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Wavelengths: A silly game thing

7 years ago4,977 words

I find myself making creative things quite often as a distraction from unappealing university work and my broken mind. What I've been making recently is all over the place, but here are a few recent examples for the curious.

My mental health is still very poor. But I'm not going to talk about that here. I do keep getting the feeling that the biggest thing I've learned here at university is how incapable I am of fitting in with other people, of finding and keeping good relationships... And that's something that continues to torture me every day. I've been wondering whether to just drop out, accept that I'm incompatible with the world and just go and live alone, spending my lonely time making things, in my bubble. Because that's all that I seem to be comfortable with. I'm not saying that's what I'll do, but the thoughts definitely bubble up, constantly.

It's because I'm finding the university work draining to even think about - I'm becoming jaded about the dry, analytical approach of science - but whenever I have the time and the energy, I end up immersing myself in creative projects. Perhaps a life spent doing just that wouldn't be so bad? I don't know. Or maybe it's just because I'm doing it for procrastination rather than for work. It's a sad fact that the more we have to do something, the more we probably dislike the very thought of it. Probably.

That's why I've not been approaching recent creative work with a, well, work mentality. It used to be that I'd work on projects with the ultimate, idealistic aim of finishing them, releasing them, making a career of it, making money, but that's failed so consistently so far that I'm not even bothering to entertain the fantasy anymore. I don't know whether I'll stick with any of the things I'm making, the things I'm showing. They're very much just the result of my mind wandering, of following my whims. I'm not thinking about them like a businessman. Nor am I making them for anyone else. Still, perhaps someone will get something out of them anyway.

Here's a screenshot of the thing I'll eventually get around to describing, so then it'll show up as the preview image for this post:



It's sort of come out of nowhere; I had no idea it'd even exist about five days ago. But it's now a working-ish template of a game; you can actually play it yourself if you want, from a link I'll provide at the end.

But I want to go back a bit first. I never know who's actually interested in me rambling about my creative work, since I know that a lot of people are aware of me because of my games, but it's been so long that I've finished and released anything that I don't know if people see me as a games developer or creative type anymore. Maybe they just see me as someone who writes moody blog posts about my problems, or something. But I 'enjoy' writing about the things I make, so I'm going to indulge myself for my own sake.

About a month ago, I worked on something I called ∞ Divine Dreams ∞. I've not done anything on that in a while, mostly because depression and university work got in the way. It's often in the back of my mind, though, and I've been wanting to add new conversations, and to introduce the remaining characters.

I felt though that first I should vary the poses and expressions of the characters in the current 'episodes' - which was always the intention - but I got frustrated at my lack of artistic skill, or confidence, when the alternate poses didn't turn out as nice-looking as I'd hoped. Or when my perception of the current art shifted towards scathingly negative, doubting anyone could possibly like it, imagining the things people might think about me for drawing the way and the things that I do. I wonder how many other artists feel that way? Wondering how others will judge them based on their art style or subject matter?



Like this, for example. I'd worry - or rather, I am worried - that people would see Gemma's unnecessarily shapely bosom and essentially assume that I objectify women, and that any actual woman who saw such a thing made by me would immediately put me in an undesirable category and want nothing to do with me. I notice that a lot of male artists make 3D models of women with almost flat chests, and usually wonder whether it's because they want to avoid accusations of sexualising or objectifying them (though that probably says more about how I think than about how they do). I can only wonder how artists who essentially draw porn have the self-confidence to post that online, associated with their name and everything. Perhaps they already have enough admiration from others in the real world that they don't need to be insecure or worried about the hypothetical reactions of strangers? Or perhaps they just simply don't care. I don't know. Some people just seem quite open about the kinds of things that please them, though. Ogling people, saying "he's hot", filling their walls with posters of shirtless studs or busty bikini babes. Shockingly, I've never done that myself.

I did make that Eugene character look less weirdly gaunt and old, though. So that's something.

Anyway, I was getting annoyed that my art wasn't turning out like I wanted it to, but I've been dabbling in 3D modelling for much of this year, so I wondered whether it'd be easier to take that route. While it seems much harder to model, skin and rig a character than to do a static 2D drawing, once the model is made, adding new poses to it is much easier (for me) than drawing the same character consistently. It'd also allow me to do more dynamic shots, to add more life to the thing.

