#gonna go to a local community college that specializes in animation and video game design

[dragonwysper]

Oh yeah I'm in a music psychology class and our first assignment (afaik) was to make a short presentation on six songs that describe our lives. I wanted to share those, so here y'all go

This sounds like the woods to me, and those were a fundamental part of my childhood and a big influence in how I see the world. Also I really wanted to sneak a bit of dronescape (or dronescape adjacent) music into there lmao

My fucked up journey with my gender identity. It was. An Interesting phase. I'm not super proud of it, but it was a very chaotic time for me in a lot of ways. I was suffering with severe dysphoria, and since I didn't know why, I blamed everybody else. Throw in a few really toxic friends and influences I had, and. Yeah. Good song though lmao

Internet trauma go brrrrrrr. This is very much one of two (2) medias that I feel reflect what the internet is most clearly (the other one being Bolavlk by sournoodl). Fun song and describes a huuuuge portion of my trauma.

Threw this one in for a lot of reasons. Mainly, this song is an excellent tribute to horror as a genre (especially horror films), and horror has been the most influential genre for me. Highkey began with an interest in Creepypastas as a middle schooler, which turned into fucked up creature design, which turned into horror movies and other media. Harley Poe has some excellent horror songs.

This one is just very mecore, especially like. Post-trauma, and currently after I've had a lot of emotions tied to my trauma unrepress themselves. It speaks to my impulsiveness, this almost manic mask I put on in public, my intrusive thoughts, and the pervasive feeling of fundamental isolation from humanity (or at least general society). I feel like I've become something unrecognizable from the person I used to be, and I often feel very inhuman for it.

And this one is here because it's been a comfort song for me since I was around 15. It's lovely, and it also catapulted me into more experimental and undefined genres of music. It still makes me happy to hear, and I know most of the lyrics by heart.

I just got my classes figured out btw, after missing. An entire Week of class. So I'm catching up lmao. Thankfully there isn't too much. This presentation and an assignment for graphic storytelling analyzing Marvel and DC comics are the only two assignments I have. Everything else is just reading some class PowerPoints, documents, and segments of books. I just hope it's not too chaotic when I show up to class lmao. Hopefully I'll leave a good impression from preemptively doing all of the current assignments lmao

#i'm discussing black panther for my marvel vs dc assignment btw #the professor had us read an article discussing the fundamental differences of marvel superheroes and dc superheroes #and the assignment involves picking a superhero and talking about which comic brand they fall under according to those “rules” #i picked black panther because he really seems a lot more like a dc superhero according to all that #which i found interesting #currently reading rise of the black panther to get a better idea of the plot (since we have to summarize their origin story) #is good #i do really like marvel's panel design in their comics #classic and very dynamic #plus t'challa and wakanda as a whole are really interesting #sorry that was a Ramble #my other classes are this one discussing monsters in all their forms and another about middle eastern religions #should be fun 😤 #nice and easy since i'm transferring to another school after this semester LMAO #gonna go to a local community college that specializes in animation and video game design #they have some REALLY good programs #like half the people who were in my highschool animation program go to that college #and everybody i've talked to has all good things to say about it #plus it's like 2k per semester instead of 6k-8k 😭 #this school is fucking terrible omg. they were advertised as having an excellent animation program. get here and they're cutting it #plus a LOT of other shit. one day i'll make a post about it #but ANYWAYS #spotify #music #miracle musical #harley poe #mother mother #bo burnham #dewey martino #marina

[innuendostudios]

I Want It To Hurt: Thoughts on Night in the Woods

[massive spoilers ahead, but I’ll warn you before we get to them.]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ending of Night in the Woods. Finished the game a couple weeks ago; it’s pretty much the only game I’ve managed time for other than 20-minute bursts of Nuclear Throne when I’m waiting for footage to render or just decompressing between obligations. I have a weird jumble of feelings about the game, many of them deeply appreciative and some... confused.

These capsule reviews aren’t meant to be any kind of consumer advocacy, but if you’re waiting for me to tell you whether or not you should play the game: yes. Whatever else I say, yes, you should go play Night in the Woods. You may not know what you think of it by the end, but if you’re the kind of person who reads my stuff, you aren’t going to regret playing it.

