Cramped

New game! It's an itty bitty sub-1000 word linear text game. It's also a horror game — I've been making lots of cute nice stuff lately, so making something that's a big ol' bummer felt refreshing.

I used the Videotome engine, the first in a series of homebrew text game engines by Freya. I love Freya's games to bits, so when she hosted a game jam based around using using her nifty tools, I jumped at the opportunity. I had a lot of fun!

The actual story was a piece of flash fiction I wrote for a Writer's Club meetup a few months ago. I got an aesthetic I liked together in Videotome, gave the story an edit pass, and it all came together pretty quickly. There are several pieces of flash fiction I've written in the last year I've gone "I should make a little game out of this" for, but this is the first time I actually did it. Maybe I'll do it more in the future!

Making Games in ZZT

For the first time since 2017, I made a little game in ZZT! It's part of the upcoming 2024 Vextro anthology release, so I'll be publishing it in December as always. I was honestly surprised by how much of a delight ZZT was to work with; thanks to advances in tooling and my own knowledge of the scene, I had a better time with it than I did the first go around. I wanted to share a little primer on it in case other folks want to try it out.

Here are the main assets, in my mind, of using ZZT as a dev tool in 2024. 

• Simple top-down "walk around and interact with things to make text boxes pop up" language is cozy, familiar, and endlessly flexible. I'll be comparing ZZT a lot with Bitsy and RPGMaker since I think the three engines offer a similar language with interesting differences in their approach.
• The built-in object programming language is shockingly flexible, giving you much more power over your game logic and world than Bitsy (while still not as much as RPGMaker event scripting, which I'd argue isn't entirely a negative). 
• ASCII art style is attractive without forcing you to make custom assets, and without having the "stock" look you get from using more detailed default assets.
• Light-weight and extremely easy to deploy: thanks to asie's open source Zeta emulator, ZZT runs on all major desktop environments, AND in browser (albeit not on phones like Bitsy or Puzzlescript). All in under a megabyte for each version! And thanks to asie's Reconstruction of ZZT, the core engine is open source as well!

All in all, ZZT has a legitimate niche if you can get a handle on its quirks. It's completely FOSS now and it has a microscopic footprint. It runs in the browser but doesn't require a browser. It's a great tool for making top-down walking sim story games (a genre I really like) that also has the flexibility to incorporate action game setpieces, dungeon crawls, and puzzles. That opens up a ton of possibilities for interesting storytelling.

When I made Atop the Witch's Tower, I did everything in DOSBox with the default ZZT editor. For non-standard colors, this meant importing hex-edited boards into my game and manually copying tiles from them. The ZZT editor also had the nasty habit of wiping object code when I had too many objects on the board at once. Most of the magic of ZZT's language was still present in the original level editor — but it was undeniably a pain in the ass. 

This time I used KevEdit, a tool originally made in the early 2000's to streamline ZZT dev. KevEdit's great! The biggest hurdle for most folks I suspect is that it's keyboard-only, but I enjoyed painting boards with the arrow keys. Beyond that it adds a ton of conveniences that weren't present in the original editor: easily building palettes of non-standard colors, removing boards, the random fill tool, importing and exporting object code for editing in a text editor, and a ton of other niceties. I was intimidated by all the options it offers up front, but I followed along with Dr. Dos's guide on the Museum of ZZT and got a handle on the essentials pretty quick.

I talked about how ZZT's object scripting is powerful, but there's one very interesting, irritating wrinkle to it. You can't take direct control of the player object, the way you can in RPGMaker. You can't move them, and you can't teleport them to a new board programmatically. There are ways around this: the big one is putting the actual player object in a corner and having them "pilot" a fake player object that actually interacts with the game (and CAN be controlled by object code). You can also spawn boulders on top of the player to move them, or something?? Basically the alternatives are weird and annoying, they add extra friction to both dev and to play. (There are tons of great games that make use of these approaches, I'm just relaying my own experiences here.)

