Game Dev Is Hard

I think anyone who is seriously into video game has had a dream or at least a thought of wanting to make their own game at some point.  With the rise of indie developers making huge numbers of sales on platforms like Steam, why wouldn't you want a piece of that pie, right?  However game development is INCREDIBLY hard.

I've been trying, for a while, just to make my own piece of shit game in RPG Maker.  Now maybe it's a problem with the genre I'm trying to develop for but before you even start doing anything on a computer there's so much that you have to think about.  I feel that if you don't go in with a decent plan then the project is going to, maybe not fall apart, but get pretty confusing pretty quickly.  You have to have all your ideas and how they are going to work together straight before you really begin.

Now you would think that the actual putting together of the game, the coding, would be the hardest part of the process.  While coding is an extremely hard thing to do we now live in an age where there are a number of programs to help you along with this process. For example, I'm making something in RPG Maker and I know next to nothing about coding.  Despite that, I've been able to use the tools provided to at least get SOMETHING working.  A little man walking around an island that gets into random battles doesn't sound like much but when you're starting from the bottom it's a pretty big deal.  I have another friend who is trying to make a point and click adventure game in an engine called AGS and as far as I know he taught himself all the coding side of that by just fucking around with the program and asking on forums for help.  Of course, you're quite limited when you use these kind of tools but when you're just starting out they are a good way to put your big toe into the ocean of game dev, so to speak.

But no, the reason why game development is so hard is just the sheer range of skills you need to be able to pull it off.  There's a reason that very few games are developed just by one guy.  You need to be able to do the coding, compose music, write stories if your game needs it, make artwork and have a good game play idea to make all that shit stick together.  That's A LOT to ask of a single person.  I feel like I have good ideas and if I'm making an RPG or adventure game I'd be pretty good at writing a story but I know NOTHING about composing music and I can't draw for shit.  This is a big roadblock for your average person.

However there are great examples of absolute beasts making great games entirely by themselves.  The one that springs to my mind straight away is Touhou, made by one drunk man who goes by the name of ZUN.

Awesome games, great soundtracks, incredibly challenging and fun to play and yet that artwork is....shall we say mediocre at best.  No one can be perfect though, the amount of skill the guy has in all of those fields surpasses mine by a great deal, I'm truly in awe over how these games even exist.

Still, if you do have an idea for a game and you are slowly working away at it, don't let it die.  If you can't draw, go learn.  If you don't know shit about music? go google some tutorials.  We live in an age where all this information is readily available and if you're willing to put in the hours then anyone could probably pull it off.  Just don't get frustrated when it isn't the walk in the park you were probably hoping it was.

Reminder: DPD Are An Awful Company

This afternoon I was browsing the "memories" section of my Facebook account and apparently, 6 years ago today is the day I discovered that most of my gaming collection from the UK was stolen!  I've blogged about what happened in the past but I'm going to jump at any chance I can get to bash the company that stole all my shit.

I remember it clearly, I had just finished my course at university and I was gearing up not only to leave Uni but also the country.  My family had moved from England to Sweden and I was moving from England to Japan.  I had such a large collection of games at the time that there was NO WAY I was going to lug all of my shit to Japan so I decided to send it to the family home instead and have it sit there.  I only took my PS3 collection and my portables since those are region free/small and the rest I loaded into boxes and gave to a courier service to deliver.

So some time past and I get messages from my mother saying that the boxes arrived to the family home but they weren't the boxes I sent.  Instead of games my mother received boxes of Jay-Z albums and Bill Clinton bobble head dolls or something.  I was mad, my mother was mad, everyone was mad, so of course we call up the piece of shit courier service that we used called DPD.  According to them and the tracker, the boxes were at some warehouse in Germany.  Why the ended up there I have no idea but for some reason they "couldn't be sent" and shortly after that they were just "lost".  Now I'm not an idiot, I know full well that at some point on my collections journey, some fuck face must have cracked open those boxes, saw all the games and decided to help himself.  Here's a list of what was stolen

All my PS2 games (nearly 100)
All my Wii games (about 50?)
All my Xbox 360 games (about 70)
A random assortment of PS1 games (a decent 20 or so)

The company is pretty adamant that no one stole my shit and paid me £600 in compensation.  If my shit wasn't stolen then why pay me any compensation? Also £600 to replace ALL THAT SHIT, good fuckin' luck.  Luckily thanks to Steam and the abundant game stores offering old stuff for cheap I've been able now to replace a good chunk of it but I'll never forgive the gigantic sacks of shit at DPD for stealing my shit in the first place.