The game’s protagonist, Mae, seems exquisitely designed to remind a certain type of person of themself. I might be one of those people, or, at least, I was when I was Mae’s age. Mae is a 20-year-old college dropout living with her parents in her jerkwater hometown, unsure of what to do with herself and generally unwilling to talk about it. Her town's economy is drying up and it’s a lingering question whether it will still exist in a decade or two. Everyone’s out of work or working for less than they deserve. Most of her friends from high school are still there, working the same jobs, playing in the same bands, eating the same crappy pizza.

It’s horribly familiar. When I was 20, I was piddling around community college with no motivation to transfer to a university. My dad had been laid off during the pre-Recession recession and hadn’t seen comparable pay since. I spent most of my time hanging out in coffee shops in my own jerkwater town, chatting up all the kids who’d never moved away, killing time. I worked my first job at the video store that was also a liquor store, around the corner from the hardware store that was also a deli. Our local businesses were also dying, save the few that secured a spot on Main Street, though by the time I was 20 my town was becoming a bedroom community for San Francisco and, instead of turning into vacant buildings, the local shops were getting muscled out by Peet’s Coffee and Jamba Juice. We even had our own parallel to NITW’s annual Harfest, but we called it Pumpkin Festival.

Admittedly, I was never a delinquent like Mae, and never managed to play in a band, even badly, so the sequences when I got to smash fluorescent lightbulbs and play bass were a kind of wish fulfillment (Mae’s bandmates sound for all the world like they’re covering Joy Division). And it’s moments like these that create the simple pleasures of Night in the Woods. It’s a game where stealing pretzels to feed to some rats you found in an abandoned parade float constitutes a major time sink and a minor, beautiful victory. Like, maybe I’m a fuckup but I can keep some rats alive and that’s not nothing. It’s a game where the conversation trees talk about the selling out of the working class, about punching fascists, about anarchy. It’s a game where the critical decisions you make are about who you want to hang out with on a given evening. (For the record: I agree that Gregg rulz ok but as soon as I realized that Bea didn’t like me very much I decided, oh no, I’m gonna make this girl my friend. So I saw pretty much none of Gregg’s or Angus’ optional content in my efforts to be best buds with Bea, and I regret nothing.)

So this game is something special. Play it. Let’s talk about the ending.

*SPOILER TOWN*

If I had sum up my overall impressions of Night in the Woods, I guess it’d be a more extreme version of my feelings on Oxenfree - somewhere over the course of the game I went from actively liking it very much to just kind of respecting it. Only more complicated than that.

OK, so Night in the Woods hints at a larger, darker plot from pretty early in the game, and such a thing was directly teased in the Kickstarter pitch, so by the time such things make their way into the game we’re all amply prepared for it. We’ve known all along that "there’s something in the woods.” I’m still not sure how to put into words my feelings on what that something is.

OK, OK, here goes: in the early stretches of the game, Mae has dreams that hint at what her mental state is up to, but as the game goes on, the dreams become more and more consistently about confronting giant animal gods. She also sees what appears to be a ghost man kidnap a kid at Harfest, but no one else sees this. Mae becomes convinced that there’s some kind of ghostly power that’s getting inside her head, while her friends worry that she’s cracking up. Still, they help her investigate various ghost stories around town, for her sake, and Mae’s health visibly declines and her dreams get more intense, until one night she finds herself communing with what may or may not be an utterly indifferent God who does not care about her or anything that lives on Earth.

Eventually, Mae and her friends track the ghost men into the woods and it turns out they’re not ghosts, they’re local men in hoods who are some kind of death cult. They believe they can keep the town from dying by kidnapping and sacrificing undesirables to the demon goat who lives deep beneath the old mines. They tell Mae that this is what’s been visiting her in her sleep.

So: Mae thinks she may be dealing with ghosts or God, the cultists think it’s a demon. Meanwhile, Mae’s friends think she may have some poorly-treated cognitive issues - turns out Mae had some kind of psychotic episode years back where she hospitalized a boy because she just couldn’t see other people as people anymore, and she’s been grappling with this disconnection for some time and going to college without good treatment may have made it all much worse. And maybe all this talk of careless gods and demon goats is just Mae dealing with the ugly parts of her own psyche.

Anyway, so Mae’s friends straight up shoot one of the cultists with a crossbow and then cause a mine cave-in that dooms the rest, which is, no matter how you slice it, a pretty sharp tonal shift from what most of the game has been. And, before escaping, Mae has a vision of sorts, where she feels herself sucked underground and once again confronting some kind of supernatural being.