Every time I've engaged with ZZT, I bump up against this limitation and grind my teeth. But I vibe with it more when I think of it as a creative challenge. ZZT wants me to make the player an active participant in the story. When I can't pause input and take control of the player, I have to completely rethink how I approach "cutscenes". I think both Atop the Witch's Tower and my new ZZT's story scenes would've been less impactful if ZZT let me take control of the player avatar, because I would've instinctively gone for lazier, less interesting solutions.

Those are my immediate thoughts after slamming out a short game in ZZT for the first time in ages. I'd like to spend more time making games in the tool, as well as more time playing other people's ZZTs. I love the original Town of ZZT and rabbitboots's Faux Amis (pictured below). I'd also like to play more of the classics Dr. Dos has celebrated over the years. I think other dev friends should give it a look — if you enjoy working in high-level tools with cool limitations, tools like Bitsy, RPGMaker, or Puzzlescript, I think you'll find something to connect with with ZZT.

Lockirby2's RPG Challenge Runs

Lockirby2 is one of my favorite youtubers I've kept up with over the last few years. I first found the channel through their excellent and instructive walkthrough of the original Kaizo Mario World. But the real fun has been keeping up with the Final Fantasy challenge run videos. I got a lot of joy from watching and reading along with the two most recent series, the FF6 0 EXP Solo Rotating Character Challenge and the FF7 Strahl Community Challenge, as they came out.

Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII are pretty gentle games for the most part. But they have a ton of hidden depth that I never picked up on playing the games casually. These challenge runs and their strict rulesets highlight their innumerable mechanical subtleties. Did you know Atma is vulnerable to Slow? Did you know JENOVA Life has a 1/N chance of using Aqualung every fourth turn, and N starts at 5 and gets lower as her HP decreases? Did you know, did you know, did you know—

I love these games. Getting to learn all these weird details and seeing the creative ways Lockirby2 exploits them is delightful. The videos push me hard to think critically about RPG systems; sraëka's games and criticism are the only works I can think of that make me feel similarly. 

I absolutely had to write a post after seeing them bring that same level of attention to detail to Facets (after I tactfully and humbly pointed them at it during a convo on discord). I really can't overstate how gratifying it was to watch the playthrough and read the commentary. It's a level of intense formal close reading I've never experienced for any of my games before. It feels incredible to get that kind of scrutiny specifically from someone I already really respected for their RPG design thoughts.

I want to make more turn-based games with hard, chunky boss fights someday. I want to make them enjoyable for casual play, but reward deeper engagement from knowledgeable players as well. Thoughtful criticism like this is gonna help me get there.

Game Reviews: Live A Live and Romancing SaGa

Live A Live (1994, SNES)

Played the fan-translated Super Famicom version, natch.

Live A Live is as good as it gets. Square at the top of their game making an anthology of experimental micro-rpgs. Every one of them's a banger. If it was just the seven chapters on their own, it'd still be essential playing, but then the last two chapters tie everything together pristinely. It's just a perfect little package, as good as any other masterpiece Square put out at the time.

Every other rpgmaker dev I know has been obsessed with this game for years; I can't believe how long it took me to get around to it. There's stuff I've seen in my friends' games or done in my own games I thought was really original and clever. Then I discover Live A Live did the same things in 1994.

I'm not discouraged — I think it rules that artists have always been doing weird cool storytelling with the format. Instead of working in a vacuum, we're part of an ongoing dialogue that's been going on for 3+ decades. To me, that's much more cool and exciting. If you're interested in getting into the heads of people that made amazing games like LAL, I can't recommend this interview with director Takashi Tokita and other key staff members enough.

If you spend a lot of time thinking hard about how rpgs work, if you're a dev or an enthusiast player, you owe it to yourself to play Live A Live.

Romancing SaGa (1992, SNES)

The structure of this game is so nifty. It's almost like a magic trick, where I don't want to spoil it. But the gist of it is that the game's story progression isn't locked to any specific questline. The world moves forward over time, with quests becoming available and also locking out without you necessarily triggering any specific flags. Essentially everything is optional — the path you carve through the game to get strong enough to beat Saruin is entirely your own.

