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Weekly Update - AFC Retrospective, Dreamons?

2 years ago3,366 words

I've spent this week doing work on this side project which I'm tentatively calling Dreamons. I also revisited its predecessor, Alora Fane: Creation, for inspiration; it's such a tragedy I never widely released that! Maybe I finally should??

I know I should probably be focusing on Atonal Dreams instead of getting distracted like this, but as I said last time, I'm wondering whether I can use this shorter, less important thing as a way of practising the process of promotion... though I haven't actually done any promotion for it because I've been too distracted this week by worrying about things like going out for walks and improving my diet or just generally feeling frustrated by the professional 'help' (or lack thereof) I got last Monday (∞ which I wrote about a few days ago ∞). It'll take time to settle back down, or something.

(Though I've been struggling to get back to Atonal Dreams since like December...)



As I wrote about last week, this Dreamons thing is essentially a kind of spiritual successor to AFC (Alora Fane: Creation) - a thing I made in 2013/2014 with which you can make your own short RPG-style 'quests' - though I hadn't actually properly played that in forever. So I spent some time replaying my own AFC quests to remind myself of why I ever made it in the first place.

Disappointingly, though, most of the quests I ever made are just seconds-long feature tests rather than finished stories. Of the few finished quests I do have, several seem to have issues which make them 'crash' in the middle, which is frustrating since they used to work. Maybe the result of engine updates that broke previous features or something?




One that I did play through to the end - and which I consider a good example of both my original intentions for the game/tool and the reasons I never released it - is a silly thing called The Magic Sausage.



I vaguely recall it being met with discomfort due to being weirdly facetious: the protagonist is a woman who's been held captive for a decade and beaten daily by her 'husband', and she starts the game in her underwear, for example, all of which is treated as a silly joke.

I have no idea what place my mind was in to even come up with such a thing!

I know a part of it was inspiration from a common trope in Neverwinter Nights modules (which were what inspired AFC in the first place) where you'd find yourself in prison with no equipment; I liked starting from nothing like that, as essentially a blank slate, where every item you found really mattered and made a difference.

I don't know where the 'story' themes came from though. I know I was very mentally unwell at the time (I say as if that's ever not been the case), but what specifically was I thinking? I can't recall.

I think it was probably just a combination of the ambient culture of the time (lots of stuff that'd be called 'edgy' in hindsight) and my complete naivete regarding lived experience which meant I had no awareness of the pain such things can cause in the real world. Like someone who'd make dead baby jokes not because they'd laugh at actual dead babies, but because they had zero memories of even being around real babies or death of family members so the 'nice thing + horrible thing' contrast becomes as absurd as a crossdressing lumberjack (hmm, I wonder if that's regarded as problematic these days too, actually; I genuinely don't know).

I'd say it's embarrassing to look back on, but - unlike with a lot of things - I see it with a kind of detached curiosity more than anything.

There are lines like this:





Thinking back through the bleary fog of time, I think bits like that are at least likely manifestations of a horribly warped belief that men = bad and women = wonderful that I'd developed from the painful sausage fest that was Fig Hunter and the almost-as-painful lack of any female presence in my life? And maybe the themes about being imprisoned represented something subconscious, since I've continued to explore similar ideas through much of what I've made in recent years?

I wasn't really intending to write this post about things like that, but I suppose it's impossible to untangle them from my feelings about AFC in general. The main reason it never saw a release was because the stories I was trying to tell were too infused with probably-inappropriate humour and my personal issues, and I believed they'd be seen as 'problematic' due to reactions from the people I'd surrounded myself with, and I'd be crucified for them by a wider audience. It's something that still affects me a lot, and which has been interfering with moving Atonal Dreams to a release.



Disregarding the 'story' I definitely made up as I went along and saw as little more than silly nonsense, the structure of this quest reflects what I intended AFC to be: a 'bite-sized RPG' where you travel through tiny one-screen towns and 'dungeons' which felt like a distillation of the familiar RPG experience.



Along the way, you'd have simple, straightforward battles against plot-unrelated monsters in your path to progress, some of which were more boss-like but most of which were compulsory.



As you progressed, you'd grow as you would in an RPG, from wearing rags and clearing rats from someone's basement -



- to slaying gods with your magic sword and party of new friends, all in the space of about half an hour. The whole RPG experience, but with the padding stripped out.



I also liked setting things up as a kind of puzzle, so for example your path might be blocked by a monster which you'd only be able to survive against if you'd found the three half-hidden potions in the tiny area you had to explore. I liked the idea of making use of RPG gameplay tools like swords and spells to strategise and figure out or earn the correct way to proceed.

A deliberate and rigid approach, I suppose, and a response to the frustration I'd felt from other RPGs where you had a ton of free choice about how to build your characters, but none of it really mattered anyway because all options allowed you to mindlessly mow down hordes of foes over and over in a way I never found fulfilling.



