SecretArcade

Kind of a dev diary from someone with far too many projects.

[igotnextlies-blog]

Inspired by a terrible misunderstanding of a personal story of heartbreak and angst, comes at last a decent idea for an arcade game to put in the arcade box. KISS CHICKEN

It’s pretty perfectly insane-o 80s arcade. Right up there with Burger Time and some other forgotten favorites. We’re only about a week into it, but the design is evolving nicely from this, our initial whiteboard. For now, I’m just going to present this with little to no commentary and get back to fighting with Unity. 

[igotnextlies-blog]

Oops

Yeah. 

Things got busy. But the dream didn’t die. It just slumbered. Lots of movement. Let’s celebrate some victories first.

1) Mini Arcade - totally built!

As is customary, upon initializing any device with a screen and an input, one makes it play Doom.

It totally plays Doom. Esteban put the arcade through its paces.  We didn’t manage to get around to deploying anything for it in time for the ARG THIS time, but I have just been biding my time with the old girl. Now at last, I think we’re ready. Next post: KISS CHICKEN

[igotnextlies-blog]

Oh. Hey, right. The arcade cabinet is underway. Since this photo was taken, it’s been mostly glued and no major mistakes were made. Shortly the electronics are going in and then everybody had better pray, because it’s been a while since I did things with wires and electricity and circuit boards. 

[igotnextlies-blog]

We probably won’t make our deadline.

Martzi and I have been working whenever we can on our small romance game. But it’s been slow going when by day we’ve been producing and shepherding a PS4/Xbox One game through submissions and simultaneously dealing with E3 while enjoying some unexpected press and other accolades. 

But there has been progress! We’re not likely to finish in time for the game jam deadline, but insert long rant here about how I think game jams are great for inciting ideation and lousy for producing anything of substance. I’m grateful for the idea of a deadline to spur us to finally take some action on a long-discussed project, but we’re going to make a good game, and not one that will have to be done in 10 days.

And there are plenty of venues for us to show it.

I’ll talk more about the design and philosophy of how I like to work in branching narratives in an upcoming post, but the thing is shaping up to be pretty fluid. I’m not big on fair and balanced systems in emotional games. Why? Because game systems can sometimes be too rigid. People aren’t computers, and can’t be expected to behave like them. Deliberately having one branch be pretty heavy and informed by many stats while the other gets handwaved with one tends to simulate the complexity and irrationality of the human heart pretty well, I’ve leaned. It’s kind of an impressionist approach to systems design. 

We’ve decided to use TyranoBuilder for the project, mostly to take it for a test drive. It’s intuitive if somehwat idiosyncratic, and fairly extensible with some scripting, but we’ve chosen to honor the spirit of a jam and not stray too far, bending the tools within easy reach for most of it.

You may notice Second Life running in the background. This is kind of a lifehack/deliberate style choice. I’m not sure when you last checked in with Second Life, but for all the weirdo stuff in there, it’s also got a decent realtime render engine and some quality creators with work for pennies on the dollar. I bought the apartment we’re using as our main set, all the furniture, and the “lot” to park it on for about $25. Then I modded it (misspent youth in SL talking here, I have an avatar that just turned 11) and decorated the set and am shooting some test backgrounds. Much faster than painting or modeling in maya, much less aggravating than even image searching on google since I can shoot my set from all angles, adjust time of day, lighting, prop placement, and more. 

Took about an hour to place, light, and dress the set, and now we have lots of backgrounds. 

The words in the game are still a royal mess, though. 

[igotnextlies-blog]

//hello world

So I’m going to be making a couple things this summer for research, funsies, and other skunkworks projects. Here’s the list right now:

a secret video game distributed in fragments on USB keys

a short love game about crushes and things

oh yes, I suppose I’m making another ARG but NO SPOILERS HERE

But the two big ones that will get blogged here a lot are both custom hardware.

First, a mini arcade cabinet sourced mostly from retrobuiltgames hardware that we’re building ourselves like crazy people. 

It’s going to be a PICO-8 machine that will likely become a repository for lots of small jammed games from students and cool indie friends who are into restriction-based design challenges.

annnnnd

something that Martzi and I are calling an “story-based arcade machine” that will be a primary text and clip-art interface but with these key features:

a barcode reader

a thermal printer

some buttons

a radial encoder

a dark/light photo sensor

at least one other hidden input built into the custom 3D-printed enclosure

So I’m bad at keeping journals or logs, but I’ve been persuaded to keep a dev diary for this. And probably there will be lots of guests on this. Or who knows. Maybe this will be it. Though unlikely. It’s 5pm on a Friday and I’ve got energy drink, electronics, and some wood. Here we go.