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Big Adventures In Tiny Places

Big Adventures In Tiny Places published on No Comments on Big Adventures In Tiny Places

Been thinking about game design again and navel gazing a bit about what it is I like about games in different genres. I’ve always had some games I latched onto to kill time, but there was actually a period of time where I kind of lost interest in gaming. Pause to let the reader finish gasping or fainting like a Southern belle. This phase came about from the first steps the industry started taking into 3D- awkward low poly models with low res textures, most devs not really having a base line of how controls should work in a 3D environment, and the awkward steps taken toward making games feel more cinematic. It honestly turned me off and even though I had a N64, there wasn’t a hell of a lot that really caught my eye as a must own. Even to this day I’d rather see nice hand drawn or pixelated sprite art over hyper realistic muddy shootmans and zombie games, but now I have the power to “hey man, that’s just your opinion” myself. Truly a great and terrifying power I use for good and also undermining my confidence and sense of self if left unchecked.

What brought me back into the hobby was the humble GBA. It was basically a portable SNES and since I get into basically everything late, it was an SP with the snazzy flip open lid. Black version because obviously, that was the coolest one. And the first game I picked out? Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In itself, it was probably a weird choice since I wasn’t super into RPGs, for a variety of dumb reasons from short attention span to thinking it was kinda stupid for people in a fight to just stand in lines taking turns hitting each other politely. I loved Chrono Trigger and liked FF7 (on PC!) but tended to bounce off of others. But I’d seen the original FFT at a friend’s house and thought, “hey, you can actually do things like backstabs or take advantage of heights and obstacles? This is a GAME CHANGER.” So I dug in and I freaking loved it. Once I was in the post game I made it my mission to raise up an all Viera team, because I’ve always been like this. It was really the first time I realized how cool RPGs could be when freed from the TV or computer room and the whole idea of having an explorable world full of little dudes I collected and trained was also very, very cool.

(Never was much of a Pokemon kid, by the way. Picked Game Gear over Game Boy as a kid and looking back regret it a little, but I still loved the thing.)

The way the portable form lead to changes in game design and philosophy is pretty interesting too. Since battery life could still be a problem, some games added “suspend” modes I could never bring myself to trust and others started focusing on allowing more bite size sessions with generous save points or just letting you save whenever. Even getting away from RPGs, I gotta say Peace Walker is still probably my favorite MGS experience since it broke everything into mini stages instead of giving me a giant map to get lost in while resources dwindle. Then there started to be games made more simple, abstracted even more to focus on the core… RPG…ness.

SURPRISE I’M GOING TO GUSH ABOUT STING AGAIN

When my SO of the time and I went shopping on a trip, we each grabbed a GBA game to mess with on the trip; she went with Riviera: the Promised Land and I picked Sigma Star Saga since I’d been waiting on it and hoped it would be a worthy successor to The Guardian Legend. It wasn’t, really! But I checked out Riviera over her shoulder and started thinking “this looks cool but also kind of different.” Later, I got my own copy and was super into it. They stripped away free roaming and broke dungeons down room by room, littered with event triggers you spend points earned from performing well in battle to use. In exchange, they focused on story and presentation, with lots of splash art to really sell special events. It was basically heavily boiled down RPG concentrate and was both perfect for handheld and just plain interesting in itself.

I would keep up with Nintendo hand held systems over the years, eventually getting a PSP too to break things up a bit. As much as I love action stuff, I just couldn’t get enough oddball portable RPGs and tactics games. One of the standouts was Half Minute Hero, and something just grabbed me about the design of it- it’s almost more of a puzzle game challenging you to find the most efficient routes through a quest, unlock all the endings, and all done pretty tongue in cheek. The world is going to end in 30 seconds, so get going, hero! The Time Goddess can rewind things for you but charges increasing amounts per reset. Eventually, after completing multiple entire other game modes, the ultimate final stage appears: the heroes of each time period rush to the finish to save the day in five minutes while time itself unravels the world around them, and for something that’s basically a gag game, it’s a genuinely epic conclusion.

