one that that Shadowrun pays off in spades. For the unawakened, Shadowrun takes place sometime between 2050 and 2070. The future is not a pretty place. If the cyberpunk dystopia wasn’t enough, in this future mankind has experienced something called The Awakening, and with it, goblinization. Magic has returned the world and it wasted no time in screwing everything up. Dragons show up (naturally), mages start popping up all over the place and people discover very personally and traumatically that their ancestors might not have been as human as they’d believed.

The titular shadowrunners are a varied bunch; mercenaries for hire, information runners, smugglers and fencers. People with little to lose and a whole lot to gain who aren’t afraid of doing dangerous things and dealing with powerful organizations. They live in the shadows off the grid, dodging the incorporated police force known as Lone Star and taking contracts where they can. Occasionally, their employers actually hold up their side of the bargain.

Teams of them consist of a myriad of personalities and talents, some of which include the famous, bushido-obsessed street samurai, magic-wielding shamans or mages, hackers and riggers who send their consciousness directly into the internet or into their vehicles, shapeshifters and more.


It's like The Breakfast Club, except with elves, mercenaries and a lot more people die.

You can see, quickly, how such a premise would make for an awesome video game.

The Return

After watching the trailer, all I can feel is excitement. It’s clear from the design, the game systems, the characters and the dialogue that Harebrained Schemes knows the world they’re building, knows the audience they’re catering to and actually, genuinely cares about it all.


Thankfully Harebrained Schemes is here to unfuck the property.

When I first heard about it, I was skeptical, but little could be worse than the digital abortion that was 2007’s Shadowrun. I’d always pictured the perfect Shadowrun game as a sort of Grand Theft Auto clone with a strong co-op centric focus. You could have your street samurai and mercs mixing it up in the streets while your riggers offer support from remote controlled attack drones. Mages would keep the area nice and on fire and hackers would function in a sort of Watch Dogs style capacity, turning street lights against the authorities, hacking bridges and unlocking doors or gates.

Sadly that’s not a vision that the current market seems willing to support, and I approached the first look with cautious hope. What I found was something amazing.

Beyond the clear admiration and love for the original source material, Harebrained Schemes has gone the countless extra miles to satisfy everyone who’s ever played a Shadowrun game in any form. The moment an NPC was revealed as Jake Armitage, protagonist from the 1993 SNES Shadowrun, my jaw hit the floor. He even was sporting the dopey sunglasses he stole for a disguise. When the battle music kicked in, a reimagining of the same game’s combat theme, I was stunned. Then I learned that they’d gotten the composers from both the SNES and Genesis versions to do the soundtrack.

Holy shit.


Our hero protagonist, Jake Armitage.

Throw in a robust editor through which the entirety of the actual game was made and you have a product that offers limitless possibilities.

Watch Your Back

My interest in this runs deep. Shadowrun is an important property to me. It’s the game that defines my life and my start as a gamer. It was the first tabletop RPG I’d ever heard of. It wasn’t the first tabletop RPG I played (that honor goes to Mechwarrior 2nd edition) but it was certainly the one I played the most. From hiding in the stairwells at school with my friends to running 13 player games out in Colorado, I can safely say that it’s the one tabletop I grew up with.

The SNES game deserves mention here as well. Despite being a bit liberal with the rules system the game absolutely nailed the atmosphere and setting. For its time, it was groundbreaking. The opening scene of the game showed you being brutally gunned down by a hit squad. You weren’t even a good guy by any sense of the word... Jake Armitage was a Shadowrunner and an information courier. Sure, he could be nice to people, but this was a man who killed people for money. He stole from corporations and hacked bank accounts. He hires other killers to work for him. He doesn’t even go through anything like a redemption story... he’s just out for revenge. Add to that a flat out awesome soundtrack and have a hell of a setup.


Buzz, chummer.

Watching that first look Harebrained Schemes released made me grin like a madman. To know that there are talented people in the industry who clearly want to make a game that includes and defines what Shadowrun means to so many different gamers is like a breath of fresh air. Nothing is more depressing than watching your favorite, most beloved property be wrung out, chewed up and pushed around for a cheap money grab. To know that it’s finally getting the attention it deserves is worthy of applause.

