The Ugly Game Behind the Scenes

So I made my first actual complete game for the "I can't draw but want to make a game (again)" game jam. The core purpose of which was to work with my daughter on developing some sort of creative skills. I'd chosen Ren'py as the tool to work with since I had fiddled around with it in the past and it would be a great tool to practice a number of skills.

Originally we were working on a game based off the 3 little pigs which was something with an easy foundation to build out. Then I saw this game jam starting in a week without a real barrier for entry and we bailed on the pigs. We had a good 4 days before the jam started to plan what it was we were going to craft. We talked about what programmer art was and settle on it being a game that might be ugly, but it works. Since duck's were a major theme of the jam, I paired the Ugly Duckling with this ugly game and focused on trying to figure out what I wanted out of it. 

I had to think about color schemes in games that were ugly since visual novels are basically art heavy and the ZX Spectrum color pallete just felt right. From there I remembered the fairly ugly Questprobe Fantastic Four and Incredible Hulk game and figured I might try and build an adventure style game. Never having attempted a kinetic novel before, I figured why not go for the triple whammy of unfamiliarity and built my game accordingly.  

The idea always dwelled on the black cartridge being able to find it's original owner all along. Go into any game store with classic game cartridges and you'll find one with some kid's name scrawled on it by their parental figure signaling that this game had an owner that cared about it at some point in time.   It's the perfect way to deface a game and from there the Ugly Game was born. This game cartridge would be something that would be able to move about and do it's best to find a place it belongs as if it were given some kind of sentience. The game would be picked on for being different by the other games. It would be an odd looking thing on a wall full of brighter cartridges.

The cartridge was a Tengen game cartridge for most of the prologue until I realized giving sentience to a game cartridge is a bit far fetched for a home console game. For those that don't know, Tengen manufactured off brand Nintendo cartridges for games that were mostly legal to play in the NES. They were black cartridges and truly looked bootleg. Black cartridge, black duck. It was all coming together. That's when I started thinking about the game moving and the Tengen cartridge just falls flat on it's face when you think about a NES game moving like that. I joked once to my daughter that the only reason it would be able to move about was because it had spider eggs inside of it from sitting so long in the highest corner of an undusted shelf. She was horrified that I was saving that as the ending reveal so I nixed that leaving an homage to the spider in one of the endings.

Plus most NES games are stacked on top of each other in displays so I felt it needed a new angle.

That's when I remembered rumble cartridges. For those who don't remember, a few games like Pokemon Pinball or Perfect Dark for the Game Boy came with special cartridges that rumble. They were black cartridges that bulged out and looked odd, especially when inside a Game Boy. So the Black Cartridge would be based on that. While every other cartridge was doomed to it's fate, the Black Cartridge would move towards it's goal of finding someone to play with it. 

I had originally tried to work on variables with if statements and the like. However, after a day or two of working on this I couldn't get the code to work like I wanted. I know it can work, I just have to sit down one day and really fuss about in the program. With all that wasted time, I did it the old fashioned way and stuck with writing the paths as unique. Unfortunately, the story lost a whole bunch of content because I had to spend so much time to make sure all the variables linked to each other.  A better developer than I would have knocked this out in minutes. It took me days. 

Meanwhile my kid is just cruising along with her story and crafting dead ends with her branches or crafting return statements and she is looking at me funny as I pull my hair out. 

So the Black Cartridge was formed. I wanted the other cartridges to have  some kind of sentience and personality, but I couldn't get focused on story telling while screwing up my code and fixing my kids. The Marcus and Lewis game was going to be a proud braggart type who spent it's life being played with by many children. It would often reminisce about all the different friends it had made over the years and the different owners that had played with it. The black cartridge was supposed to hate this game so much that it pushes the annoying cartridge over the edge and in to the kid's hands. The black cartridge not only wouldn't have been chosen, but would have been ignored for not one, but  two Marcus and Lewis games. Not sure how it would have worked, but I was thinking about it being ignored up on the top shelf because the newer version of Marcus and Lewis was more popular and thus justified it's place up high. 

Things that just get left on the drawing boards right?

For the game on the other side codenamed Haka, I wanted to make a strange foreign game that would have been just as ignored as the Black Cartridge but for a reason other than it just being weird looking. So it started out as Russian which was probably going to be Tetris, but I couldn't figure why a Tetris would be less loved than the ugly Black Cartridge. I then thought about those Japanese games that get imported and then get traded in. Whenever I see them in game stores, they are there in the same spot from January to December. So it was going to be this game that spoke passionately with great emotion to the black cartridge in complete gibberish because of the language barrier.  Since the type of game didn't matter, I wanted it to be something that made no sense as a video game. So I thought of an anime video game and remembered the worst possible choice of anime that would make for a game. So Haka is just Grave of the Fireflies the Video Game.

Using a piece of paper with boxes drawn on it, I was teaching the kid about scenario boxes and variables. So, the scenario would just wind up into a Rube Goldberg like situation where each move would lead to victory or failure. A joke around the house was how the video game was just going to be thrown back and forth across the room because of one ridiculous scenario after another while a pair of Mallrats just watched in confusion at the spectacle. There were going to be more customers too, but that just seemed like a distraction in the end. 

Characters had backstories that were going to be explored more like the gruff manager with the heart of gold. It all was mostly lost due to the time crunch. It was odd to have my daughter finish a full day ahead of me. So the last few days on this project were me trying to get everything that had been thrown together to work out on my game while testing hers.

The art was all done with a touch pad instead of a mouse because I wanted the lines to feel like they were drawn with fingers so that it felt sloppy. I tried to make it look sloppy as best as I could so that it fit in the theme, but most the art assets were made the day before it was due. So in a good way, a lot of the art assets were thrown together. In a bad way, a lot of the planned art just couldn't get created. By 1AM I figured I had put all I could in. My pointer finger hurt like crazy due to the fingerpad that's on this laptop. I swear it feels flatter.

The endings to the game were the last bit so they were cut waaaaay short. Mostly because I didn't do enough research on what I wanted to do. Ren'py's forums have some sample codes that I thought about using. The game's reveal was going to be Dapper Duck's Dress Up game back during the first draft which the kid would have thought boring before putting in Marcus and Lewis. I'd have to go another way though and went with Quickity Quack which my daughter came up with. The game was going to flash between memories of the father and the son each playing with it for the first time in the back of the car on the way home, but I just couldn't get that out. 

I thought it would have been a nice reminder of the Black Cartridge having this lovely memory come back to it now that it has a battery inside to recharge it. Also, not sure this came across in the final product but the black cartridge did all the movement by itself. As a sort of call back to the sentience of the game, when the battery gets put in nothing is being pulled out. I didn't really know where I wanted to go with that, but I did still want to think of this beaten up black cartridge as something special because of it's determination.

I'm not sure how people normally wrap these games (especially on games soooo much better than what I threw together), but hopefully I can find it in me to make another one of these since I did have a fun time creating with my kid.