I poured a lot of time and serious effort into two quests (one more than the other, I think, though my memories of this time are so foggy I don't know for sure), both of which I felt particularly embarrassed about due to them being negatively received back then.

Or at least I felt they were, though I suppose there are similarities with what happened a couple of months ago, where I was caught in a flare-up of mental illness due to other life things (like isolation, uncertainty about the future) so critical comments hit me much harder than they would have otherwise. It's tough to say.

I was reluctant to replay either of them since I assumed I'd cringe too painfully hard, but I managed to push through that just yesterday to play one which is just called Chapter 1, as I'm assuming it was meant to be the 'official story' of AFC or something (I can't remember).



It follows a ~shy artist girl~ with the very-player-unfriendly Irish name Caoimhe (pronounced something like 'KEY-vuh', obviously!), who... is a very unsubtle manifestation of my own quirks and neuroses which probably aren't exactly relatable - or appealing - to the average player.



Have you seen the recent Velma thing? I haven't, but lots of people hate it. One of the criticisms I've seen aimed at it is that the main character is basically just a stand-in for the creator, who everyone loves despite her churlish smugness and who always comes out on top. She - and the show in general - mocks groups like adult animation or Scooby-Doo fans, essentially the expected target audience. One source questioned who the thing was even for, the only apparent answer to which was her, the creator, and nobody else.

So would this story I made back then, and its protagonist, appeal to me and only me?

That's the concern I had - or developed based on reactions - back then, and which made me anxious going into it this time around.



I definitely got some cringing pangs as I played through the story and read the dialogue, though I was also largely relieved; it wasn't as bad as I thought.

I remember getting the same internal reaction when I replayed Taming Dreams a couple of years ago, which I'd developed similar concerns about during a period of mental darkness.

While Caoimhe embodies (exaggerated versions of) some of my traits and struggles, it's not as if she's a direct self-insert or anything. I made at least a bit of effort to make her her own character. And I'd like to think that she isn't an offputtingly obnoxious arsehole who insults the player... But obviously different people like different things. I don't know.



Some lines I'd written for her surprised me. Here, for example, she's asked why she can't cast Cure, and explains that it's because when she's wounded, she prefers instead to savour the pain so as to experience it, rather than just trying to get rid of it as soon as possible. This is kind of what's taught in mindfulness, but I don't think I'd ever even heard of mindfulness when I wrote this. It's also what I've heard some spiritual types claiming we manifest here into life for, to experience pain and suffering that we can't in the eternal light and love outside of it, just as we might play games to experience things we can't in real life. So I find it interesting that past-me was writing about such things.

One of the things I was cringing in anticipation about was the vague memory that I'd based some characters on the types of people I'd encountered on Fig Hunter (though not specific individuals), and that you beat them up as part of the story. While playing through, though, I was surprised by how little it resembled the judgement-warped memory; if anything, it made me laugh quite a bit. Here's a short video of the interaction:



I imagine that'd be interpreted as generic gamer caricatures or something? Which was the intention, I think. And while they're all buffoons, I wouldn't interpret anything about that - from my perspective here in the present - as offensive in any way, really. Less so than many men-mocking memes, anyway. If anything, everyone involved in that interaction is behaving in a very imperfect way that's hardly worthy of admiration or emulation. It's a comical exploration of human flaws rather than some kind of preachy moralising or anything.

(But then again, I'm not really the sort of person to look for whether fictional portrayals are offensive, so maybe people who are would see them differently.)

You could argue that the (ostensibly) shy and sensitive Caoimhe overpowering all three of them communicates some kind of objectionable message or something, but that's as much about gameplay necessity (the player overcoming obstacles) than anything.



I found the Sawyer character interesting, as it's been so long since I made or played this thing that I had little recollection of him. He's not just a caricatured representation of some belief I held at the time; if anything, he's more akin to the dangerous bad boy romance-fiction archetype who sweeps the average female protagonist out of mediocrity and into a life of adventure (though Caoimhe doesn't fit the corresponding archetype; she's not even clumsy!!). He has an edge to him, he's not nice, but he also cares. These days I'd probably be averse to writing a character like that due to the direction my mind's taken since then, but they're hardly rare in fiction.

There are aspects of his character that represent the 'feelings bad!' attitude I'd grown to despise from many people on Fig Hunter taking that approach with me (attacking me for being openly emotional, talking about how logic trumped feelings, etc), and I wouldn't exactly call the dialogue expertly-written, both of which can be seen in this example:



Though all things considered it could definitely be worse. The writing's better than MARDEK's, at least? Probably?

(And (in my opinion at least) it's not exactly worse than the other professionally-made RPGs I've been playing recently... Crisis Core's script hardly seemed like high art to me! Everything is highly imperfect depending on the angle you look at it from.)

