pubs
I am attempting to list Builder on Mobygames. So far the experience has been very strange. I entered in all of the relevant fields and pasted in my stock description, as used on the game’s site. Then I waited a few days for someone to acknowledge the submission. Since then I have been ensnared in a baffling time-elapsed argument with a series of “approvers”.
Pentatonic Duck: The description field is used to objectively describe the game and/or its gameplay, not give subjective opinions. Please rewrite your description to be more objective. You should add more rating categories as this is how other users will rate the game. Please provide a source for the release info. A link to a trustworthy website would suffice.
Me: [something along the lines of] Could you explain, as specifically as possible, what you find subjective about the description? I can confirm that it is completely factual, as this is my own game. The source for the release information is me, since this is my game.
Jeanne: The last paragraph.
Me: [something along the lines of] What about the last paragraph do you find subjective? Everything in it is a matter of fact. Is it that you dislike the wording?
Pentatonic Duck: The whole description sounds like an essay; you don’t actually describe the gameplay. Subjective elements are plentiful, from “glitchy and obtuse” to the list of games that influenced you ( rather than a factual comparison to the game’s precursors). You should add more rating categories as this is how other users will rate the game.
Me: That is the gameplay, though. The game is designed to be glitchy and obtuse. The gameplay comes out of the glitchiness and the obtuseness. That’s the whole point of the game. In the first paragraph I sum up the game’s mechanics; in the second I detail the game’s structure. In the third, I describe the game’s design premise and expressive purpose. I’m not injecting opinion; I’m stating facts of the game’s design.
As for the list of influences, I don’t get what you’re saying. You’re saying I should give a beat-by-beat comparison of what elements are derived from what games, musical acts, and cartoons? Why?
As for rating categories, I don’t really acknowledge that any of them are relevant. People can assess the game as a whole, but what’s the point of breaking it into pieces?
We’ll see how it goes from here. I’m ready to drop the whole thing.
I have never had a good experience with Mobygames. Once I found that someone had edited my own profile to include reams of information that I didn’t want there. When I changed the information, I had to provide a source to justify it. I told them that I was the person being described, and so I was the source. Then they asked me several times to provide a good explanation for changing the information. I said that the information was out-of-date, inaccurate, and that I generally didn’t like it. Apparently that wasn’t good enough. It took ages to fix.
The site makes Wikipedia look benign. The thing is both strangled with bureaucracy and often flat-out wrong — but good luck changing anything. It’s also ugly, poorly coded, and badly organized, making it difficult to navigate.
The site is almost useless, and yet it’s an important resource, as it’s the closest that the game industry has to an IMDb. The insularity and the incompetence of the project are perhaps illustrative.
(May 26th, 2011 @ 2:25pm)
I missed this until now; someone commented on that Game Set Watch blurb about Builder. I tried a few times to respond to it, but it looks like the commenting system is down now.
In my scrambling I lost the first part of the response, which amounted to impressed noises about Battleships Forever, a very sophisticated-looking (and not all that dusty) game made under Game Maker. I then went on to clarify that as great as the YoYo games tool is for indie developers, that I was coming from a different direction.
Builder isn’t made with Mark Overmars’ familiar Game Maker, though; this is a 20-year-old engine by the New Hampshire based Recreational Software Designs. It had something of a lively community back in the early ’90s, fed through disk swaps and dial-up BBSes. These days it’s horribly obscure.
Part of the exercise was to see if I could make something halfway relevant with such ancient tools. And I sort of was, though the engine creaked and complained. And that creaking and complaining in turn became sort of the real point of the project.
(May 16th, 2011 @ 10:09pm)
If you have played Builder, you may wonder about the developer name tacked onto the front. My wife certainly did; why on Earth, she asked me, was I using this throwback name instead of our long agreed-upon branding? The answer is that Builder puts official close to an era that previously I had left dangling for about fifteen years.
When I was young, I expected to be a cartoonist. From 1988 to 1992 I wrote and drew a spectacularly unfunny comic strip called Andrew-Jonathan. Although there was no particular story or humor, there were plenty of characters – all with complex relationships, backgrounds, and personality quirks. The strip was also an outlet for themes absorbed from adventure movies, Tintin and Uncle Scrooge comics, and personal experiences.
1988 was also the year that I began to design my first game, in the margins of homework assignments and in the back pages of notebooks. The game started as a clone of Konami’s The Goonies II — attic setting, inventory, and all. As the ideas developed and took on their own life, they absorbed elements of Hudson’s Adventure Island, Contra, and Super Mario Bros. 2. The cast of Andrew-Jonathan (in particular the title character) was also absorbed into the concept, almost from the start.