Thank you Harebrained Schemes. I can’t wait to see what you can do.

For the four or five of you who remember, my last article was an overview of Ys Origins. In that article, I briefly mentioned an encounter back in the day with a game the US knows as Wanderers From Ys III.

Well, after writing the article I got sucked into the nostalgia trap and started poking around for more info on the series. During this all, it got me thinking back to what it was to be a gamer growing up and how things have changed so drastically over the years.

Games have always been a part of my life. Back in the late 80’s/early 90’s, my NES was my entire world. Thinking about how my friend’s older brother would explain how to pronounce Japanese names after beating Section Z and Mega Man 2 still makes me grin. Funny that I ended up majoring in the language.

I owe a lot of it to my awesome parents, who may have never imagined raising a geek but certainly never balked at it. Heck, my fondest gaming memories are of watching my dad play Dragon Warrior (or even earlier Adventure on the Atari 2600) and playing Life Force (known as Salamander, a Gradius spinoff, to those less familiar) with my mom. She was my partner, which was good because she was the only one who was dextrous enough to enter the Konami code until I got older. It’s funny to see how that code has grown to mean so much to so many gamers, when to me all it reminds me of is my family.



It wasn't weird to fight a giant pharaoh head in a space fighter inside of a monster back then.


Back in those days, we didn’t really question our games. They were fun or they weren’t, simple as that. Little things, like the personalized letter packaged with StarTropics, were amazing to me (especially that upon opening it, the letter was addressed to Mike). The hidden watermark wasn’t clever DRM... it was a holy shit moment that transcended the digital reality I spent most of my life in. Multiplayer wasn’t a feature... all games had it. Sometimes, it just involved passing the controller around the room. Playing through Ninja Gaiden with a friend wasn’t strange at all. To us, that’s what lives were for... a signal to let someone else take a shot.

The SNES was probably the biggest turning point in my life. When I think of the SNES, it marks the time that I went from just playing games to really thinking about them. When Final Fantasy VI (3 at the time) came out, I played it for a few hours and then dismissed it. To me, it was too confusing, too weird, compared to Final Fantasy IV (2 at the time).

It wasn’t until a year or two later that I revisited it and discovered how wondrous it was, how complex characters and stories in a game could be. It wasn’t about the good guys stopping the bad guys... it was about a lone soldier pulling his dead son out of his bed, about a thief who killed his partner and left his daughter after the death of his wife. It was about brothers coming to terms with the assassination of their father. It was about a general, disillusioned with the war her nation was fighting. It was about people. I think it was the first game that ever made me cry, not because it was sad, but because it ended. I never wanted to leave that world and the people who I'd come to think of as friends.

I’d become more thoughtful, more rational. I sympathized more with the deeper elements of a story rather than just plowing from point A to point B.



How many operas do you know that have perverted octopi and tyrannosaurs?

Press Down To Crouch

Strangely, if you had to ask me what I missed most about those days, I likely would respond with ‘instruction booklets’. In those days, when there weren't lengthy tutorials or controllers with 40 buttons, you could take the time with a booklet. Make it an extension of the world you were entering. I had almost as much fun with them as I did with the games they came with. Tracing the Mega Man booklets’ pictures of the bosses, the misprint in the Blaster Master instruction booklet that saw the last boss being shown but the first boss being censored out, reading Metroid’s entry about Samus and how ‘he’ was the best bounty hunter alive (damn, was that ever an awesome reveal)... that stuff was fun. Heck, I still have the aforementioned Life Force’s booklet, scanned and copied onto printer paper and stapled into a booklet, that I accidentally kept after returning it to Dorothy’s Fashion in Knoxville. Yes, I used to rent NES games from a fashion store.

I’ll never forget waiting so long for Chrono Trigger’s release, bugging mom to take me to buy it and then the crushing disappointment when we went out to BW3’s to meet with dad’s coworkers. I spent the entire time in the corner, reading the instruction booklet cover to cover, over and over.