I'd already modelled Gemma a while back, for ∞ this cringeworthy thing ∞ that activates far more of those judgement-fears than the previous screenshot, but which I'll include an old screenshot of anyway:



I have mixed feelings about how those models look, especially in regards to proportions (not just the cartoonish balloon breasts, but things like the head and waist, limb thickness, etc). They don't have the same feeling as the more stylised Divine Dreams characters. So rather than just reusing that one, I tried to make that character again from scratch, using the Divine Dreams art as a direct reference:



I ended up spending days just trying to understand 'shaders', though; an aspect of 3D graphics I'd never given much thought to before. They're... things that determine how light interacts with objects, and can be used to produce 'toon-like' outlined effects (as in the two models on the left here), amongst other things. They're written using a rather esoteric type of programming (in Unity at least, which is what I've been using), and while I was able to wrap my head around the basics, I wasn't able to get the exact results that I might have wanted. Her leggings have the wrong colour outline in the 'toon shaded' examples here, and the ones with more 'regular' shading look a bit bland or lifeless.

I was also unsure about the faces. They're flat and just painted on - unlike the modelled faces in the other screenshot - which allowed for what I felt were more simply expressive (rather than uncanny) emotes, but they still feel a bit wrong.

Something that kept coming to mind when making these was the idea of neoteny: essentially, how humans, compared to species like chimpanzees, retain many childlike physical features into adulthood, and how exaggeration of childlike features is the key to making something look cute. Big eyes, soft faces, large heads and short limbs, things like that. My art tends towards cute because I feel that it's nicer and more emotionally expressive, as opposed to gritty realism which is unappealing to me. But then I wonder how many people would see my art and work as childish, puerile, as a result of this. How many people would reject it because 'it looks like it's for children'. I imagine some people reject Pixar films for that reason.

Contrast that look with this random mobile game I played a bit recently:



I wonder if people would be more inclined to interpret that gritty, aggressively 'realistic' look with something less embarrassing to be seen playing on public transport? I just see it as the sort of thing that young boys would think was cool or 'awesome' or whatever, a power fantasy, and I roll my eyes at it. It doesn't really appeal to me. Having this kind of style is no barrier to me enjoying media - I suppose the recent Final Fantasies have had this kind of look - but it does bother me to think that despite being rather puerile on a thematic level, it might be more likely to be accepted than something that looks like it's 'for children'. Goodness and befriending are childish, smirking empowered slaughter is what we must grow into. Or maybe all of this is just nonsense, not true at all. Obviously I think too much about how my creative work will be perceived, and try to guess based on what I know, but obviously there's a lot I don't know and I do live in a bubble!

Anyway. I never really got very far with that ostensibly cuter 3D model of Gemma. I did make a derivative one of Oneira...



...but it looked sort of... off, in a few ways. Hard to put into words. It doesn't really feel like her. Eh. Maybe this style could have worked, but I decided to rest on it for a few days, to see it with new eyes, while I worked on other things like assignments.

While procrastinating one day last week, I randomly remembered another game I'd started making years ago, called Clarence RPG. I never got very far with it, but it comes to mind occasionally because it still makes me laugh.



I think it's the first game I made where I tried to get away from the typical violence-based combat system that the overwhelming majority of games assume is the only way to do things. Rather than attacking using fire, ice, lightning, etc, you'd tell a joke, flirt, ogle, and these skills would have 'flavours' based around the primary emotions. Characters also had moods instead of status effects, and it amused me just drawing the expressions for them for each character. I just found the whole thing hilarious, conceptually; rather than delving into a deep dungeon, slaying goblins and dragons to find some powerful artefact, you'd pop to the shop, have a string of 'awkward encounters' along the way - which involved making old ladies cry and dogs get aroused - all to pick up a bottle of milk. It was silly.

Eventually it turned into the whole Alora Fane thing, with its sentiments and so on, which was sort of like a middle-ground between the two, but I feel that by making the emotions system more serious, it lost the kind of silly appeal that's kept Clarence RPG rooted in the back of my mind for years.

It was quite mean-spirited though, story- and concept-wise... and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. The characters were all deliberately amoral, and perhaps gaining pleasure out of putting your opponents through emotional - rather than physical - abuse could be seen as sadistic (odd, that; how gaining pleasure out of simulated violence would be fine, but something like this might be more questionable).

I don't know why I stopped working on it. Interests shifted, I suppose. I can't remember.

Another project that keeps resurfacing in my mind is something called Wavelengths, which I suppose must have come not too long after Clarence RPG? It's built on the emotions system, sort of, and I think it was probably the first game I made which focused on building rapport rather than whittling down some kind of health substitute. Constructing, rather than destroying.