This imaginary game began to trickle back into both the text and the metatext of the strip. The Crabby monsters (likely a subconscious influence from Super Mario 2) started to appear.
The strip absorbed some of the game’s scenario, and the sort of violent 8-bit sense of cause and effect. Most curiously, whenever A-J’s friend Freeport was shown playing a videogame, it was a variant of that game –based on the strip and featuring those characters.
In a way, the strip’s four-year run was a build-up to and replacement for the game that I dreamed of playing. When in 1992 RSD’s Game-Maker presented itself, my attention shifted entirely from the comic. My first task on installing the software was to implement the game as directly as possible from my extensive plans. The result, I called A-J’s Quest. Barring the engine’s limitations and some improvisation along the way, the result was fairly close to my intentions – if a bit rough.
The biggest diversions came from the limits on idle states, the odd key-mapping restrictions, the engine’s strange treatment of counters, and the lack of an on-screen display for hit points, items, and whatnot. I also envisioned the ability to equip and unequip weapons, as in many NES adventure games. None of these were big problems; I just adapted, and found more pragmatic implementations.
Soon after completing the game, I responded to a note in the Game-Maker box and mailed a copy off to Recreational Software Designs. They quickly responded with an unexpected call, then a long correspondence that would eventually lead me to produce gameware for Game-Maker 3.0. More immediately, they sent me the beta to an upcoming release of Game-Maker – one with provisional Sound Blaster support. In turn I went out and bought a sound card.
The adjusted version of A-J’s Quest, now labeled 2.0, found its way into a demo for the 2.0 release of Game-Maker. It was also a feature of the short-lived Game-Maker Exchange program, where RSD compiled peer games onto floppies and sent them out to contributing users. But before I let loose my opus into the wider world, I decided to think up an official studio name. I didn’t think very hard.
Now that I was a real game designer, I started to pour my energy into developing a more-of-the-same sequel. Its main gimmick would be multiple characters, each of whom followed an original path to the same goal. To prepare for this focus, I redrew the character sprite almost from scratch. In a short time I had learned much of pixel animation, and the previous sprite had started to bother me. The new sprite, I used as the basis for all four characters.
Aside from appearance the characters were only really distinguished by their vocal tics, which the new Sound Blaster support made possible. The levels were mostly recycled themes, using recycled tiles from the first game.
A couple of years later, with a beta of Game-Maker 3.0 in hand, I set about making the biggest, most convoluted game possible with the tools. I meant to incorporate every possible character from the Andrew-Jonathan strip, each of whom would have distinct abilities and a different path through the game. The game would be a huge, branching adventure full of big decisions. For this event, I again tweaked the Andrew-Jonathan sprite with more detailed shading and more sympathy to Game-Maker’s quirks. In turn I added more variation to the other characters’ animations.
With my masterpiece in hand, I went back to revise the first two games and raise them to the level of A-J 3. I incorporated the second game’s much cleaner sprite into the first game. I adjusted most of the background tiles and some of the layout, added another level to A-J’s Quest, and smoothed over some awkward concepts. After all the tweaks, the first game wound up at version 4.0 and the second game wound up in pieces all over the hard drive. It was too much work to bring The Return of A-J up to snuff, and I had long overwritten its original format, so I was stuck with a dissected husk of a game. I figured if anyone actually registered the first game, then that would motivate me to put all the pieces back together. Neither happened.
Both the 4.0 and the 2.0 releases of A-J’s Quest achieved fairly wide distribution. The others, not so much. Whatever its form, for all its quirks and compromises, A-J’s Quest is probably one of the most familiar and influential games to come out of RSD’s tool set — and it became the cornerstone for about a decade of my creative life.
The story continues in Part Two…
(April 28th, 2011 @ 6:46pm)
I just realized how much Builder was subconsciously influenced by Portal. I honestly didn’t even think about it at all. But Valve’s design pervades almost everything about the game’s structure, down to the build/destroy thing (as opposed to red/blue portal stuff), and the way that the design is broken down into… sort of puzzle rooms.
And the whole game is sort of about escaping from this cozy gamey situation. And all the way the game teases you about what may be beyond that facade. Then at some point you — well. At some point everything becomes clear, and that’s when things become really interesting.
It says something about Valve’s design sensibility that I find myself aping it without even knowing I’m doing so.
If you have yet to play Builder, go and do so. If you downloaded it early on, you might as well upgrade; there are always little improvements. Meanwhile I’m working on a way to make the game easier for everyone to experience.
(April 16th, 2011 @ 3:21pm)