Music to Grow By

It’s probably not surprising that game music was my genre of choice growing up. It still is, in many respects. Looking back, it’s not hard to see why other people thought I was nuts listening to chip tunes, but they were lacking context. When I listened to the Final Fantasy 6 ending, I wasn’t just listening to tinny midi music, I was flying away from Kefka’s Tower alongside Terra and Edgar and Mog. I was dashing off into the wilderness to seek adventure. I was descending into Brinstar in the hunt for a dangerous space pirate.



If this makes you want to run out and kick ass, you’re on the level.


It’s strange the stuff that sticks with you too. Sure, I could probably hum everything that came out of Squaresoft in the 90’s (who couldn’t?) but others had their place. Take the opening to Lagoon, for instance. Not a particularly well known title (or even all that good) but for some reason, this intro sequence is just perfect to me. The timing, the music, the visuals... I wanted to know more. Also, Thor was the first time I’d ever seen a character or person with heterochromia, and it made him stick in my memory for a long time. That, and I also thought he was a girl at first.



There’s no way this music is anything but awesome.



It’s also at this exact moment that I realize how much of an Ys clone this game was. Huh.

Next Gen!

Things changed a lot in the mid to late 90’s. My family started getting into computers, starting with a 386, and I remember both being amazed at how I could run Duke Nukem 3D (without sound though, since the computer didn’t have a sound card) and being sad that I’d never possess a machine that could run the awesomeness that was Quake.

I had my wisdom teeth out sometime in middle school and while recovering, my parents rented me a Playstation along with Warhawk and Twisted Metal. Soon after I discovered Final Fantasy Tactics, Symphony of the Night and Resident Evil. It was around this time that I went from appreciating games to being critical of them. I demanded more and sought out rarer, more unusual titles rather than playing them at will. I discovered modding on the PC side of things, starting with Archmage and Airquake for Quake 1 (SPOILER: I eventually got a computer that could run it).



We shall decide with our weapons whose hair is more luscious.


Games started to become less of an experience and more of a hobby. I no longer lost myself in them wholesale. I still loved them fiercely, but the moments where I was so in these worlds that I forgot to breathe had become few and far between. I saw potential in them, not only in what they were but what they could become. After the Playstation, my hobby only became more and more tempered.

Looking Ahead

More than anything, I love how the hobby that has defined my world has finally become so popular. Sure, I bitch and moan at times about Farmville ruining games or EA’s terrible business practices, but seeing so many people who aren’t gaming geeks who didn’t grow up with Toe Jam or Dr. Light playing video games makes me happy. Maybe it’s validation, maybe it’s just joy knowing others are finally discovering something amazing I’d always lived with, but I can’t help but love it.

Which is why I’m not scared about the future of gaming. For every Dead Space or Bioshock that blends more towards the mainstream, for every cookie-cutter modern war shooter that hits the market, for every Capcom cancellation or Konami cash grab, I see a sea of indie games that aren’t afraid to push the envelope or try something crazy, unpopular or downright insane. I see creators like Suda 51, Peter Molyneux, Keiji Inafune, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, Itagaki and Warren Spector who actually care about what they make, even if their audience doesn’t always care back.



It turns out that eyes can have orgasms too.


I also see a new generation of gamers with new expectations and demands. Maybe we won’t always see eye to eye, but I can safely say that I’m excited to see what games I’ll be playing with my grandchildren.

Oh, and as for my mom? She's still my favorite partner. That's her on the right.

If you’re a gamer in the US, likely your only encounter with the Ys brand before this era would have been with Wanderers from Ys for the SNES. It was certainly my first experience, and one that has stuck with me since the day I first played it. While it was deeply flawed and stupidly difficult at times (especially the bosses), the gameplay was still something unique and fun and the music was absolutely awesome.

Ys Origins is another game in the epic series that is finding new life on Steam. It’s a standalone game, being a prequel set 700 years before series hero Adol ever touched a sword, and is easily accessible for anyone.

There’s a bunch of fantasy mumbo jumbo, but the long and short is that the two goddesses of Ys, one who's a decent harmonica player, have run away from their floating continent with a Macguffin of stupendous power and a group of mages and knights are sent to find them.



Now this is a religion I could get behind.