Now this might be surprising to you if this is the first thing you’ve read here but I’m kinda into mobile games lately. A lot of it is because cheapo gacha RPGs and strategy games do a pretty good job of capturing that “vibe” of the random RPGs I kept collecting. Maybe not so much your FFTAs as your Luminous Arcs and Wild Arms XFs. Second and third stringer franchises just always appealed to me, I guess. It’s part getting to explore something nobody else is really talking about and part getting to relay my experiences to my friends so they can go “hey, that sounds cool” then not play them later. Even if they do exist as a front for nickel and diming susceptible players to death and funneling money to China, they check a lot of my boxes for “actually good stuff,” the bite size sessions, interesting game mechanics (well, sometimes) and most importantly getting to carry lots of cool little imaginary people around in your pocket. To train and dress up and poke at and sometimes enter multiple surprisingly non binding marriages with.

On a level sometimes it feels like I’m drawn to RPG things in Not RPGs. The aesthetics, theming, the character building, taken away from the normal format. Like say, Caladrius Blaze, the top down bullet hell shooter where you gather XP items from destroyed enemies and redeem them to increase your stats for each skill (read weapon) between stages. Or World Flipper, the surprisingly neat Pinball RPG where the heroes hop between themed worlds, solving their problems and making all sorts of friends. Bite sized. It’s got leveling and team building. There are Lots Of Dudes in it, and they all fit in your pocket. I love it.

I think another angle to all of this is how to take advantage of the language of tropes. Tropes aren’t necessarily a bad thing for you to click a Cinema Sins dinger at. They’re a writing shorthand and can be useful for saving time or grabbing attention. Anime does this a lot. Especially lately. But that’s a rabbit hole for another day. (Maybe.) There’s a quest in Half Minute Hero where Hero meets, befriends, then has to kill a girl which, like everything else in the game, happens in the course of a couple minutes tops, and it’s genuinely pretty emotional. with minimal dialogue or even screen time. Your mind is filling in blanks and thinking back to other times you’ve seen a scene like this, but it’s being presented in a new and interesting way. That is to say, very fast.

Most of the pen and paper game designs I’ve attempted over the years have come from a similar place. I like designing characters and want people to enjoy them on a level past going “hey that looks neat” and scrolling along to the next. Irrgarten was a dungeon crawler card game that more or less came about because I wanted a simple game that gave people a little fantasy gaming “fix” with minimal setup and the early concepts of Critical Heaven were to basically combine the interesting battle gimmicks from Rondo of Swords and Yggdra Union. I kind of wanted to keep them as card gamey as possible but they keep turning out more and more like board games. What can I say, I just really like the idea of having a whole deck of planegirls or adventurers y’know…

In your pocket.

A Question of Value(s)

A Question of Value(s) published on No Comments on A Question of Value(s)
Overwhelmingly positive with mechs AND anime girls? But…

This is one of those thoughts that has percolated in my dysfunctional little brain for a while now, but when I was idling scrolling through the Switch eShop sales page looking for interesting indie stuff to impulse buy and probably play five minutes ever, it jumped back out and now it’s blocking the bathroom door, so I guess it’s time to address it before the situation escalates. A new shmup, Moon Dancer (which looks pretty dang cool) is on sale, but squinting above it, I see the original price is $18.99 USD. The Steam version is $14.99 regular price with the option of a soundtrack bundle.) Now, I’ve seen the sentiment crop up in reviews that the price of a game shouldn’t affect its rating, and as someone who is into kind of nichey stuff, it’s a factor I get stuck thinking on a lot.

I like a lot of smallish studios’ work, the indie scene feels like the place to find titles that are either imaginative or at least similarly cozy to the stuff I grow up with, with a dash of excitement of discovery on top from finding something quality that hasn’t been completely overhyped and overexposed online. I don’t honestly know if WayForward and Inti Creates are considered indie anymore, but they’re at least able to keep their own identity and mostly avoid the big trends that make high profile companies’ outputs feel so bland and samey. I also personally know a few people home-brewing their own passion projects and/or self-publishing and the amount of work that goes into it is huge and admirable. Major props to people who spend years going “I’m making a game!” and banging at it ’til it actually happens.