And she just talks to it. She says she’s done disassociating from people. She knows that maybe nothing lasts, that maybe her friends will all drift apart and her town will die, but if that’s what’s going to happen, she wants to accept it. If everything disappears in the end, she wants it to hurt when it does.

The question, then: in this moment, are you, the player, talking to God? A demon goat? Or the dark parts of a mind in need of treatment? Or, a similar question: is the town dying because of the stagnation of wages, the shipping of jobs overseas, the failure of government to support small towns? Or is because the town needs to sacrifice to the beast that lives in the mines?

The game doesn’t have an answer for you. Instead, the game’s stance seems to be: whatever the answer, it’s out of your control. Be it economics, fate, religion, superstition, or mental illness, it is not a mystery you can solve, a villain you can shoot. It’s something you will have to live with, day by day. It is inexorable that, on a long enough timeline, everything ends. Maybe it doesn’t matter why. When you stare into a void, maybe it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking to God, a demon, or your own broken mind. Maybe what matters more is what you say.

You may never know the truth. So hold on to what’s good and live with uncertainty.

I feel like this is a very profound thing for a game starring an anthropomorphic cat to say. I also can’t shake that it felt more profound when I typed it out just now than when I experienced it myself.

As a person from a jerkwater town, who’s spent his entire adult life working his ass off and yet perpetually broke, who’s spent the last five years grappling with depression and anxiety and the radical acceptance it takes to know that his thoughts can sometimes be extremely alien to him, and who has walked the long path from Christianity to wishy-washy agnosticism to weary atheism, I feel this moment should have slugged me in the gut. I can’t think of a single game that would say such things, and I can’t think of a game that seems more explicitly tailored to my sensibilities and experiences.

But while I respect the hell out of Night in the Woods’ ultimate message, I still feel conflicted about how it plays out. I don’t think the game is wrong to veer into odd genres at the end - so many of its themes are internal and philosophical that literalizing them in order to build to a climax feels like a smart decision. I don’t know if it’s that the game spends such a long time raising questions and then kind of rushes the answers. I don’t know if it’s that Mae and her posse seem a lot more credible cracking wise and worrying about money than shooting people with crossbows. It’s certainly hard for a game about normal people with normal problems to throw in highly abnormal problems for the final hour.

I don’t know if I maybe just need to play it again.

I feel like the more I think about the ending, the better I understand it, but I still can’t say with confidence that I like it. And my appreciation of the game seems deeply rooted in the front half and not the final third.

And I don’t know when I’ll have time to go back in and play it again. For now, I’m glad I played it once. Whatever it was, it was certainly something.

#capsule review #night in the woods #adventure games

[grandlethal16]

Exclusive Interview w/ Tony Yang @ Studio Atma (Gravastar)

Tony Yang, the former lead software engineer at Studio Atma, talks about Gravastar, their upcoming sci-fi JRPG, one thing about being an indie developer he would like people to know about, and the value of having a local indie dev community to go to for support and feedback. (Interview over Skype from October 2016) By Tyler Cummings

GrandLethal16: Would you like to introduce yourself?

Tony Hi, I'm Tony Yang and I am working on the game Gravastar by Studio Atma.

GrandLethal16: Tell me about Gravastar.

Tony: Gravastar is basically a JRPG that contains the aesthetic of a JRPG and the unique epic storyline of a JRPG with a bit of fighting game mechanics. You have timed elements in the game where you have to input combos and complete button presses to unleash special attacks. It's set on the world Aethera and you're playing as Baird, who has just discovered he's a Spectre and we can't say why because that will spoil the game, but basically he finds out that he's a rare being that has power tied to the stars that soar over the skies. He needs to basically journey on a quest with his friends to prevent that power from being used for evil. So you know, nothing too crazy in the JRPG scale.

GrandLethal16: What inspired you to make Gravastar?

Tony: Essentially, we were playing a bunch of newer JRPGs and a trend of game design. I guess that in order get all the people's money, they streamlined JRPGs a bit - it's basically become “Press A to win”. When we were little kids, we were playing all these games, like Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana, the older Final Fantasies and Xenogears - that sort of stuff - where you were more involved and you actually felt like you were part of a story rather than part of just a timeline to get things done. We wanted to bring that back to our gamers, so they could have this grand tale that they were a part of.

GrandLethal16: What part of making Gravastar did you enjoy working on?

