Where's my game?

Nowhere in sight.

And not any time soon.

Ok, I just want a preface effectively saying: don't listen to me about making video games. I have very little to showcase that I know at all what I'm talking about.

With that out of the way, I still want to write down some probably dumb thoughts I have on the motivation of making games, and what kinds of games I would want to make if I had more skill. Additionally there's an overlapping element that factors into what games I'm motivated to play, and want to play.

There are what feel like a billion 2D platformers, 2D metroidvanias, and that's not even scratching the surface of things. I still play some new ones, but I don't play anywhere near a large fraction of the ones that are constantly coming out or have come out. An aside: if the only release is on itchio, I basically just don't play it, because I never look at or hear about it. Nothing against itchio, I see it as taking the mantle of responsibility Newgrounds had back in the day, and it's also great to unify hosting for all the various gamejam type games. Bringing it back towards the point I started with: I was there, man, and played a ton of those very small and often very experimental flash games. There were tons of them, then, too, and not just on Newgrounds. It might have even felt like billions, too, but it was at least hundreds of thousands of them.

I'm not going to say I've seen it all, but I've seen a lot of it.

So, point 1 that cuts my motivation, both in thinking about making something, and in thinking about playing something: is it something I've already seen/played before? Like, a lot like something? I don't even have to name the specific thing, if it feels like a gestalt of things I vaguely remember from way back then, it puts me off.

Independent of gameplay, I can typecast just by genre. The market is over-over-saturated by 2D platformers. I don't want to spend a year+ of my life making a really good one (a basic one for learning purposes in much much less time, maybe), and the ones I'm going to play need to have something that really makes them stand out.

That brings me to sub-point 1a: what overcomes my reluctance? It's simple: uniqueness and/or charm in some other dimension.

Most often, especially for 2D games, this is accomplished via art style. Some 3Dish games too; Dordogne is a super beautiful and boring game I love entirely carried by its art. I avoid almost all pixel art games because they all look the same, and most of them aren't even faithful to the pixel art medium, or even confident enough in their pixels to use it for the game's main hero image and icon. As soon as you're using your engine's dynamic light source feature to dynamically recolor and reshade your pixels, you've all but lost me on the art. You might win me over on some other metric, but that's a big one.

Low-poly N64 and PS1/PS2 era games have started to become more popular, I'm still a sucker for those, in part because they don't feel as over-saturated as pixel art games. Recently, "Lil Gator Game", while in many ways stretching the "low", and while not in many aspects an amazing game, was still something I loved because of its strong art style and other aspects.

Similarly I'm a sucker for boomer shooters, but this has at least as much to do with those classic mechanics, if not more, than with their art styles.

I could go on about all the games that are basically clones and do nothing new for the genre gameplay wise that I still end up loving, but I think my point has gotten across. What hasn't gotten across: I absolutely suck at art. I don't have a distinct "style" I can lean on to cover flaws in other areas. When I say "I want to make a game", I really mean "I want to make a solo game", and unfortunately, it's going to look like crap for most of its existence, so it had better be great in other ways. Of course this is self-defeating in many ways.

It does suggest some unlettered advice for indies though: if you also don't have a distinctive art style, and you're adding to the infinite pool of pixel art 2D whatevers.. don't expect much attention without something more. Maybe you can pivot and find an artist to do a hand-drawn style, or just a different style than pixels, or even move into 3D.

Of course, maybe you have a good combination of setting and solid (even if not particularly unique) mechanics that can carry you, e.g. I quite enjoyed Axiom Verge. And it did have some cool stuff I'm not sure I've seen elsewhere -- at least exactly, I mean I can pick out the higher level pattern of many metroidvanias of "acquire new power that lets you bypass this barrier that was previously not bypassable". Doing that in a cool and setting-believable way though is nice, rather than just copying whatever some other game did with a lazy dash teleport.

Good music always helps, too. For some people it's a deal-breaker, even, for me it's a nice bonus and I think best used to help make the setting more subtly believable. There are a lot of cheap tricks that can be done here, too, I think.