The thing that gets me is that game pricing feels like it’s just all over the place. Honestly, most feel ridiculously generous, like full length RPGs with original art and engines selling for $20 or less. My beloved ZeroRanger is still technically under construction after four years while keeping the same $12.99 price point, and it’s probably my favorite shmup. So when you get a release like say, Darius Burst CS, which isn’t quite mainstream but well regarded in its genre, releasing for $50 (base game, it has/had numerous $4.99 DLCs), it’s kind of a tough sell for me. (Also it seems to be delisted now? I went to check the price and I can no longer add to cart on Steam.) And the hell of it is like, I still kind of want it, in a “gotta support the scene!” kind of way. I was willing to buy it on a steep sale one of the few times it did and I burned some Amazon credit on Deathsmiles 1+2 since I like 1 a lot and never played 2, but they were both a bit beyond an impulse buy for me. I have a similar problem with fighting games, I love both genres and appreciate the replay value your get out of replaying them and improving over time, but at the same time, they’re both kind of a short experience by default, and if it doesn’t click, then I’m going to probably get each character’s ending and shelf it forever.

hey wait why does this image follow that sentence? weird

I realize that shifting from talking about indie projects to ports of existing games to home console or updating them is a different ball game, but it’s hard for me to separate the two when I’m scrolling through the listings. Ultimately, they’re both a product and an experience, and when I see someone pouring their blood, sweat and tears into something then selling it for $3.99 or giving it away for free out of love for what they’re doing and another listing is a decades old arcade game, optimized for current systems for $7.99, it feels kind of off to me. Arcade Archives does do great work, and I nabbed some of their ports in spite of being really easy to just emulate the stuff, but at the same time, I’m thinking “this is a good port, but they didn’t make this.” And where do you even place things like the Pixel Game Maker series of releases or commercial RPG Maker projects? There’s effort there, in the writing, graphics, generally, though there are some games that just do the bare minimum and release it to Steam because they’re allowed to. There are some really impressive games coming out of Maker engines, and you definitely can’t knock them making game development more accessible to people who otherwise couldn’t (hell, I purchased Pixel Game Maker myself recently hoping it clicks and I can make something some day.)

Pixel Pirate Pack, featuring Popeye and Blutus

I’m not really saying that indie devs are underselling themselves or that porters are gouging their audiences here, more that ‘value’ isn’t entirely about cost but a factor I can’t entirely ignore when I’m game shopping or reviewing something. I’ve dropped ten or fifteen bucks on more duds than I can remember but also gotten hours of fun from games in the same bracket. I’m also guilty of overpaying for weeb trash games because, well, that’s just how niche things go. Sometimes you have to bite that bullet if you want to play Darius Burst CS badly enough or want to import a Super Robot Wars or tiddy ninja RPG. When something enters niche hobby territory, there’s usually a price hike, look at photography on real film. You used to be able to get disposable cameras for cheap at any drug store, now it’s basically a hipster luxury territory.

Let’s step away from the cozy side of the games market for a bit here. I know, I don’t do it much either, but it’s okay. Just hold my hand and don’t follow anyone from Blizzard anywhere. I love my Switch, ok? It’s probably one of the top three consoles I’ve regretted least buying. But Nintendo continues its proud tradition of pricing everything at $50-$60 and never budging from launch price and that makes buying into first party games really tough for me unless peer pressure is involved. I play Mario Kart pretty regularly with friends after finally caving on it, and Smash Ultimate is a good time even if I rarely do multi player with that one, but I’ve been kind of hemming and hawing about Breath of the Wild for years at this point. I don’t play a lot of open-world games, and I honestly haven’t played much 3D Zelda, but the near universal fellating of BOTW has me wondering, like- is this the one? Is this going to be the open exploration phenomenon that makes me not mind forgetting what the hell I’m doing while wandering around lost in the woods? Genshin Impact sure wasn’t. I got super into Honkai Impact, its stage based brawler cousin, and after a while I thought “Hey, maybe it would be fun to go back to Genshin and see how much these two games have in common.” Since I haven’t gambled myself into a cardboard box as of writing this, I think you can guess how well that went. So, I haven’t pulled the trigger on BOTW. Splatoon always looked kind of neat, but I don’t really want to pay full Nintendo price on a ‘maybe,’ especially knowing that they have something of a shelf life with finite Splatfests. Also Inklings keep cutting me off in Mario Kart offline circuits and I’m kind of developing a grudge. It just irks me that Nintendo never cuts the price on these games unless they make it to best-seller status or completely fucking bomb (I got Other M for 12 bucks new at GameStop back in the day) when most companies would give it a break a few months or a year out.