All the active elements that are in a game that kind of speaks to Secret of Mana and Xenogears, where rather than “Select ‘Attack’ and then select a ‘Target’ ”, you just select an attack and you select a target, but now you have the chance to do fight move combos where you, “Jab-Jab, do an Uppercut” and knock them into the air. That sort of stuff. We wanted to implement that into the game as well.

GrandLethal16: Optimization of moves based on remaining time bar?

Yes exactly. Exactly. If you have some of your longer attacks, you want to wait until the end of the attack phase so that you can get all the attacks in.

GrandLethal16: What part of making Gravastar took longer than you expected?

All of it so far! But honestly, all we've done so far is just the battle system, and I think the greatest moment was at the beginning. We were just picking up unity and we hadn't - none of us - had used it before and we were asking each other, "How do we just get a guy to just move around on the screen in animation" and once we had our first little section where we just had a goo that’s not even animating and our guy - he's barely drawn in and he just moves over and does an attack on the goo, that was the best moment. We were like, "Yeah, we're actually making the game now!".

GrandLethal16: What are the biggest challenges you’re facing as you develop your game?

So, none of us had experience shipping a full title before. Well, that's not true. One of us did, but basically, we’re just trying to get the timelines down, figuring out what other work was gonna be needed to be done by when, and how long did it take to get just a battle system going. That's taking a little bit longer than we expected, but it's been relatively “on schedule.” We are at least experienced in our own specialties: programming or arts. One of the other things is learning how to balance feature work versus polish for conventions. Getting out to a convention, trying to do a convention every month - that sounds great and all and that's good for marketing and getting people to come and see your game, but that also means that you're not leaving yourself a lot of time to work on the larger features you need to get done. We're working on an overworld now so we're actually gonna take a good six months break from showing at conventions to get the overworld out and that way we have something bigger to show to everybody the next time we’re at a show.

GrandLethal16: What’s the craziest gameplay moment you've seen in Gravastar, either when you or someone else was playing?

One of the craziest things I've seen? So internally, we test out the game and we have competitions to see who can get the longest combo off of a single attack. There's an attack we call the Spiral Vortex, where you basically go up and do a special attack and have to mash the A button repeatedly to get the attack out to hit more and do more damage. We would be like, "I got 12." That's wasn’t bad, but then this guy comes up and he's clearly played fighting games before and he gets up to 19 and we're just saying, "What in the heck. How do you even get to 19? I don't even think my fingers can move that fast". It was pretty amazing!

GrandLethal16: Have you thought of recruiting some FGC players to playtest your battle mechanics?

You know, we really should. We figure there's probably enough people that can get that sort of fast button mashing in there. We can bounce around those people.

GrandLethal16: How did you get into video game developing?

You know, I've been a gamer since I was a little kid and when you're a gamer and you know techie stuff, you want to get into game programming. That's what I've wanted to do for awhile. I took some classes in college for games and also I did some Starcraft 2 modding, but I didn't actually start doing full-on game developing until I met up with the guys at Gravastar. Yeah, we met and talked and it just seemed like something we wanted to do!

GrandLethal16: What are the biggest challenges you faced when developing your game?

As far as storyboarding, that's already mostly been taken care of. I'm on the programming side, so I enjoy helping out with storyboarding, but that's not my forte. One of the biggest things we have to do is just play the game, doing all the moves and say, "Okay, this feels right.” or, “Oh, this doesn't feel right." and trying to figure out what sort of ideas we can implement to make the mechanics feel better. We're constantly talking about, "How can we get the ‘juice’ in?". The “juice” is what's gonna draw people in and we keep asking ourselves, “How can we get the juice to the players?". So, just constantly playtesting and re-iterating on things has just been the biggest part of making Gravastar work.

GrandLethal16: What is one thing about being an indie developer you would want people to know about?

It depends on how deep into the indie dev scene they are. One of the biggest things to know even though there are all these sorts of engines out there Unreal and Unity or whatever, there's still a lot of work to be put into making the game. You can make an RPG Maker game and if that's what you want, it will work for you, but if you wanted to go into depth and really make a solid game, you're gonna need to sink a lot of time into it. One of the things that we do is we have full-time jobs to support our night-time jobs (working on Gravastar). In our experience, you have to approach it with a startup culture where you have to constantly seek funding, otherwise you're not gonna be able to make this game. You really have a full-time job to support you until you get extra funding elsewhere.

GrandLethal16: Speaking of “extra funding”, where do you think crowdfunding fits into the indie game dev “game plan”?