Now let me raise another point on uniqueness. Or rather, lack of uniqueness. This is much more common in the AA/AAA game level. And it's this: I see your same-as-everyone-else character animations and rigging, lighting, and even assets that come straight from Unity or Unreal defaults/widely available extensions. Sometimes you have used those tools skillfully, but so often, there's a level of clunk to them, because they fundamentally weren't designed for your game, nor did you apparently try to push them or modify them enough to try and close that gap.

There are basically 0 great Souls-like games made in the Unreal engine, and a huge part of that is pure gameplay, most noticeable I think as a failure of mechanics and animations. Lies of P is maybe an exception, and even then, it's a Bloodborne clone more than Souls. Waifu Souls (Code Vein) is maybe another exception, carried by the power of anime. The Unreal engine is amazing, no doubt, but it leaves its distinctive mark on everything it touches and if a game just leaves it there, it makes it very uninteresting in a lot of ways, and worst when bugs around way over-flappy cloth physics for instance aren't even attempted to be dealt with, I wonder what other things the studio just threw its hands up and said "meh" to. (Related, Rockstar's JSON fiasco.)

This suggests another avenue for indies and bigger studios alike, and an avenue I'd prefer to take myself (given more skill and so on): use your own, custom engine. Even if it's not as advanced, or even buggier, than the established options, it will still be different, it will look and feel different, and that alone can be attention grabbing. Same thing when it comes to 3D: Blender is an amazing tool, should be the first one reached for, but maybe consider other tools, and maybe consider writing a simple modeler just for your game. It'll be different, and different is what I want to make and see, as a higher value than the normal values used to judge how good a game is.

Nier Automata wouldn't have been the amazing game it was if it was made in Unreal. It could have been made in Unreal, but it would have suffered for it.

Now: again, don't listen to me above. If you just want to make and ship a game, and don't have this weird hangup over different-ness that I have (I don't want to call it "originality", because it's not quite the same thing, but I do think about John Nash's obsession with that concept (I think he had it, but I might have gotten the image from A Beautiful mind, which wasn't entirely accurate on him)...), then please, by all means, use these amazing tools that have made game development more accessible than ever.

For myself, I suggest the same thing, too: if all I want is to make and ship a game, just use godot, man. But apparently, that's not all I want. (Sure, if I ever collaborate again with someone(s) on a game, or join a company to make a game, I expect we'll be using largely standard and popular tools and languages, and seek out libraries that solve problems for us rather than doing everything ourselves.) Part of the joy for me in programming, and even in my crude attempts to make other forms of art, is the solo aspect of it, and the learning aspect of it, and the reinventing-square-wheels-to-better-appreciate-round-ones aspect of it. I like to see how things are or could be implemented under the hood. I want to use Lisp for everything, too. But, yeah, the world doesn't really need another A* implementation anymore than it needs another generic 2D platformer, and Lisp's not going to be a top 5 popularity lang any time soon, and my rate of learning without extrinsic motivation (e.g. a job) is kind of low.

(An aside on 2D platformers, or 2.5D ones even, I hear the Mario Wonderland game on the Switch is excellent. I've also heard that every level is jam packed with innovative and interesting ideas. Eat your hearts out, entire rest of the 2D indie scene, when Nintendo, an old and not too innovative company, can still outdo you all on this dimension, by a large margin.)

There was this amazing and beautiful blog post written a while back, I read it several months ago. I agree with so much of it, and yet I also disagree with so much in a subtle way. I think a lot of it comes down to this paragraph near the start:

I make games that I like. None of them have felt like homework. I think they’re good, and I’m proud of them. Most of them I put together in a couple dozen hours apiece. I don’t make any money doing it, so if that’s your goal then this piece probably won’t be that useful to you. But if your goal is also to make games that you like and are proud of, I think my thoughts might be helpful.

With no disrespect to the author, I don't like your games. I'll leave the dislike at that. I do not think you should feel bad about them in any way! You should feel proud of making them! Making anything is something that should elicit the feelings of pride, right? While I might point out that they're situated in an over-over-crowded market, I don't at all think they shouldn't exist or have no value. Again, I'm just some random internet guy with a probably-defective pride and passion sensor.