The downside of this approach is like, if the only thing you need to do to win is get strong to beat one boss... it kind of makes the whole game into one big thirty hour grind! You'd have to be playing it in a really boring way for that to really be true, but most of the quests are variations on "spend an hour fighting 100 random battles in one of the mostly interchangeable dungeons." "The whole game is grinding for one hard boss" is reductive, but not that reductive.

In a sense, it's the purest distillation of the appeal of post-GameBoy SaGa, to the point of being hard to digest. To me, these games are about the joy of fighting a whole mess of enemies and getting a constant drip-feed of incremental stat and skill upgrades after nearly every battle. The open world structure makes that more interesting, but I think that aspect feels more special to SaGa fans than it actually is because of cultural myopia. There are tons of open-ended PC western RPGs from this era like the Ultimas, Might & Magic, Wasteland/Fallout, etc. "You can go anywhere!" is only unique to SaGa if you've mostly played Final Fantasy-style roller coaster games.

But nobody does the character progression dopamine drip-feed like SaGa. It's not just the little stat ups after every fight — the systems and setpiece bosses are complex enough that the progression always feels substantive and rewarding. Grinding only feels good when there's a challenge that makes the grind feel worth it, and SaGa final bosses are terrifying monoliths. I barely scraped by Saruin at the end of this game; I've played through a lot of RPGs, and nothing hits like a SaGa climax.

I did finally get tired of the grind about twenty hours in, switch from hardware to emulator, and speed through the last ten hours with a fast-forward button. There's just ultimately not a lot to it. It feels "pure" to me because it's so empty, and if you're not already onboard with SaGa, I would recommend almost any of the other games over this one.

But I adore these games. I think SaGa's core appeal is more lizard-brained than we're often willing to admit, but what's wrong with that? Number go up feel good. I've had a stressful few months, and I had a lot of fun coming home and vegging out in front of the SNES and button-mashing through another dungeon's worth of battles. Romancing SaGa re-energized my love for the series, and I'm very excited to play one of the many new releases fans are feasting on. SaGa never dies! SaGa lives on!

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Metroid Prime 2 and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004, GameCube)

“Wait for it to start doing its spin attack. Switch to Morph Ball. Boost Ball into it while it's spinning to stun it. While it's stunned, roll between its legs, and lay a bomb on its flashing weak point. When the body is destroyed, the head flies off and starts attacking. The head will have a light or dark shield; switch to the opposite colored beam to dispel it. Then you can use a Super Missile to destroy the head.”

This is me describing how to kill a Normal Non-Miniboss Enemy in one of the late game areas of Metroid Prime 2. I swear to god every fucking enemy is like this. God forbid you design an FPS enemy where the optimal strategy is “shoot it until it dies”; it always has to be some five step process to make then enemy vulnerable, then you have a half second window to shoot them (from just the right angle, of course) and finally deal Real Actual Damage.

Of course, even with all that, many enemies take three or four Super Missiles to kill. So now every encounter takes a full minute to finish, and often they’ll put three or four of these fuckers in the same room. So of course I run past every single enemy I can, because combat is a miserable ordeal with no reward, and I’ve already been through this room seven times anyway, god fucking dammit.

Don't you dare use anything besides Super Missiles or maybe the occasional charged light/dark/annihilator beam. I can't think of an FPS with a more pathetic default gun. There's almost never a good reason to use any of the non-charged shots against enemies. I counted the number of regular beam shots an extremely piddily enemy took later on — 26 hits! What's even the point of having a beam at that point? Where are the popcorn enemies? Why is everything a painfully involved miniboss? Why do the beam combos cost so many resources when I never found a single practical use case for any of them?!