It's got it's places. it's great to kind of see and get an idea of what sort of appeal your game has to the market! Imagine just being able to get out there and say, "These 10,000 people backed our game, so we know we at least have 10,000 people who would play our game”, but then the opposite side of that spectrum is that if you don't have a player base, it's really difficult to get crowdfunding out there. One of the things that people say is, "Make sure to build your player base and really connect with them", but if you don't have a player base it can be tough. Then you're gonna have your parents coming in and crowdfunding you a little bit and you're like, "Thanks, Mom and Dad". So, it has its place, but you also have to have some sort of critical mass of followers before you can even feasibly consider it.

GrandLethal16: What tips would you give anyone looking to independently develop their own game?

Make sure you have a lot of time, because you’re either gonna sink all of your time into the development of the game in general and put in 50-60 hour weeks, or you're gonna have to spend a lot of your time outside of your day job to do it. An even better thing I would say is to get to know your indie game community. One of the biggest things that are helping us out right now is that we're part of Seattle Indies group. We're also part of the Meetup group. We're part of this core channel of indie devs, and so everybody can do a show and tell and be like, "This is something I just made!" and everyone is really supportive with, "Oh that's cool. What did you use for that?" or something. Definitely get to know your fellow indie devs!

GrandLethal16: Where do you see yourself in five years?

In five years? Hopefully, we'll be shipping Gravastar around that time. In five years, I'm hoping to be drinking a pina colada on a beach somewhere, but after that, it's kind of hard to see out past that point right now. Right now, we're just aiming to get Gravastar out there to the fans.

GrandLethal16: How big is the Gravastar team?

There's four of us at the core and we also have contractors that we work with to get certain elements done in our game.

GrandLethal16: What aspects of Gravastar are you currently working on?

Tony: It's actually kind of funny because we were trying to work on our Active system would work and also how Slow and Haste would affect turns in battle and we actually went and played Final Fantasy X again because that was the inspiration for that portion of our game. We just looked at it, and it's such a solid system that we were paying homage to it in our game.

GrandLethal16: Do you have specific games you turn to for inspiration on Gravastar’s features?

Tony: We don't have anything specific. Whenever we're focusing on Special Attacks, we look at the Marvel vs Capcom Hyper Combos, where your Super Meter is charged and you unleash it and there are certain flashes on the screen with overlays. So, anytime we are stumped we just look at what other games have been doing. We don’t reference any specific game, but we ask ourselves, “What do these sort of games do to complete the system?”

GrandLethal16: Undoubtedly, there’s a great library of games to draw inspiration from!

Tony: Oh yeah! It is a credit to the JRPG history that there are so many good games out there.

GrandLethal16: What are your top 3 favorite JRPGs?

Tony: I cut my teeth on the JRPG drama with Final Fantasy VII. Even though that's not quite holding up through time, it's still one of my favorite JRPGs. Chrono Trigger is also in there. I just loved all the branching story lines and all the endings that you could get. You weren't necessarily the same character throughout the game. You had Chrono, but then you could play as all the other players at some point. I don't really have a third one that kinda sits in that category. I guess Final Fantasy X is also pretty solid, but it's just kind of whatever is playing for me right now is a favorite. I guess you could say Pokemon is a JRPG...

GrandLethal16: I think it’s definitely an RPG.

Tony: Yeah, so I remember playing Red and Blue Version. That was my shit back in the day. So those are my three, I guess - Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger and Pokemon.

GrandLethal16: Do you have a website where folks can check out your work?

Tony: The biggest place to follow us would be on Twitter. If you follow us @StudioAtma, A-t-m-a. You can also check out Gravastar on our GravastarGame.com website or you can go to our Facebook page, which is StudioAtmaGames.

GrandLethal16: Thanks for taking time out of your day to sit down and chat with me!

Tony: No problem, Tyler. Thanks for having me on!

Check out more on what Tony Yang is up to these days from his Twitter page, @Tony_Dubu, or visit the Studio Atma website for the latest news on Gravastar! You can also follow Studio Atma on Twitter at @StudioAtma!

If you liked this interview, follow my Twitter page, @GrandLethal16, to keep up with upcoming content and events! I post-convention giveaways / gaming updates to Instagram and Facebook, too.

#studio atma #gravastar #jrpgs #jrpgsallday #videogames #indie games #indie dev #seattle indies #role playing games #star ocean #Final Fantasy #steam