The moral of the story is don't EVER use DPD for ANYTHING.  If you are planning to send something and you're thinking of using DPD to deliver, DO NOT.  You'd be better trusting Garett to run your shit to the location, a literal member of a thieves guild, than having DPD even go near one of your boxes of stuff.  We're all going to lose games at some point, maybe by stealing or by wear and tear but to lose so many all at once still hurts 6 years down the line.

Mobile Games Need to Stop Lying

I don't hate mobile gaming as much as I used to.  Certain titles like Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 and Dragon Quest Rivals have changed my opinion on mobile gaming being a complete steaming pile of dogshit.  I'm not ashamed to admit now that sometimes in my downtime I'll go sniffing around the app store for a new RPG to have a go on or maybe find some kind of rhythm game that's just packed wall to wall with anime girls.

It's also not uncommon to see adverts for these games on social media.  Scroll through your Twitter or Facebook feeds and you're bound to see at least one advert for some kind of mobile game.  One thing I can't stand though is when these adverts flat out lie to you about the content of the game.  There was one I remember quite vividly for a game called Z Girls or something, some town building waifu game with zombies which in it's ads used a lot of images of Vocaloid characters.  It's not uncommon for some mobile RPGs to do vocaloid crossovers but these game was completely devoid of any of that.  It was just putting the characters on the ad to try and entice certain fans into thinking their shit game was worth playing.  The absolute worst offender was some Pay2Win menu based Romance of the Three Kingdoms strategy game that was using footage from some goddamn Dynasty Warriors game in its adverts.  How do they even get away with shit like that?!

Generally speaking if you see a game that has these kind of ads they are usually shit anyway and are trying to use the misinformation in the ad to at least get a download and bump themselves up a listing on the app store.  There are quite a few games however that don't lie to you and are actually pretty good such as Azur Lane and South Park Phone Destroyer.

Let's be honest though, if you really want some decent mobile gaming you're probably better off just buying a DS, Vita or Switch.

Japan Heat Wave

I've not done a non-gaming Japan post in a while but given the current situation out here I feel now is a good time to do so.

IT'S. FUCKIN. HOT.

Now I know Japan isn't anything quite like England when it comes to weather.  Japan actually has weather other than overcast and rainy for starters and usually temperatures hit about 30-something degrees in the summer however this year the weather has been taking the piss a little bit.

It's now at the point where the news is having to report on the number of people who are DYING from just how hot it is.  This is insane considering that Japan has a pretty good relationship with the air conditioner but even a short amount of time is enough to drain someone of all their life force and leave them as a dry husk on the pavement.  Lord help if you if you're a child or over 70.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/23/national/temperature-tokyo-hits-nationwide-high-year-mercury-rises-40-8-western-city-ome/#.W1cIW8J9hEY

Luckily for me, I'm more than happy to sit underneath my AC with a huge bottle of ice water and a stack of video games.  I defy you to try and tell me that global warming isn't a thing, come over here and say it to my thermometer

Card Game Meta Is Annoying

I remember way back when I used to play Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering with my friends.  We would save up a little money, head down to the corner shop or the nerd store in central Manchester buy some boosters and play.  While it was frustrating to lose to a guy because his luck was better than yours there was something fun about being at the mercy of a booster pack.

Card games however are an expensive hobby so as I got older I drifted away from them.  I didn't have to give up completely though as thanks to games like Hearthstone, Shadowverse and Dragon Quest Rivals I can enjoy the TCG experience for free.  All of these games let you play for free and earn cards for free with the option to pay for boosters if you so wish.  

Now all of these games come with a ranked play mode and when I see that kind of thing of course I want to get as close to the top of it as I can.  While it is fun to collect cards, make decks and climb the ladder the higher you get the more dull these games get.  

There's a meta in each of games that, once you hit a certain rank, what decks you HAVE to use to see any kind of success.  If your not using one of these top tier decks that you can just google up you're basically doomed to sit in the middle of the ladder forever.  If your good you can get a bit higher but unless your a TCG god you ain't reaching the top without Professor Google.  

This is because getting boosters is just about playing a lot and instead of duplicates sitting in a shoe box for years they can be "dusted" which allows a player to craft specific cards.  So not only can you google a top tier deck but making it is a cinch so OF COURSE everyone is going to use them.  