While I don’t think the combat works at all for the regular enemies, I think there’s a perverse rom hack joy to the bosses. They have all the same problems and jank as the enemies, but multiplied several times over. Every major boss is a 10+ minute encounter, and because the timing to dodge enemy attacks is much stricter here than in Prime 1, they often come down to the wire. The thing is, once you’ve beaten a boss, it’s over. And you’re generally rewarded with a cool power-up! The regular enemies are miserable because the game expects you fight them over and over for no reason. The bosses don’t have that problem.

All my most memorable moments in Prime 2 were barely scraping by at the end of the painfully long boss fights. I beat the Spider Guardian on my first try with 10 total energy to spare. If I'd taken a single additional hit, I would've died and had to start the whole grueling trial over again. The release I felt nailing each of those super-strict bomb jumps and defeating the boss was orgasmic.

The finale is epic. The Ing Emperor’s second phase is the scariest fight in the game outside maybe the Boost Guardian, and after barely scraping by that fight you still have another timed boss fight to deal with, one that’s exceptionally confusing and opaque in its execution even by this game's standards. All without any checkpoints of course. No notes, pristine conclusion.

The best thing you can say about Metroid Prime 2 is that it’s a weird, obnoxiously strict, rom hack-y sequel to Metroid Prime 1. Prime 1 was polished, streamlined, and generally pretty easy. It’s a good game that definitely called for a sequel that’s annoying in the ways Prime 2 is annoying.

Prime 2 is far too long, and the story is contrived videogame bullshit in contrast to Prime 1’s gracefully unfolding mystery. Calling it an FPS feels unfair because it invites comparisons to games where the combat is actually fun. But it has some good tunes, and in spite of (and sometimes because of) its myriad failings, it still takes you on a journey that feels substantial. There’s a catharsis to reaching its hard-won conclusion.

I definitely don’t think Retro is the best to ever do it, and I’m in no rush to revisit Prime 3. But they make games that feel like real adventures, and that’s something I’ll always appreciate.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky (2009, DS)

Cleared the main game, special episodes, and post-game story.

This was my first Mystery Dungeon game, and it honestly kicked my ass early on. I finished the Groudon fight having exhausted every resource I’d been stockpiling, and I banged my head against the Bidoof’s Wish special episode endboss for over an hour.

After a while though, I figured out what moves worked really well, what items to stockpile for bosses (reviver, totter, and x-eye seeds), and played more tactically. My goals stopped being “get through the dungeon and beat the boss” and started being “try to win without using any reviver seeds.” Nothing gave me real trouble after the first ten hours. This is ultimately still “Baby’s First Mystery Dungeon,” which was great for me, because I’m still very inexperienced with roguelikes, and I was in the mood for a light and breezy number-go-up game.

That said, the Zero Island South dungeon is very intimidating. It’s a 99-floor dungeon that starts you at level 1, with no items, money, or teammates. It basically turns the game into a real capital R Rogue-type dungeon crawl. If I hadn’t been playing for 40 hours already, I’d probably throw myself into learning it. But after a few attempts, I’ve decided I need a break. I suspect for MD veterans, the post-game super-dungeons are the main appeal here, and the rest of the game is essentially an extended tutorial. I hope to get there someday!

Ultimately, the story and presentation were the main draw for me. It’s not hard to explain why the story is as good as it is. It’s just written like a real JRPG or VN. The story is free to do what it needs to do, instead of being incestuously beholden to series tradition like the mainline Pokémon games. It functions like a good YA novel, so the big moments can have a huge emotional impact. (The amazing soundtrack, perfectly deployed and directed, also helps.)  

It’s not just the big moments though. All the incidental character writing too worked great for me too. The game is just cute. I love all the characters, I love living in this tiny adorable world.

The main game lands great, but it doesn’t feel quite complete on its own. I think Special Episode 5 is absolutely required for the story to land the way it needs to. The main game and the last special episode are two halves of one climax, and without either one the story doesn’t feel quite finished. After having played both, I was deeply satisfied. I cried my eyes out through both finales, of course.

The special episodes are only in the Explorers of Sky version of the game, so I strongly recommend playing this version, and not Explorers of Time or Darkness. They’re maybe the most story-essential post-release content I’ve ever seen, even more than Dana’s solo dungeon in Ys VIII, and I’m a little aghast they weren’t in the original game.