Here's another conversation that I feel is better-written:



Interestingly, it's only Sawyer who really has anything resembling a character arc, with him pursuing this 'Storm Stag' which has manifested from lingering mental effects of a troubled past... though I wouldn't say that he develops at all as a result of any of it.



I wouldn't say Caoimhe has an arc in that she becomes a better person than she was at the start as a result of tackling adversity, but one detail I did like is that her emotional state during one point in the story is reflected in the gameplay mechanics,



and a conversation a bit later has her loyal pet dog try to comfort her, which also becomes a gameplay skill which can relieve the effects of her mental burdens. I'm proud that I was able to use the fairly simple mechanics of the battle system to interact with the narrative like that.

Annoyingly, I'd intended for this to be Chapter 1 of several, so it builds up to a climax but then ends on a cliffhanger. I wish I'd just made it as a standalone story!



Structurally, it's similar to the other one in that its progression is like the RPGs I'd grown up with: you start in a little town, then work your way through short dungeons filled with monster battles with a boss at the end, collecting items and growing stronger along the way.

AFC only allows you to include a limited number of 'rooms' (36 in total), but this only used 23. It took me like 90 minutes to play through, which is way longer than I expected! And much longer than I really intended for the quests made with the tool to be.

I quite like how despite the time it occupied me for, the quest file itself is just 45kb, smaller than any of the images included in this post.



So that was a look into the past. But what about the present, the thing I've been working on recently?

I wrote about it last week, including a link to ∞ a public post on my Patreon with more details ∞.

Since then, I've been working towards getting all the major features working, most of which involve customisation in some way.

For example, you can specify two colours (from a large but limited number of options) for the sky, which - together with also selecting colours for the tileset - can drastically alter the feel of a given room:





You can also recolour - or completely redraw - pixel icons for items:



And these can be used to interact with conversations:



Simple props like rocks and plants use an editor where you specify the model type and up to four colours for it:




I also added some simple clothing items, which work the same way, where you specify a model and up to four colours for it. These can then be acquired and equipped.



I got wondering while doing all this though... Is this something most players would even want? Personally I do like creative customisation in theory, and I enjoy the challenge of developing these features, but...

I replayed my old quests partly because I was wondering about this, and what I noticed was that I tended to use mostly the 'premade' items and things that came with AFC even when options for more customisation were available.

But I also made those in the first place so I suppose there was already a feeling of ownership or mine-ness there. Would a player who didn't make them be more inclined to make their own equipment etc if they had the option?

I also tried making a new quest for the first time in years (I didn't get very far with it though), and with that I was eager to assemble the world and story; having to create or customise assets might have felt like an annoying barrier.

I know it'd be wiser to play other people's AFC quests to get a better idea of what minds other than mine want to actually do with the thing, but I've always been weirdly reluctant about that for several stupid reasons I blame on my generally broken mind. Probably something I need to push through...



I know at least some people played AFC, but I don't remember how; did I post it to my website? Just share it directly with a few people? I imagine it got leaked to at least some Flash portals, maybe.

But I never formally and officially released it, which feels like a tragedy to me now. I wonder whether it could have had as big of an impact as MARDEK, maybe even bigger? Ehh, no point dwelling on it though.

I've mentioned a few times over the past couple of years that I'd like to port some of my old Flash games to Steam... but I never get around to it because I'm always busy doing other stuff, mostly working on Atonal Dreams. Plus my past experiences trying to get the old technology to work have just led to frustration (like having to dig up old Flash versions on dodgy websites and then they don't even open my .fla files anyway because it says 'incompatible file', ugh).

Since I've been struggling to focus anyway though and I've been recently inspired by replaying AFC, maybe I should try again next week to see if I can figure out a port? Would anyone actually be interested in that?

Though... I never considered the game finished. There are bits that'd need tweaking, and I feel weird about returning to Flash to do that.

And I suppose the main reason I never released it back then was because I wanted to include some 'official quests', but would things like the two I've described here be enough? Would they just be off-putting or reputation-ruining?? I'd only want to include my own quests for legal reasons, but...

Bleh, I don't know. This morning, I felt I was onto something, but now that I've typed all this out I feel very uncertain.

Would you be interested in a port of AFC? Do you think anyone else would? Should I just focus on the Dreamons thing? If so, what should it even include? What would players want? Or did I have things right with AFC and I should just make a direct remake of that instead?? Or or or???

Decisions, decisions!! How terrible I seem to be at making those!



In other news, the USA DEFINITELY AND FOR CERTAIN SHOT DOWN TWO UFOS IN THE PAST COUPLE OF DAYS AND WE'RE ON THE CUSP OF AN INTERGALACTIC WAR AND-