I see that I already mentioned it in that other awkward post from a while back, which I suppose shows how it continues to influence what I do these days despite never really coming to much itself. I think I only worked on it for like a week or two, and I gave it up largely because the mechanics revolved entirely around branched conversations, which would have been hell to write. The point was that you'd have three characters - Gemma, Erin and Thomas - who were paranormal investigators, who went to people's houses and solved their mysteries by essentially befriending characters. Each of your characters would have their own personalities and approaches to situations, and the key would be to choose the most appropriate/effective for the person you were talking with. Sometimes Erin's empathy was best, other times Thomas's tough critique was, and, well, I suppose it all tied into what's been a years-long frustrated fascination with how social dynamics work, born of a lot of people saying very unhelpful things to me and getting annoyed when they didn't get the results they might have wanted.

It was called Wavelengths because of an idea that parallel dimensions occupy the same space as ours but on different frequencies, and that paranormal experiences are the result of frequency overlap (not something I'd support really, but it seemed interesting enough for fiction), but also the idea of 'being on the same wavelength' as someone else, seeing things from their perspective.

It seemed a nicer concept than Clarence RPG in that regard, but it just would have been too hard to make. I did eventually end up sort-of combining the emotion-JRPG-'combat' and rapport-building in Taming Dreams' runes system, though, which I'm still really fond of (despite one of the thorn-in-my-mind comments the Android version got which said the 'battle system' was 'unoriginal'... compared to what??). It was all about understanding rather than overpowering, and it was a novel system born from my interest in personality types like Myers-Briggs, but compressed into more manageable game mechanics. Rather than being INFJ, a character might be Afx because they're very Abstract rather than Realistic, more Feeling than Tough, and in the middle in terms of Jolly and Grave. If you're not already familiar with Taming Dreams (and I wonder how many people who'll read this aren't?), I suppose this isn't really making sense, but... I suppose it's a difficult concept to describe!

Oh, one final thing. I've been playing a mobile game called Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow pretty much every day since its release. It's mostly due to feelings of loyalty and routine at this point. I don't know if I'd say I 'enjoy' it, but I play around with it for a few minutes in bed before I get up or go to sleep, and I suppose it feels like it'd be sad to give that up.



It's one of those city-builder games that are apparently quite common? The only other one I've played though is The Simpsons: Tapped Out, years ago, and the main reason I got this one was because of my mediocre but unobjectionable experiences with that (before I accumulated too many characters and it just became a chore to maintain). There's a Family Guy one too, I think, but I've never played it.

The 'main' focus of the game is to build a town using buildings and decorations and things from the show, and to collect characters who wander the streets, sending them on time-based tasks to accumulate currency to buy more buildings to get more characters etc. Unlike Tapped Out, though, it has a feature where you can send parties of characters out on missions to planets, to progress the plot and for various rewards. (Or maybe Tapped Out has since added such a thing? I haven't looked at it in years.)



Each mission has a map of these interlinked nodes, with branching paths, which are often blocked unless you bring a certain character along. Each node triggers a JRPG-like battle, with these sprite-based graphics (presumably inspired by ∞ this episode ∞).



These battles are incredibly simple - characters only have one attack and a special technique, and your only real involvement is selecting a target or triggering those special techniques when they've charged up - but not unappealing, to me at least. I wouldn't say I have fun with them, but I think they're the reason I've stuck with this game for months because there's an element of simple reward and purpose to them that Tapped Out lacked for me. Plus I suppose it adds to the nostalgia fix I'm already getting, by reminding me of the JRPGs I've both played and made as well as Futurama.

I also find it conceptually amusing imagining characters entirely unsuited to such things all going on missions together and fighting hordes of opponents. Rather than Fry, Leela, and Bender going on delivery missions as usual, you might have the frail Professor, Hedonismbot, ∞ some old cat lady ∞, and Scruffy (the janitor) venturing out together to throw cats and grapes at space bees until they die. I can only wonder what their interpersonal interactions would be like during the journey. Would they be friends?? It engages the same silly part of my mind that made Clarence RPG appealing to me, though it doesn't really play with that absurdity, and being able to bring anyone along is more of a game mechanic than a thematic element.

As with so much comedy though, the interactions between characters are largely acerbic; I suppose it's funny to see people trade barbs? Futurama itself had some moving moments, but I suppose they wouldn't be appropriate for the hardly-the-focus interactions between characters in this that serve only to trigger quests.