That's not to say creativity is completely off limits.  Unranked play and the "random deck" modes keep the fun alive but the fact that ranked has to adhere to strictly to a meta makes things a little dull sometimes 

The Sega Saturn Chalenge Is Coming

One thing you may not know about me is that I LOVE the Sega Saturn, it's easily one of my favorite systems.  Hell, the first few playthroughs for YouTube I did were of 3 Dirty Dwarfs and Panzer Dragoon Saga

So I'm currently amassing a large collection of Saturn games with the intention to stream ALL of them, or at least all the games in the Saturn library that aren't sports games.  The point of all this being 1. I get to explore a library of games from a system that had a TON of Japanese exclusives and 2. To try and introduce more people to the absolute magic that is the Sega Saturn.  A lot of the games on the system are RPGs so if I actually ever finish or not before I die is another story but I'm sure as hell going to try

If you are familiar with the Sega Saturn and are interested to see a game, feel free to donate to charity to have it bumped up the priority list although I'm only going to finish each game once so don't just donate for NiGHTS 20 times and expect me to play nothing but that.

It's still going to take a while to set up but I'm hoping to get the ball rolling on this by September so go subscribe to the Twitch channel in the meantime or check out the two Saturn game playthroughs I did on the YouTube channel

Memories of Knightmare

So last night I was playing Haunting Ground on the PS2 for Twitch and I reached a certain corridor puzzle that got me very excited.  The puzzle was a room full of hexagons with a suit of armor at the end.  I had to carefully navigate my character across the right set of hexes to avoid getting a crossbow to the face.  This room reminded me VERY heavily of an old TV show I used to love when I was a kid called Knightmare.

Knightmare was a game show for kids that started in 1987 and ran until 1994 that aired on British TV.  The premise was simple, a bunch of kids met up with this dude called Treguard the dungeon master and they would pick one member of their team to don a "Helmet of Justice" and go into the dungeon.  The helmet blinded the player to everything except what was directly underneath them and it was up to the other kids on the team to guide them to the end.  The real reason for this was that the kid in the dungeon was actually just walking around a chroma key studio so only the viewers could see the dungeon.  If the kid didn't have the helmet he'd just see a lot of green(?) I guess.

Anyway the show, despite being for kids, wasn't easy on it's contestants AT ALL.  Difficult puzzles, traps that would instantly kill the player and fiendish puzzles were all put in place to hinder progress.  Not only that but each team was on a time limit to finish since the kid in the dungeon had a "life force" that was slowly ticking away.  So you could be the best dodger of traps in the world but if you got bamboozled by a talking wall then good fuckin' luck reaching the end.  Off the top of my head, I don't remember a single team winning in an episode for as long as I watched.  However it was a long time ago and I probably missed a bunch of episodes so I'm sure someone won at some point.

I was pretty obsessed with this show as a kid too.  My mother often reminds me of my younger years with stories of us going to the park and "playing Knightmare".  I assume this meant one of us closing our eyes and being commanded around by the other.  Apparently my obsession with Knightmare was so great that we even did this when waiting at bus stops and I can't imagine now how that worked at all. 

I have since learned that there is in fact a Knightmare video game on the Amiga but I've only played it for about 5 minutes on an emulator.  From what I can gather it has very little to do with the show and it's a dungeon crawler more akin to Wizardy or Dungeon Master.

I'm sure if you look hard enough to episodes have been archived somewhere so go see if you can check them out.  It's a great show even now and it might be fun to watch even now for a bit of a laugh.

Fortnite Season 4 and leveling frustrations

If you've been watching the stream you might now that I've jumped on the Fortnite wagon pretty hard.  How could I not when for a while almost every advert I saw was "CHECK OUT THIS AWESOME FREE GAME!"  I wanted to try a battle royale game but PUBG was £15 and looked shit, Fortnite at the very least had some personality.

So it dragged me in really hard with its fast paced game play that was enjoy to enjoy in short bursts.  It also helps that I can just camp in solos while I do housework or work on other things and the occasional fiddle to get inside the zone helps break the monotony. I really enjoyed the the event with the meteor and the map change that came with it too, the game is telling a sort of loose story without words that you have to figure out by yourself by observing small changes to the map.  It's a cool way of doing it that gets a community discussing ideas about what might come next.  

I enjoyed it SO much I ended up dropping 1000 yen on a premium battle pass, which is very out of character for me since I've not payed for a cosmetic since about 2010 but I just couldn't help myself.  The battle pass and the challenges that come with it are a nice mixup to play and without them I'd probably play at lot less.  It's crazy how a simple objective like "get a kill with a trap" can make you want to play over and over again until you get it.  