The entire game takes place inside of Darm Tower, a huge spire on the surface that’s chock full of demons, helpfully sorted in order of strength from the ground floor up. Thank goodness they didn’t switch that, or the game would be really short. Demons know their shit, clearly.



Hugo, entering the Castlevania wing


Initially, you have the choice between two characters: Yunica, a young girl and knight-to-be of Ys and Hugo, a mage. I’d like to take a second and say how awesome it is that the main bruiser of the game is a female, wields an axe and is dressed very conservatively. She’s also never treated like a weakling, holding her own against powerful demons and sorcerers in spite of being unable to use magic. In short: a badass.

Hugo is entertaining in his dickery, easily pissing off everything with a pulse with his witty comebacks and hardass attitude. He can be a bit grating, but after Yunica's wholesomeness, some snark can go a long way to freshening up the experience.

There is a third character, who is more difficult to play than the other two, but is just a whirlwind of asskicking when you play them right. I can't talk too much about this one without giving away part of the story, but the third time through, the path is different enough to refresh the experience and the revelations within round out the plot nicely.



How many teen girls do YOU know that can one hand a battle axe?


Yunica and the third character were the most fun for me. The gameplay and breakneck speed made physical combat crazy fun, especially once you unlock more of their abilities. Hugo plays far differently, with most of his fighting taking place at range. It was more carpal tunnel inducing, but being out of the fray made the game a hell of a lot easier. Trapping enemies in a web of magical remote mines never gets old either.

Graphics are a nice mix of 3D landscapes and bosses with sprite based characters and minor enemies. It has a Xenogears/Final Fantasy Tactics vibe to it that I can’t help but love. There are minor perspective issues when platforming because of this, but it’s nothing unforgivable.

The music, by the way, does not disappoint. Some of the themes, such as the one in the desert area and the last floor are great background tunes to slaughter demons to.

To me, what makes this game are the boss fights. Whether it’s a nail-bitingly close duel with one of the many colorful villains roaming the tower or a life-or-death struggle with one of the gargantuan demons that live on each floor, they’re all memorable, exhilarating and brutally hard. The best part is how carefully designed most of them are. When you die, you know damn well what you did to screw up. Rarely is it ever a bad mechanic or cheap tactic that kills you, which is what kept me coming back. I might have been cursing up a storm after being killed twelve times by a giant centipede, but damned if I wasn’t grinning the whole time. It helps that the controls are razor sharp and very responsive. Ys Origins is a blast to play.



Didn’t I ride you in Ocarina of Time?


The game’s not without its flaws, however. The levels are mostly uninspired, ranging from generic desert area (in a tower) to underwater world (still in the tower) to gigantic lava factory (strangely high up in the tower). Deaths can come extremely cheap as well at times, with some enemies being far more deadly than they first appear and your character giving little feedback to how much damage they’re really taking. Don’t even get me started about drowning, which is almost as stress inducing as any underwater adventure Sonic ever undertook.

To really beat the game and understand all the events going on, you’ll need to beat the game a total of three times. The third time is a bit different, but the levels, major bosses, music and enemies never change. If you don’t enjoy the gameplay enough to carry you through this, it could be a game breaker. To me, I loved every second of it. The thrill of overcoming a particularly tough boss is just too much to pass up.



Dalles, continuing Chester and Ernst's lineage of terrifying Ys villain names.


If you’re a long term Ys fan... well, you’ve probably already played the hell out of this. If you’re a fan of action rpgs with a solid difficulty curve, you’ll likely get your money’s worth out of Ys. Just kill that centipede once for me.

Has anyone else gotten the chance to play Ys Origins? What are your thoughts on the game? Should I pick up 1 & 2?

Hey Destructoidians, Returner Mike here once again with the thrilling second episode of my special, ‘So Your Rampant Insanity Has Driven You To Create Something’. Last post dealt with what I like to call ‘cruel reality’.

This one is going to be a bit different. Now that the ugly parts are out of the way and you’re hopefully beginning to understand the monumental task ahead of you, we can get on to my favorite part: Why you should make a friendly gesture at the rest of the world and kindly inform them of where they can store their cynicism.



Thank you for your input. I'll take it under consideration.