Anyway. That's a bunch of rambling about various 'ingredients' that all came together in my mind last week and led to the creation of the thing I've been working on for the past three or four days.

I was playing that Futurama game, thinking about the appeal of collecting characters and going on these space missions, and how each character has a ∞ class/job thing ∞ roughly based on what the primary characters did in the show. Fry is a Delivery Boy, Leela is a Captain, The Professor and Amy are Scientists, Bender is a Robot... They're equivalent to RPG classes like Warrior, Wizard and Rogue, but using a different paradigm, which is always something that I like. Seeing something familiar from a different conceptual angle while keeping it mechanically similar. There are only seven classes though, and the non-primary characters tend to be assigned ill-fitting ones because of it; Smitty (a policeman) and a Horrible Gelatinous Blob are both Delivery Boys, for example.

I started wondering about what classes I might use for some of my own real-world-rooted characters (Gemma, Erin, those ones, not any from, say, MARDEK where it's already sort of clear). This led to wondering whether I could actually make a similar game to the Futurama one myself, or at least a basic bare bones version, simply for the fun of it, with no intention of releasing it or anything. Just playing around, for curiosity and pleasure. I started idly drawing a small pixelated sprite of Gemma, just to see what it might look like.



I actually really liked how it turned out! (Though the chest movement in this walking animation - meant to show the torso moving from side to side to prevent it looking stiff - perhaps looks like her boobs are jiggling, which triggers the same concerns I had about the other art...) I used to struggle making sprites, but I suppose it felt comfortably familiar since I'd got a lot of that struggling out of the way years ago. I was reminded of how back when I was a little child, I'd draw pixel sprites in Paint before the internet was even a thing (or at least it wasn't what it is now), before I knew anyone else had any interest in them, and memories of those more innocent times added to the appeal.

It's also what reminded me of Clarence RPG, since I felt that the style was similarish. That led to wondering what it'd be like if I drew various mood emotions for her, as in that game, which was amusing. That led to wondering whether I could use similar 'battle' mechanics to Clarence RPG, and whether I could use the same paranormal investigators setting as Wavelengths, but the runes-based rapport-building from Taming Dreams, and a gameplay structure inspired by the Futurama game.



I envisioned a sort of house thing where you'd collect the characters (which they'd use as a base for their paranormal investigating), rather than a city, since I have no real interest in something on that scale, and having a more intimate focus - as with a house - allows for more visible character interactions. I made it so they wander around randomly, and talk to one another, triggering the mood emotes (currently at random, though I've an urge to make them based on actual personalities). I find it interesting to just watch; the same kind of curiosity as a fish tank, maybe.

I've used the Divine Dreams characters, though I'm not sure whether to stick with that in its old long-conversation-based format, or to reenvision it as this. Perhaps the house would be the temple, then? I wonder.

The primary focus though was these 'battles', based conceptually - ridiculously - on awkward social encounters.



They're sort of like a combination of the 'battle' systems of Clarence RPG and Taming Dreams, with a few differences.

Characters have these 'runes' - the same ones as Taming Dreams - that represent their personalities, and their skills are more or less effective based on similarity to the target's rune, their own, and the skill's rune. So an AFG person using an F skill on an RFJ person would be very effective because the RFJ person feels that the AFG 'gets' them by using an F approach, but if the AFG used an A skill, it'd be very poor because A is the opposite to R. Surely this makes tons of sense and requires no more explanation.

Each skill has a 'flavour', which are something like a combination of the Clarence RPG and Taming Dreams ones. Taming Dreams had the six Alora Fane cyclic sentiments: Courage, Fear, Bliss, Destruction, Creation, and Sorrow, each of which is effective against itself and the one next in the sequence, and weak to the previous one. I still like those, but they're quite fantasy-ish, I feel. Clarence had more comically mundane ones, in four opposing pairs: Angry-Friendly, Happy-Sad, Sexy-Disgust, and Hunky-Scary. Sexy and Hunky were sort of like gendered versions of the same thing, and Disgust seemed a bit lowbrow (despite it being one of the primary emotions, supposedly), so I've compressed them into three opposing pairs for this: Friendly-Angry, Happy-Sad, and Sexy-Scary. Roughly, they represent the degree of social harmony, the affective mood, and the degree to which you're drawn to or repulsed by someone. Psychology! I find them quite neat, though I don't know if anyone else gets the same pleasure out of these kinds of tidy, sensible, widely-encompassing but succinct categorisation systems that I do.