This has all been kind of a roundabout way of saying “I don’t like paying more than $20 for short games but also don’t want them to stop making them.” So many indie games sell low it kind of feels like being spoiled, but as an artist I’m also pretty painfully aware that selling low is an easy way to get takers, period. I’d hate to wind up as the equivalent to one of those assholes who gets a quote from an artist and insists “no way it should be that much, anyone can draw if they try and if you do it for fun why are you charging me at all?” So, love and respect out there, earnest indie devs and those of you out there who bust your bottoms making quality game ports and collections.

I didn’t even get into this shit, huh?

Slayers Week Masterpost

Slayers Week Masterpost published on No Comments on Slayers Week Masterpost

Another Slayers Week draws to a close on the Tumblrsphere and it was fun participating as usual. I was especially excited that my cross posts to Twitter managed to catch the eye of Rui Araizumi himself, which is extremely exciting given how much influence his style and Slayers in general influenced me.

The prompts are usually interesting and non-shipping-centric, which makes it easier for me to get creative as someone who prefers ‘cool’ to cuddly when left to my own devices. So, here we go!

Day 1 Prompt: Pokota- Not a character I’m super into or attempted to draw before, really, decided to try and give him a little of the vibe of a Sonic character being a little mascot dude as he is. I did come to like him a lot more last rewatch, though.
Day 2: Mazoku- With so many to pick from, I thought I would go for someone outside the lords/generals/priests but still recognizable, so I picked the tag team terrors of Kanzel and Mazenda from Slayers NEXT.
Day 3: Lina Inverse- I think Lina was the grand finale last time, but she gets an early appearance this time out. Lina is always fun to draw, in fact she’s basically my ‘test pattern’ whenever I get a new piece of software or hardware. Tangentially, my pal Evo sent me a new tablet, and these were all drawn on it. Funny, that!
Day 4: Supporting Character- Given so many to pick from, I decided to draw Ruma from Slayers Premium simply because I don’t think I’ve seen her get any fanart before. She’s got a cute design, I never actually noticed her cape was tattered and dirty until digging up reference pics. This and Day 7 are probably my favorites of the week.
Day 5: Sylphiel Nels Lahda- Or some spelling thereof. I don’t really have a lot to say about this one other than I had to redo her eyes because the first take made her look sly or seductive and I was going more for that gentle doe eyed look. I should also note up to here all of these images had no backgrounds because I was focused on the character art and hadn’t had time to play around much with the paint tools to make half decent backdrops.
Day 6: BroTP- Having two women as a ‘BroTP’ feels like stretching the term a bit but they always had a fun chemistry even if I prefer the main series to the specials basically any day of the week. It says something that they can literally fight against each other in a war then nonchalantly sit down and have lunch in a tavern like nothing happened. Best Frienemies.
Behind the scenes take, this one was *tough,* to be honest. I was having a Bad Anatomy Night and wound up using my Figma Body-Chan for reference photos, then scaling them to the proper heights made the proportions on the doll feel odd. I feel like I could have done better on this one, but given time constraints and working live on stream I gave it a solid “this is done.”
Day 7: Gourry Gabriev- Rounding off the week is the jellyfish brained sword prodigy himself, Gourry. Last time around I had him in an action pose, so this time I thought I’d show off his doofier side where he’s making the “Oh! I get it!” face but more than likely does not, in fact, get it.

If you’d like to check out submissions from people other than me, hit up the main blog at http://slayersweek.tumblr.com.

Switchin’ It Up (And Other Stuff)

Switchin’ It Up (And Other Stuff) published on 2 Comments on Switchin’ It Up (And Other Stuff)

‘Ey folks. Been a while again, and I really meant to get back into the swing of regularly posting here again, but I’ve been in kind of a slump recently. Thankfully, some very awesome people, old and new have been doing their best to help me pick up and get back at it.