Is creating an amateur project a lot of work? Yes. Is it going to be a long, brutal, possibly thankless task? Oh sweet Mario yes. Should you do it anyway? You are damn right you should. Why? Because someone has to. I write because my stories won’t be told any other way. They’ll sit there, in my head, screaming to get out and unless I write, that’s where they’ll rot and metamorphosize into those obnoxious ‘regret’ things. I don’t want that. You don’t want that. Your future therapist wants it, but he’s likely a huge jackass who’s cheating on his wife or something, so stick it to him.

Besides, proving your detractors wrong is beautiful.


The Warm, Uplifting Truth

Your vision is possible. Try it, you sitting there, staring at your computer. Just whisper the words at the very least. I'll wait. Mull it around. Your vision is possible. Whatever is in your head can be realized in the medium that you want. Will it be easy? No. Nothing of worth ever is.

Your idea is possible and there are people out there who you can find who will be just as eager to see it through as you are. I have some other awesome news for you... you are living in science fiction. You are in a world where we have nearly perfected electronic telepathy, and through amazing sites like Destructoid, Reddit, 4chan, Deviantart, Soundcloud, Newgrounds... you too can find these awesome, like minded folk.



Look! There's your new art director on the left!


Post some ideas. Talk to your friends. Have them ask around. Post on message boards, scope out subreddits, follow artists on Tumblr, scoop up people as they are just getting started or are just in school.

There are some hard pills to swallow here, but if you’ve made it this far, you can go a bit further. The biggest one is - your baby is no longer yours. The moment you bring someone else on board, your project is going to change. Probably in ways you never imagined and possibly in ways you don’t want. That’s the cost of what you’re doing. No matter how small a part these people will have in building your dream, their mark will be left on it. This is NOT a bad thing. Just like life, diversity helps strengthen your work and gives it the unique chance to be critiqued during it’s creation.



You never know what ideas you'll spawn!


Your Project Doesn't Have To Be Expensive or Difficult

Unless we’re talking about time, you’ll be amazed at what you can get away with not paying for. An amateur team, working on a freeware title, can find a surprising amount of assistance online, from their local community or can learn for themselves without too much difficulty. As I mentioned before, social websites like Reddit, 4chan and such (and think outside the box here... places like crunchyroll.com, Steam and newgrounds.com have huge communities of people likely with similar interests, just looking to work on projects with others.

Our artists and writers were found all around the web, and were all brought together by a common idea: the want to create something fun and meaningful.



Think of the wonderful things you'll make!


A side note here, if your project requires things from the real world, remember that businesses are made of people. Call around, ask questions, as for donations or assistance. If you need photos for references, you’ll be surprised at how accommodating places can be. It never hurts to ask, and people are almost always thrilled to contribute if you ask nicely.


You Will Improve

Win or lose, succeed or fail, you’re going to learn something during your project and it’s going to make you stronger. Maybe your team’s input will point out a flaw in your writing style, or perhaps you’ll learn new art techniques from the other artists in your group... regardless, no project is wasted, and at the worst, you’re merely gaining strength and knowledge to make your next attempt that much better.

One point I’d like to mention here... listen to criticism. In fact, seek it out. It’s not always pinpoint accurate or nice to hear, but it rarely is devoid of meaning. Of course, I mean criticism, here. ‘Eet boiled lobster poo’ is not criticism. Neither is ‘your writing sucks’, ‘you aren’t funny’ or ‘I could do that better’. Ask people why. Ask them why until they throw their hands up and walk away. What about the scene doesn’t work? Why don’t you like this character? What stops them from being believable? It hurts to hear about how your work is flawed. There’s no secret way to stop that from being true. You just have to masochist up and throw yourself out there. It’s the best way to learn and improve.


You Will Have An Audience

It’s the internet. The place that gave birth to amputee porn, rotten.com and Google+. If you create it, chances are a fair number of people are going to explore your work and that some of them will enjoy it. Criticism via fans is a brutal affair, and I’m not sure how much I can recommend getting into discussions about your work online. All I can say is... be civil. Anonymity offered by the web makes it easy to say hurtful things. Try to look past the callousness that being faceless provides and really think about what people are trying to tell you. Be receptive and warm and your audience will be far more likely to grow.



