Yes, I was all about my parody logos.
I have been fascinated by games ever since I first played them.
The sole idea of making an entire career (and livelihood) out of creating something designed to bring joy to its players seemed genuinely dream-like to
me.
Unfortunately... I was sure that I could never make it happen.
I was no programmer, I didn't know the basics of storytelling, and I hadn't been blessed with talent in any artform. Like many others, I believed that I was destined to see games from the gamer's side of things, and that I would never have a hand or say on anything regarding the building blocks that made up the experience. It was me who played the final product, but it was up to someone else to decide what that product would be like. It was a bittersweet deal.
But then, the age of the internet began.
The internet changed my understanding of how everything worked, and it introduced me to the incredibly novel concept of "online collaboration". For someone like me (painfully shy and kinda awkward), the opportunity to get something going from behind a screen seemed too good to be true, and soon we were all engrossed on deep talks about what we could do with these new-found "powers", hacking endlessly at our keyboards as our post counts increased by the dozens on long-deleted forums. It was really just a matter of time before someone would emerge from the ranks of these idealistic tweens and teens and give us the final push... and that push came in style with the unexpected release of a revolutionary piece of software called "Adventure Game Studio" (or "AGS", as it is commonly known).
Adventure Game Studio was the dream tool for all of us, Abandonware junkies looking to make our own games.
Even though it had been out for a few years by the time we finally became aware of it (it came out in 1999), Adventure Game Studio landed among us at the perfect time to have the biggest impact, when Abandonware and gaming forums were in the middle of a seemingly endless love affair with graphic adventures, a genre that spoke deeply to those who had grown up in the eighties and nineties but that had slowed down just enough to become nostalgic.
I remember how excited I was when the first of several threads announcing projects was posted, and how I went down the list of jobs that needed to be filled, hoping to sneak my way in through the use of some unpolished skill that could help me etch my name on gaming's history through some simple collaboration (yes, I was way too optimistic about the whole thing). Amazingly, I got hired as a "beta tester" for a game that hadn't even been started (or even really thought out) yet and, as you can imagine, I never did get to put those skills to the test, as the project was abandoned before it even got going, dying in the echo chambers of some MSN Messenger group chat.
I was severely disappointed by the whole thing, but I wasn't about to give up my dream after the first failure, and so I kept checking the plethora of threads posted on the surprisingly active (and freshly created) "development board" of a site, a hugely optimistic subforum that saw people throw ideas blindly and try to form teams to get them made.
As expected, most of those projects went nowhere... but there was one in particular that kept on growing on both size and activity, and didn't seem to slow down as the days turned into weeks. When I finally caved in and decided to acknowledge its presence, I was surprised to see that it looked quite professional, with an organized workplan, details for what the game would be like, a job posting with clear roles and indications and even their very own site, working independently of the puny forum thread they had been using. I was intrigued, but I wasn't ready to join in just yet.
Clicking on their site showed me that these guys at least were making an honest push, but I could see some red flags right off the bat (like the fact that they had bought a vBulletin license for their forum, which was then intended to be hidden from guests as it was their main discussion area for ideas and development -- it seemed like an unnecessary flex).
I was not involved at this time, but I knew someone who was, and she spared no praise for what was happening behind the scenes, telling me about how they had mastered AGS to an unprecedented degree and how the ideas kept on clicking as soon as they were implemented on the long-awaited beta release of the game. She also kinda hinted that they were shorthanded for the whole thing, and they could really use some people, but I still wasn't sure if I really wanted to go down that route -- they had plenty of betatesters and I didn't
see myself fit for any other position.
Weeks later I was roped into the writers' team, with the specific task of making sure that the game wasn't too linear.
This was a genuinely good effort. Unfortunately, the very nature of fan games tends to kill them, as everyone involved is volunteering their time.