The moods correspond to those six 'flavours', and generally you're more susceptible to a flavour - and better at using it - if you have the matching mood. You're better at using Angry skills when you're Raging, for example, and are more affected by others' Angry skills too... but you're worse at using - and affected less by - Friendly skills. It's hard to be moved by Friendliness, or to be Friendly, when you're angry. You also can't have opposing moods; Crying (the Sad mood) would override Laughing (the Happy one), and vice versa. Though it is possible to be simultaneously Angry, Crying, and Aroused, which amuses me. I think the silliness of things like that is the main reason this project appeals to me. I don't expect anyone else to share that fondness, though.

Characters in Clarence RPG had 'Obnoxiousness' and 'Charisma' stats, and the flavours were divided into Annoying and Nice categories, with the former being fuelled by the Obnoxiousness stat and the latter, of course, by Charisma. They were devised as equivalents to the physical/magical stats typical in fantasy games. They both just whittled down the opponent's willpower, though. In this, I've taken that a step further, where building rapport with opponents is the goal, but it can go into the negatives, too. You can 'defeat' opponents either by building a good positive rapport with them - at which point they leave you in peace - or you can annoy them so much that they run away. Alternating between annoying and charming the same person would be counterproductive though; you'd be undoing your own efforts. So it adds an element of thought and strategising, I think. I don't know if it's appealing or just annoying to other people though. I tend to enjoy these things on the conceptual level (in case that isn't obvious by now) rather than on a mechanical level, so people who see this purely mechanistically might not find it enjoyable.

As in Clarence RPG, the people you face are essentially archetypes/stereotypes, but this is... potentially problematic. For several reasons! Any kind of stereotype runs the risk of being offensive, no matter how innocuous. I'd hope for them to be 'playful' in a recognition-evoking but not mocking kind of way, but... well. For one thing, I don't actually know much about current stereotypes/fads/subcultures/whatever. Are hipsters still a thing? What do they look like? I had to google it, use references. Not just for how they look, but the skills they use too. Maybe someone more anchored in the real world would see my designs as comically out of touch.

Also, I felt that calling the archetype meant to represent a generic everyman "Bloke" was fitting, and it was easy to imagine the kind of look and traits of such a person since they seem so abundant (in the UK, at least). But when it came to thinking of a "generic woman", it was more difficult. I ended up remembering the term "basic bitch", which I loathe, but which seemed to be very much in the common vernacular recently. Is it still, or has the fad faded? Do people still say "resting bitch face"? I bet everyone always says that things are gnarly, hip, radical, and that they totes dig flutter bums that are far out, Daddy-O. I am concerned that calling that class of character "basic bitch" makes the whole thing feel too mean-spirited, though. But using a euphemism like "Basic Girl" or just "Basic" feels irritatingly insincere, frustratingly flaccid, and I'd find it difficult to take it seriously myself in the same way I'd roll my eyes at seeing someone write "d*rn".

As an aside, while researching hopefully-inoffensive stereotypes I could include, I came across ∞ this article ∞ about city-specific ones, for London and New York. People who refer to clothing by its designer name - and spend a fortune on it - seem like aliens to me. I wonder how many people could read an article like that and chuckle knowingly, rather than wondering what language it was written in. Bizarre. Also largely irrelevant!

Anyway, there's no real purpose to this game thing yet. It's pretty much just me playing around to see if I could do it, and procrastinating so as to avoid doing a university assignment (which I've now finished). It's silent, unbalanced, lacking many assets (using all skills just plays a standard 'talk' animation, for example), and, as I said, pointless, but if you're curious to play around with what came from four days of productive distraction, here's a link to a web player version of Unity that I hope will actually work: ∞ [LINK!] ∞

It seems to take a few moments to load, but it works for me in Chrome and Firefox. It even 'works' - to a degree, with much lag - in Safari on my iPhone... though it says that the WebGL Unity player isn't supported on mobiles, unfortunately.

(Click the door to go out on a 'mission' thing! Also, I'm having some issues myself with dragging to scroll in the house area; it seems to grab the whole web player, weirdly. I'll look into it.)

So yes. That's an awful lot of rambling about something that might not amount to anything. Or maybe it will? Who knows. Don't see this as me presenting some business plan I hope will appeal to customers, though. At this point, my mind is far too flooded with disconnected despair to even consider releasing and marketing some Product. I'm just trying to keep sane, and making things is the way that I... well, perhaps fail to do that, maybe. But perhaps someone got something out of this anyway.