Just do everything that Derek Smart doesn't.


It Will See The Light Of Day

If you refuse to give up, if you crack at it, just a little day by day, your project will see life. You’ll hit snags, you’ll lose progress, you’ll lose teammates and you’ll get so frustrated that you’ll want to cry and quit.

Don’t. Your project started for a reason. I’m not saying that there aren’t genuinely good reasons to shut down a project (there are) but seriously think about what you’re doing. Is your project really going badly, or are you simply reading the first draft? Are you getting a bit of writer’s block? Are you listening to your team’s complaints and making them your own? Are you receiving threatening emails from the man who’s kidnapped your daughter and it’s distracting you?



Pictured: Not the best way to overcome writer's block.


Be honest and realistic with yourself at the start. You want this to finish. Even a short project can take vast amounts of time to complete. You’ll never be able to account for every delay, so just roll with it when you can. There is nothing like looking back on a year of frustration and delays and realizing just how much work you actually did get done.

Next post will be a bit more in depth about how our project is being run, the systems we have in place and the way we’ve overcome our various obstacles.

Hope you’ve been enjoying it so far! If there’s any other advice that I may have missed, I’d love to hear about it in the comment section.

Apologies, but this’ll be a long one.

About a year ago, I received a strange notification. An offhand remark that I enjoyed writing in my free time had caught someone’s attention on one of the more popular social media blogs. Turns out that this individual was looking for writers to work on a project of his. I told him sure, as I was pretty bored around that time and to be honest, my dream has been to write games since the dawn of time.

A year later, I find myself in charge of the endeavor (I’ll get to that) and wondered how best to offer words of advice and share my experiences to my readers and game-loving friends out there. So here you go - Returner Mike’s Long, Meandering Advice and Insight on Amateur Game Development.

The Bad

We’ll get this section out of the way, because like any good how-to document, it needs to crush your spirits about the undertaking you’re about to embark on right out of the gate.


The Reality of Failure, or The Venture Bros Were Onto Something


First and foremost, most projects, especially those of amateur passion, will fail. Let it float around inside your head a bit. That includes yours. The possibility of failure is always going to be floating right above your head. Maybe your game sucks, but frankly, if it even gets to release, that’s a huge achievement. Maybe your artists leave, maybe you realize far too late how little material you have for your story or maybe you and your team will just get bored.

How to avoid this? Well, what’s kept me going is this - everything you’ve ever played likely started as an idea between a bunch of friends on one beer-soaked, Halo Slayer-filled night. There isn’t some tank of bodysuited clones floating in goo to come up with ideas like ‘Cube of Meat Saves Girlfriend A Lot’ or ‘Ayn Rand Failing Under Water’... it’s people like you. Oftentimes without training or anything. Ideas may be a dime a dozen, but if you feel strongly about it, explore it. There may be some merit there.




There are always worse ideas out there.


Another thing is foundation. Ensure your project has a clear goal. Hash that out with the team until you’re sick of it. What do you want to do? Create a heartwarming love story visual novel? Create a shooter with bizarre gravity physics? What? Make sure you always keep this, your end goal in mind.

Next, and this one might not work for everyone, but tell people. This was a piece of advice offered to me while I was writing in my first National Novel Writing Month. Build up your own peer pressure. Tell friends and family so that they’re always asking what’s new with the project. You’ll feel like a gold-plated asshole after the third time you say ‘nothing, I was too lazy to work on it’ and your family gives you that ‘fuck, why aren’t you a doctor?’ look. Then you’ll either get back to work (yay!) or slip into depression (my bad).




Pictured: Gold plated asshole


Last, be prepared for the little failures. Realizing your ending blows or that your character is inadvertently a complete ripoff of another is not the end of your project. Things can change, especially early on, even big things, and you’ll survive it. We’ve had to rewrite huge chunks of our project for remarkably small problems and it’s never that much fun tearing apart your favorite scenes.

People Are Strange, or Shut The Fuck Up Donny!

Shit is going to happen, as the good Rev. Gump foretold. People will get pissy or bored or frustrated or just have been born directly into a vat of liquid asshole. Likely, this will occur on your team. Sometimes people aren’t as mature as they seem at first glance. Sometimes people just run into other people they can’t get along with. Sometimes, people just want to watch the world burn.