The post-game story doesn’t land as well, unfortunately. I think I would’ve ultimately been just as satisfied if I’d stopped after the main game and Ep. 5. There are enough good moments for it not feel like a waste of time, but ultimately introducing three entirely new characters for the eleventh hour climax was a bad call. I just don’t care about them the way I do the established cast, and their story resolves too quickly to have any real impact. That their story comes after slogging through that awful Unown dungeon added insult to injury.

I wanted to voice that criticism, but I still can't overstate how much the main story and special eps resonated with me. I honestly feel a stronger connection to Sky than I can really put into words or justify. There’s a certain spirit to the simple, lovely story and gorgeous presentation that’s hard to pin down, something that makes me feel warm in my heart. I think that essence is why it still has such devoted fans over a decade later.

Sky was a fantastic introduction to Pokémon Mystery Dungeon and Mystery Dungeon in general. I’m excited to play Shiren and other roguelike-adjacent retro games, and for the first time in ten years I’m excited about Pokémon. I can’t wait to play the other PMD games.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: SeaBed and Anthology of the Killer

SeaBed (2017, PC) (Itch.io, Steam)

In terms of the intensity and depth of the emotional response it engendered in me, SeaBed compares neatly with The House in Fata Morgana. It takes a completely different, much quieter and subtler path to get there, obviously. Fata Morgana gets there with the most hard hitting melodrama possible. SeaBed gets there through countless quiet moments, all working in concert to slowly weave a spell over you without you even realizing.

As a text game dev, I deeply appreciate the presentation. The whole story is told through VA-less NVL-mode walls of text, borrowed royalty-free music, as few VN presentation tricks as humanly possible, and a combo of blurred photo and cheap blender backgrounds. The only major points of aesthetic interest are the beautiful character illustrations by hide38 (who also wrote the script).

And the story still hits like a truck. When you make your characters and their longings feel this real in the reader's heart, you don't need voice acting or a bunch of expensive one-off assets. SeaBed does exactly what it needs to with the presentation to support the writing, then gets out of the way and lets the story speak for itself. I think that's really admirable, and speaks to a confidence that a lot of devs would benefit from.

If all this sounds back-handed, it shouldn't. Some of the most well-loved VNs in history are doujin games like Higurashi or Tsukihime, which used similar aesthetic shortcuts. I cherish many VNs with super-loved-on presentation. But my favorites will always be the ones that make me believe in their stories, and you get there first and foremost with strong writing.

SeaBed is as affecting a story as any visual novel I've read. I don't have much to say beyond that that wouldn't spoil the shape of the story (hence why I spent three paragraphs soapboxing about VN direction). If you're up for the slowest of slow burns, and you appreciate VNs with grown-up theming that don't talk down to you, give this one a read. 

Anthology of the Killer (2020-2024, PC) (Itch.io)

Extremely extremely delightful. I've been savoring these over the last few months, and I finally ran through the epic finale last night. I've been playing thecatamites's games for over a decade, so it's really awesome to see so much of his style synthesized into such a dense hilarious vision.

It's cathartic because I've actually often struggled to connect with his games. thecatamites's work is focused more than anything on strong texture, loved-on spaces, and funny lyrical writing. That's all great — but I like games with strong emotional arcs, stories that take me on dramatically pointed and specific journeys. thecatamites's games (and his criticism for that matter) don't generally seem interested in drama at all. Anything resembling a dramatic moment in his games tends to feel playful and ironically detached. In many respects our critical lenses are almost exact opposites.

I had a really negative reaction to Magic Wand when it came out for this reason; I kept expecting it to have some kind of real rpg story, and it just doesn't. Space Funeral has a neat little meta theme at the end that really resonated with me, but it's more of a cute final note than a big climax. The games of his I've enjoyed the most with are the short comic ones like Murder Dog IV, where I can focus on enjoying the texture and jokes, and they're over before I can build any lofty narrative expectations in my head.