I enjoyed the easy, low-stakes nature of the job, but I couldn't help but feeling a pang of jealousy as the artists, the composers, the programmers and all other key people went at it furiously on other parts of the hidden board, deciding awfully fun (if unnecessary) stuff like the idle animation our character would have upon being left to his own devises for too long... you know, the kind of junk that makes a game worth playing.
I did have my fifteen minutes of fame by locating a "logic bomb" within the script, though.
Unfortunately, a broken computer meant that I had to leave the project just as the long-awaited beta was about to be released to a completely hyped-up public, so I missed both the final touches given to it and the reception that it got.
And then... nothing.
The beta was released, it was played, it was commented, but I came back to an empty board a few months later, with no updates by the time 2008 rolled around. What had happened? I honestly don't know, since I had distanced myself from this project and the people making it for way too long, so they were unwilling to discuss it with me (they still are). Best I could gather was that someone had hacked their site and either deleted or stolen a lot of the work that was being put into the game, resulting on them shelving it.
An almost offhand comment made years after the fact assured us that the beta and most of the work that had gone into making it were "secured", but would remain unreleased "out of respect for those who worked on it"... I assume they meant that they weren't going to show a half-made product in order to save themselves some flack (and I can sympathize with that), but I honestly think that they went about it the wrong way. I don't think anyone who worked on that project (myself included) enjoyed having it locked away forever, nor that anyone would care that much as to rip apart a fan project that had been lauded but abandoned years before. Whatever the case, the game has never been released and it is likely that it never will.
Now, I would love to tell you that I learned valuable lessons from the whole experience and so on, but the reality is that I didn't. I worked the indie game's equivalent of a boring office job and basically gained nothing from it, but these projects actually helped me reignite some of that childhood love for making games that had fueled me for so long and that eventually made me seek out "employment" on the many that were being created at the time.
After trying my own hand at Adventure Game Studio (it was a disaster that accomplished nothing aside from me finding a hilarious Easter Egg that basically told you to stop working on your project and enjoy the holidays), I decided to join a competition that aimed at creating "intentionally stressful games for a cheap laugh" and delivered through my incredibly weak understanding on how Game Maker worked, creating an assortment of poorly-made (and frankly trashy) "bullet hell" games that earned recognition through their sheer awfulness, which included ill-placed effects (such as slooooow fade to blacks after each death), unresponsive controls, and two-frame animations, all which were encouraged by the competition itself, but that I would be lying if I said that they were all intentional. I was just that awful at game development.
Giving me Game Maker was the equivalent of handing a bazooka to a caveman.
I am both disappointed and relieved that I can't show you any of that crap, since I didn't make any back-ups of those horrid things I made for fun and the download links I had provided for the competition were hosted on a shady file-sharing site that no longer exists. If you wanna visualize them, though, imagine a game made out out-of-place sprites from other titles set against the most obnoxious background you can think of and then spike the difficult by making the enemies stupidly good at their job. I am sure I would have been run out of the site had it not been for the fact that making something of such bad quality was the whole point of the competition.
A project of mine did get some genuine support, however.
Several months after the competition had ended, I decided to try and use Game Maker's features in unintended ways in order to create something bigger with them, and I ended up making a crude (but functional) e-book reader of sorts that worked by using the quick save and quick load features as bookmarks and the directional movements as page turners by making each and every "room" in the game its own page within the book. It was highly inefficient and didn't see much use (outside of a Harry Potter book I had thrown in there as a proof-of-concept), but I did appreciate the fact that people were genuinely impressed by my spin on a program that was never designed to do any of that.
I never did end up giving the world the next Mario, Sonic or Crash Bandicoot, but I'm sure someone out there still has flashbacks from the time they had to sit through the parody logos and horrendous gameplay I put in front of them, and that has to count for something. Besides, when the projects I was a part of got going, it really did feel like the dream was going to come true, and that's something I truly can't look back on angrily (even though I was well on-track to make Superman 64 look like Super Mario 64).
What about you? Ever tried your hand at game-making?
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, as always I’ll leave a more detailed review of this once I’ve had my morning tea. Fan games are awesomes!