The biggest thing towards solving intergroup conflict is a strong leadership hierarchy. If someone can point at someone and say ‘shut the fuck up and work’ and the other person does it, you’re already leaps and bounds ahead of the game. Emulate other works you've seen or ask for advice. I had someone who worked project management for awhile, and we implemented an old IBM software development system. Everyone will find their own way but there needs to be strong leadership.

Now, what if the leadership is causing problems? That can be tricky. First, I’d recommend talking to whoever is causing the problems. Be gentle and respectful and try to figure out some way around the issue. Biggest pitfall - we’re all human. Sometimes we just don’t agree and we have to learn to live with it. If this doesn't lead to solutions, ask around to see if this problem has been encountered with other members. It may be something the group is trying to work through.

Also, and this is a big one, ask yourself if you’re the real problem. Take off your blinders and take a good, long look at yourself. Be honest, for the sake of your team and your project. We can only improve if we acknowledge our shortcomings. It’s never easy, but it’s necessary.




Some teammates complain. Some saddle you with killswitches.


So what if our unique ability as humans to reason and discuss things logically fails? Well, you have two choices here - get the fuck out or stage a coup.

Getting the fuck out isn’t a bad idea if problems can’t be reconciled. You might even be able to drag a few people with you.




Spoiler: If you get this joke, you're older than you think.


Staging a Coup, however, is what will get you placed onto hipster shirts. This, I happen to have some surprisingly accidental knowledge in.

In my situation, I was pretty low level at first, which was fine. I had a story to write and that’s all that mattered. As time went on though, our leadership started to deteriorate. At first, it was a few odd things, like cutting massive parts of a writer’s story with no reason or explanation, or rage quits during meetings, but it eventually began driving away members of the team and after awhile, we knew that our choices were to dissolve the project or do something drastic.

At first, we implemented the aforementioned project hierarchy and allowed each of the groups, Art, Music, Writing and Tech to vote on their own leadership. This almost went as planned, except at the last minute I was voted in for writing lead over the writer I’d been coaching for the spot. I actually discovered my new truckload of responsibility while I was out of town... about two days after the vote had occurred and been set.




You know the quote.


The individual in question continued to cause problems, however, and eventually the team pulled him aside and booted him. As a last resort, this choice is never, ever going to be easy, but sometimes it’s necessary. I imagine the boss that has to fire an employee would feel the same way. In the end, it’s about what’s best for the project, and sometimes those choices get ugly.

You’ll Never Work a Day In Your Life, and Other Bullshit

In my opinion, the biggest killer of projects isn't bad leadership or a bad concept, the biggest killer is boredom.




This guy became apathetic about his project. Look what happened to him.


There will be a point in your project when the project starts becoming work. Your passion alone will not carry you through to the end. You need motivation. You need drive. You need people who are as crazy about the project as you are to keep telling you to work. You’re going to hit slow points, you’re going to question the quality of your work and you’re going to hit snags that you never even considered. Keep going.

Apathy is one of the toughest snags, mostly because for everyone, the answer to it is different. Working on different parts of the project or even having something small on the side to work on to relieve the monotony might help.

Silver Lining

You might be asking yourself a lot of questions by this point. You might be wondering if it’s worth pushing onward. You might be getting excited to tell me how full of shit I am. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing, that there is nothing in the world like reaching a goal. For me, I don’t care if our IP isn't received well. I don’t care if it ends up as a joke on the message boards or even fades into obscurity. All I want to do is see it out there, with my name on it, knowing that I made something that I never thought possible. If I get some positive fan mail or see someone cosplaying as a character I made, well... that’s just icing on the cake.




This is how I picture myself when I argue on the internet


Anyway, next time I’ll be talking about the mirror image here... the good sides and what to do to make a project sing. Until then, have any of you started any projects like this? Did they succeed? Did they fail? Why? I’d love to hear stories from other teams.

UPDATE: Link to page 2 - http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Returner+Mike/dare-to-be-badass-project-development-part-2-244876.phtml