Anthology of the Killer meets me half-way. The grand joke of these games is that thecatamites is as good as literally anyone on itch at making Eerie Haunting Dream spaces in 3D, at setting up scares, at panicky chase sequences. He speaks the language of "Unity horror game" extremely fluently — which makes it VERY funny when BB cracks a perfectly timed hilarious joke that sucks all the tension out of the scene. (Drool of the Killer's ending sticks out to me as a particularly great moment.)

The writing is SO funny, constantly, and pairing that sense of humor with the great horror language never stops being delightful. It's also possible he was always this funny, and I was just finally disarmed and willing to fully accept his sense of humor because he fit it into a game with the most perfect cast of blorbos imaginable (I cherish ZZ).

I haven't played all of thecatamites' ouevre, in part because I've sometimes come out of his games frustrated. I feel bad about never getting around to 50 Short Games or 10 Beautiful Postcards in particular; I really want to play those. Part of me wants to end this on something like "Anthology of the Killer is thecatamites at the height of his powers," but that doesn't feel quite right. It's more like, I'm thankful that he channeled his myriad artistic strengths into a package I could personally connect to, even as someone that doesn't share all his values as a creator and player. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Trails to Azure and Carrion

The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure (2011/2013, PC)

Cleared on Hard, finished all side-quests. Finished it a while ago, but it's still stuck in my craw, so I feel like writing a review. I'm not going to spoil anything directly, but I'm definitely giving impressions of the whole game, so if you're particularly sensitive to spoilers maybe dip now.

This was obviously lovely in a lot of ways, but I think this is where I get off the Trails train for a while. Trails has never been big on stakes, but the lack of lethality to anything in Zero and Azure is just devastating. There's no weight to this anymore. The big scary villains aren't scary because I know no one's ever going to die.

It's especially weird because Zero gets most of its resonance from paying off an extremely dark character thread set up in 3rd. You'd think they'd realize it's good to have some edge every now and then in a massive fantasy epic. But if there was any edge left in Zero then it's completely gone in Azure; this is one of the most bloodless stories ostensibly about revolution I've ever seen. The new emphasis on light dating sim mechanics means we also don't get a strong core romance like in Sky. I didn't get to see any of the meager sparks between Elie and Lloyd pay off because I didn't buy her enough stuffed animals to put in her room, whoops.

It's a shame because the character writing is as lovely as ever. I finally upped the difficulty to Hard for this one and I should've done it sooner, it feels amazing and the bosses are super-chunky and fun to unravel. The music and art and setting texture are as gorgeous as always. But at this point Trails is a romance where nobody fucks and a war epic where nobody dies. I've lost my patience for that for the moment. 

Carrion (2020, PC) (Steam)

Carrion does One Thing and does it really really well. I was worried at first it would get tedious as the game went on, but it introduces just enough little movement and puzzle mechanics to keep things fresh. I really appreciate the game's restraint; less confident games would have three times as many upgrades, ten times as many optional collectibles. But Carrion only does exactly what it needs to communicate its story. It knows it doesn't need to dangle keys in front of your face to keep you interested.

It was clearly play-tested to hell and back too. It takes a ton of work to make a game that feels this smooth and frictionless without also feeling patronizing. It reminded me of Valve games at their best honestly. The choice to not have an in-game map was inspired, and I'm sure it created a lot of extra work making sure players can stay on track without one, but it fit the tone perfectly.

I appreciate the inclusion of the containment units since it gave me an excuse to run around the game world at the end, see how things fit together. It took maybe an hour to find them all, which felt like exactly the right amount of time I wanted to be backtracking before going back and watching the perfect ending play out. The extra puzzle rooms were fun too, and I appreciate that none of the setpieces ever got hard enough that I got frustrated with the innate imprecision of the movement.

Making a commercial-scale game that's this quietly Rock Solid is a huge accomplishment. There isn't a single thing about it I'd want to add or take out. I can't remember the last game of this scope I could say that about. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)