The big pot of gold at the end of the battle pass is the Omega skin and the "omega challenges" that came with it.  I was hyped for this, I was expecting some really hard shit that would really test my skills but when I unlocked it all it asked me for was to level to 80.  That's not a challenge, that's just demanding my time, and a huge disappointment for all the work it took to reach tier 100 on the pass.  

Still, the good thing about the premium pass is that it spits out enough currency to get the next one for free.  Now that I know what's coming I know that AFKing for exp is something I need to do more of if I want to 100% everything in season 5 but I don't think I'll ever quite forgive Fortnite for this crushing letdown 

Show Don't Tell

One thing I occasionally hear people complaining about when it comes to games is that they are becoming too cinematic at times.  Sure there are plenty of great cinematic games like The Last of Us Metal Gear Solid or modern Final Fantasy and while the use of cutscenes is a fine way to tell a games story, it's the ones that marry the two that really stick out as great experiences in my mind.

Take a Souls game for example, this is an absolutely amazing case of a game marrying game play and story telling in a really masterful way.  When it comes to these games there's usually a scene at the start and a scene at the end and everything in the middle is straight game play.  Very rarely will a Souls game interrupt play to show you a thing and when it does it's usually just creatures flying you off to the next area or something like that.  That doesn't mean however that the Souls games are devoid of story, the world is teeming with all sorts of details that tell you a story by showing you what's going on rather than telling you about it.  Instead of having a bombastic cutscene of monsters killing people, it has you run through the aftermath and letting you put the pieces together yourself.  For more detailed parts of the plot you have to look to item descriptions for the things you find in the world which is a sort of interesting take on the tired cliche of data logs.

Another great example of a game that does this is Fortnite.  You wouldn't expect there to be much of a plot in a battle royale like that and there isn't but the game does subtle things that show the player how the world is going to change.  While other games may make announcements on a news page like "NEW FEATURE!" Or "map changes coming for the next season, Fortnite drops subtle world changes that hint to how the island will change for the next season.  For example right before season 4 started a meteor appeared in the sky and a few hints were left around the map as to where it was going to strike.  It was the devs way of saying "we are reworking an area" using the game itself rather than just announcing it on an update page.  

There's nothing wrong with the classic cutscene, I would never want to see it go. However when a game does marry gameplay and story the experience becomes much much more memorable 

Excited For Sekiro

Usually when there's a big upcoming release I try to not get myself too excited for it.  Call me elitist or snobby or whatever but big AAA games, while enjoyable, don't usually live too long in my memory after all the release hype has died down.  However if there's one thing that does consistently impress me with every release it's From Software and it's Souls games.  Now from what I gather Sekiro isn't STRICTLY Souls, but it plays close enough for me.

Just straight off the bat I love the setting and the general look of the game.  Not because it's all Samurai and I'm a huge weeb (that much is only partly true) but I kind of like the idea of having a From Software covering as many thematic bases as possible.  We've got the high fantasy setting of the Souls games, the Euro-Horror feel of Bloodborne and in Sekiro we get a nice eastern touch, it's pretty cool.  Ni-Oh was great and all but now we have an ACTUAL Souls type game in an eastern setting rather than just a souls flavored action game from another company.

Setting aside though, I heard that this game has no real kind of leveling system which excites me greatly.  Some might lament the loss of this but as much as you might hate to admit, stats play a HUGE role in the way a Souls game progresses.  Sure, you CAN go fight those skeletons at the start of Dark Souls 1 but you're going to die in 1 hit and deal no damage in return just because your stats aren't there.  With Sekiro it sounds like it really is a true test of skill.  No more complaining about "artificial difficulty" if that's even still a thing, if you suck at Sekiro it sounds like it'll be because you ACTUALLY suck and now you have no excuse.

The feature that seems to have replaced straight up leveling is the prosthetic thing where you can equip different arms that do different things like a sort of grim-dark samurai Megaman.  I've been avoiding stuff because I want to experience as much of it for myself as possible but there seems to be one item in particular that acts like a grappling hook.  That alone is interesting because Souls have never really had much verticality so how the level design changes to suit this new found mobility is really exciting. 

If you've never played a Souls game before then you should go try one.  If you can't be bothered trying to get into a series 3 games deep then Sekiro (or Bloodborne really) might be a good place to start.  Fingers crossed that From really knock this one out of the park.