2DArray's Pile of Words

The game that I had previously mentioned called The Influence has a new name, and a lot more writing.  The new title is “This is a Work of Fiction.”  I don’t want to explain the whole story, but the title works impossibly well once you’ve finished the game.  It’s…kind of intense.

The basic idea of the game is that you’ve stumbled upon a jumble of lightly encrypted files.  Each level is a grid puzzle that you have to complete to unlock a file.  Once a file is unlocked, you get to check it out–Some files are excerpts from books or snippets from old newspapers.  Some are notes written directly to you.  Hopefully we’ll get some images and audio mixed in there, too.  I’ve included two examples of these files.  One is a newspaper clipping and the other is a series of Bible verses.

“…but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.  So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.”

-Genesis 4:5

“If we go on sinning after we have learned the truth, no sacrifice can take away our sins.”

-Hebrews 10:26

“They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them.”

-1 John 4:5

“So do not be afraid of them.  There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.”

-Matthew 10:26

Yes, it's an actual newspaper article from the 30s.

I’m pretty set in the idea of working on one of two projects that I’ve got laid out now.  The first is Fix, which I explained at least vaguely in an earlier post.  I’m still writing up stuff for it, and I’ve got some damn good ideas.  The extreme basics of the engine work, but I’ve got a lot more to do on that front before there’s anything really presentable.

The second project might be called The Influence, and it’s a puzzle-horror game.  It’s a story about the biggest fucking conspiracy ever.  Like, take the sort of cheesy idea of a shadow organization, but extend it to Lovecraftian scales, where it doesn’t even really exist as a normal entity anymore.  The basic goal is to make you paranoid about every single thing in your day.  The enemy isn’t just everywhere.  It’s everything.

First of all, if you own an XBox, stop reading this, because I have something more important for you to do:  Go buy Limbo.  Play it right now.  It’s $15, and it’s better than every game I’ve ever made, and it’s better than every game that I’ve ever played.

Anyway, I’m back from Edmonton, now, which means I’m back to my own work.  I’m still in a state of never being actually satisfied with how Grief plays, so I’m gonna let the project rest for a bit and work on something else.  The script is mostly finished, and I like it a lot, so that’s all good.  The gameplay needs, once again, to be redesigned, though.  Best course of action that I can see is to let the ideas churn for the time being, and work on another game for my contract with Armor.

At the moment, I’m calling this new game “Chivalry is Dead.”  More details when things start to come together.

So I’ve been crazy busy with moving into a new apartment (in a new town) and some other stuff, so I’ve gotten kinda behind on updating the site.  Well, if you were hoping for that to change, I’ve got some bad news, and I assume you can figure out what it is.

I’m spending the month in Edmonton, working for MaxGames on a sequel to Stick War (which in turn is a sequel to an old game of mine, called Champion).  You can read about what we’re working on at StickWar.com, but this site will be left alone for the time being.

Tally-ho!

So, to start off with a summary, I started over with a lot of the work on Grief.  The engine wasn’t fast enough, and the script wasn’t tight enough.  Got a shitload of work done on both over the past week or so (since from now until June, this is the only thing that I have to work on, at all).  You can see where the new engine in the Grief Demo tab, up top.  The character works way better than before, and that’s a really big improvement in my eyes.  This is the third time I’ve tried making a platformer with Box2D, and I think I might have really gotten it down now.  The way he works is at least vaguely interesting, so I’ll probably write something about it in the near future.

Also, I hooked up the Jack animations from Company so that he wouldn’t be a green rectangle anymore.  Once I find a character artist, I’ll get the actual game art put in.

Everything is working better than before, and I’m satisfied.

Breach 3 has officially changed its name to Viricide.  Check out the nearly finished demo in the tabs near the top of the page.  It’s got a ton of voice acting, so the file size is a relatively hefty (but hopefully still manageable) 5 mb.  I’ve seen much worse for Flash games and movies.  It’s also got two songs and a bunch of sound effects.  For those of you with headphones (or just widely spaced speakers), all of the audio is panned from left to right to give you a little more spacial awareness.  Woop woop!

It’s still missing some little things like a mute button and cookies to save your progress.  Other than that, it’s mostly just tweaking from here on out.

Let me know what you think of the game–I’ll be releasing it pretty soon!