And I'm kind of just a cynical hater sometimes. I occasionally browse the xbox store page's released games sorted by date. Not to see what's new that might be interesting, but to see what trash is being put up on the store, a lot of it even daring to ask for money. And there's a lot of trash, a lot of low-effort asset-flip trash too, and some with the gall to have really predatory looking microtransactions/micro DLC. It's gross, mostly on an aesthetic level, and I hate that there's so many of those games. (I used to look at mobile games more too but so much of that just rubs me wrong ethically as well as aesthetically.)

Yet I also think the people who go through the effort, even if it's "low effort", to make such things and publish them, are better than me. They've made something at all to put up there, I haven't, I'm just a complainer and hater.

That's basically the crux of it: if I made anything like those games, I'd hate them too, hate myself more, and wouldn't feel proud of making them, and every moment while making them would be filled with thoughts like "why am I even bothering, this is trash, there's nothing new about it, am I having fun making trash?"....

My question to myself is: is there any game I can make, small or large, where I won't think this way? I'm not so sure. The best I can do, and maybe this is leaning into the post's cheeky point 13, is distract myself from these thoughts by having fun. And I do have fun in my spare time, making little game ideas or other non-game ideas, I do program still for fun. But I don't think it's enough to carry to any finish line. For that, I think the answer is "just do it ya wimp" style thinking, nothing else will do. "Motivation" is not a valid excuse or useful mental model when it comes to actually finishing something.

The two points in that beautiful essay most relevant to my struggles are 6 and to a lesser extent 12. But 6 is not a way out, which brings me to: it's not just different-ness that matters!

I think this is basically false:

The good news is that most “originality” is just remixing other peoples’ ideas in surprising ways. Copying one game you like is boring. But if you copy ideas from ten games you like, plus two comic series and one sci-fi novel trilogy, the resulting game will feel personal and special. So play lots of games! Read books and comics, watch movies and TV, listen to music. Foster interests outside of art, make friends, live a full life. You’ll be surprised how many colors on your palette you suddenly have to paint with.

I'm not saying we don't live in a remix culture, we do. But if you just pluck things from here and there, and mix, that doesn't make it good, it doesn't even make it better than a simpler rip-off of 1 or 2 things. And it doesn't even make it all that different most of the time anyway; this is not a reliable recipe to get the desired product of more originality. Worse, if I, a player, see all of your influences, because they're so shallow and so lazily mixed, I have a very negative reaction. Homages are kind of cool, sometimes, but if your whole game is just "homage after homage", well, there's not much you in it, to say the least.

The "live a full life" shit is also shit. Let's face it, some of the best games ever made have been made by 20-somethings. This can be you, too, random 20-something person for some reason reading this. This can even be you, random 30- or 40-something person, it's not too late, don't give up!

I will say, if your game is served well by being "authentic", then make it authentic. A "lived experience" or even a "full life" can maybe help with that, in the "write what you know" sense some authors give as advice, but they're slow and unnecessary ways. Like, if your game is loosely set in ancient Egypt, a classic if somewhat rare nowadays style choice spanning multiple game genres, then even if it's a rather simplistic game like "Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy", research at least enough so that at least it doesn't feel like you slapped it together based on the typical half-remembered factoids most people got from K-12 and maybe browsing wikipedia for a day. Similarly with pirates: just because your game ship has a black skull flag and sails around and maybe some characters even say arr, doesn't make you a pirate game. Risen 2, despite its flaws, is quite a good pirate game, and no one even says arrr.

That essay's point 12, on perfectionism, I've written about multiple times here already. I don't think it's too relevant to my current status, I'm quite happy to compromise on perfection or the idea of a masterpiece. Some people won't be, but maybe that's a good thing.

...

All this post is really meant to say: someone please make a good Star Fox 64 Meets Panzer Dragoon rails shooter, so I can stop fantasizing about making one myself. Failing that, please just make more rail shooters, it's very much a non-saturated market and I'll play basically anything with substance. (Space Harrier clones and SNES Star Fox clones are at the bottom of the list though, sorry.) I even played DC League of Super-Pets: The Adventures of Krypto and Ace and more or less enjoyed it. Please.

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Posted on 2024-09-23 by Jach

Tags: personal, rant

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