Through a combination of birthday money, commissions and Twitch paying out at a good time of month, I finally pulled the trigger on getting a Switch since I kind of like to have my handhelds current and it’s kind of a dream machine for in how it doubles as a console and portable system. Been enjoying Xenoblade 2 greatly, if a bit cautiously since random draws are very much A Thing both for Blade recruitment and getting items for quests. But it oozes charm, much like the first. (And in going to try and link to the relevant Eishi N’ Dixie strip, I found that my archives are apparently busted, so I guess maybe it’s time I finally wiped the site and started over from scratch with more of a focus to it then the current, Frankensteined-together WordPress page I’m on.) E3 has me pretty hyped for DAEMON X MACHINA for a mecha fix and part of me is geeking over that Switch-exclusive Star Fox merch, but I’ll have to decide if it’s $75 worth of cool. (Really, if new games are gonna be $40 to $60 new and it comes with a plastic Arwing and other junk it’s not that awful, but seeing it in one big sum makes me hesitate a tad. The SNK 40th Anniversary Collection and their apparent new attempt at a Gals Fighter are on the way too, in addition to various WiiU ports other people gripe about but I missed out on.

I’ve been having a pretty good time streaming lately, though my art output’s basically dropped to nothing aside from aforementioned commissions. Some super generous viewers lobbed a bunch of Steam games to try out including the new Battletech, which despite some of the mixed impressions I’ve read I’m really digging since it’s something I’ve wanted since my teen years- a digital version of the board game so I can have the depth of the tabletop game without all the stat tracking and other paperwork. A few weeks ago to celebrate crossing 400 followers, I decided to sit down and do a mini marathon sampling a bit of stuff that’d been sitting in my backlog for some time. Course, Steam being Steam there’s still more stuff yet to be touched. T_T I may look into getting some capture gear since I’ve been trying to share some obscuro PS2 games and the emulated versions chug too much to be really satisfactory for stream.

Randomizer Encounters and Other Twitchery

Randomizer Encounters and Other Twitchery published on No Comments on Randomizer Encounters and Other Twitchery

 

Been pretty busy the past few weeks between settling into the new place and participating in RGL stuff, but still setting aside time to draw where I can and am not spazzing out. Luckily the things I was stressing most about didn’t come to pass (owing money for repairs and junk on the old place since it was a little junky since day one and four years of single guy dwelling didn’t help it out much, and some dickery involving the utility company0 and I’ve been back in a much more productive kind of headspace. My own channel and work are doing pretty decent right now, I’m now among the first bunch of streamers invited to Affiliate status, so if anyone catches me streaming and feels like, feel free to toss a Bit tip my way. I need to do some work updating this site to better show off my projects since WordPress was originally just adopted as an easy, more streamlined way to get text posts and articles online. It’s a bit trickier to get comic page layouts and gallery updates up and going.

So, on the subject of projects, I’m still planning to do the card game and set up a proper page for it to give an overview of the rules and general setting for the sake of gathering some interest, though the thing that I’m about to start seriously picking away at is, of all things, a re-imagining of Revolver Knight! It’s a drastic overhaul, but it should be a pretty massive improvement as a story too. I could gripe about the old one for hours (though I still don’t hate it enough to just pull the whole thing down) but the chief problem with RK, IMO was I just tried to jam too many ‘cool things’ into it. It was kind of intended to be a pastiche or mashup of stuff I thought was cool in various games and anime at the time, which probably should have been a warning sign from the get-go, but it was received decently in the beginning so I ran with it. Over time though, I kind of ran out of steam and the later chapters are rushed in an effort to show off more of the world but not really afford time to flesh them out by much. One of the biggest things I think will help is focusing more on the small-level story, sticking with the characters and their homeland and how things are affecting THEM and not forcing an ‘epic’ cross country trek. I’ve been roughing out the first chapter already and may release it as a stand alone .pdf or something to see how people enjoy it to see whether to continue it or focus on something else.

On another topic, I’ve been pretty interested in game randomizers lately, though the only one I’m really playing is The Guardian Legend one, TGL Worlds. It doesn’t have a very robust set of features compared to the Zelda ones where you can toggle some features for the seed, you just insert a rom and it spits out a randomized version of it. It also doesn’t really seem to check very thoroughly that it will give you a completable version of the game. But it does do the chief thing I want and actually alter maps, vs. just shuffling item placement between chests. It does some pretty wacky stuff and tends to cluster items and rooms of a same type together, making it easy to get overpowered (and overly costly) weapons early on… or create chains of 3-4 save chambers end to end. Still, it’s a pretty cool way to breathe new life into an old game I already like, just like trying to adopt some of the tricks speedrunners use to make some of the more aggravating bosses and stuff go down all the faster.

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