6 stills from the ‘Amareica’ that wasn’t released:
Not to mince words, Amareica (made for the Ludum Dare 55 jam, entirely within the 72-hour timeframe of said event) is a “terrible game with a lot of flavor,” as one friend put it. I intend to expand on this title, but hope to never make another game like it again (I think it’s pretty much just Breaking the Gates and Happy Hunting Ground but with horses and better UI, a style of game that I intend to abandon in the future).
Amareica began as a visual novel/survival game and concluded as a cutscene compilation. Reception was strong – “one of the most unique game jam entries I think I’ve ever played”, wrote @blaster391 – but I think it’s a fundamentally flawed title, a poorly-designed and well-presented piece, like a showy gesture that communicates nothing. Thus, my next title (gold in a week, I hope) is entirely about design, and devoid of all of the showiness that damned this last project.
I’d like to commend the work of Caleb and Nathan Duke, who served as the artist and sound designer on this project (respectively). Both turned in incredible work, creating a strong aesthetic for the project without much input on my end. In the same spirit, I’m proud of the “horse-racing” script I created, which generates races of specified lengths among a variable number of horses, allowing each horse to change speed a specified amount of times to a specified degree without changing the finish time of said horses. That said, the camera-work and post-processing that I implemented distracted from this system, making the races perhaps a bit less exciting as-is in exchange for the tacky aesthetic pleasures of garish sounds and bloodshot colors.
I don’t mean to distance myself from this ‘Amareica’ – it’s (without a doubt) my best game to date, but I can and want to do better in the future.
My final note is that this game was NOT made using any AI text, image, or code generators. This is the same with my past games, but I see it as necessary that I include such a notice now, considering the increasing frequency of AI-generated text and imagery in games, films, and other mediums. I will be including a similar notice with all future video-game projects that I release.
happy hunting ground [sic.] was released on 9:00 AM EST, March 30th, 2024, and by my measure, it is likely to be – and already is – something of a flop. As of this moment, the game has incurred 16 views and 2 downloads – both of those downloads being on behalf of individuals I know; my expectation is that the game’s view-to-download rate will keep at 8:1 or even increase further, but we shall see.
Though I would love to delve deeper into this project’s development, I am weary at the moment and would like to forgo thought on this work unto death; it’s a failure and that’s that. Long story short, happy hunting ground was initially conceived as a run-and-gun FPS, with ‘Guns, cultists, synth-wave music, 3 minutes of negative space at the beginning, fake Polish folklore, and a heck of an ambiguous ending’ – as evidenced by the final project, the game turned out to be anything but, with coma-inducing non-gameplay and a torturous, sea-gouging, wake-wharfing, awful, asphyxiating visual scheme – I hate to look at it. I spent roughly 12 hours working on the game yesterday – fasting until the game was complete – and thus it and I are mortal enemies. Now I am weak and dislike what I put out. The next game will be better? Who knows at this point.
Figure 1. Screenshot that looks better than the actual game.
So, the score – ‘Nessun Dorma’, distorted beyond belief. I wanted the game to be romantic and uplifting and thus I chose that piece, which I was initially acquainted with by a football fan. I found the most reasonable public-domain recording of the piece (from 1929) and messed around with it in Ableton, and that was that. I might post it on YouTube, I guess?
Anyways, good night, or good morning; as previously stated, I am quite tired.
Those who follow me on Twitter (at this point, one person) will be delighted/annoyed that I just released an EP (my first EP), entitled “Lil’ Spectacle.” You can find it here: https://mdavys.bandcamp.com/album/lil-spectacle. If you think it’s poor work, then don’t worry – I didn’t pour my heart and soul into it. Maybe my next EP will be better. I think I am at a very primitive point in my approach to all of the artistic mediums – perhaps I might move out of this with a few years of practice. Expect another (more consistent) EP soon.
He and she – they occupied the master in the back-right corner of the second floor of a 2200 sq. ft. colonial, $720,000.00 in today’s money (at an estimate, without tax), in a “nice neighborhood” – here, a queen-sized mattress draped with their features under the distant influence of la bella luna. Something explodes on the page – she is rapt in interest; he is reserved to the words in his head, which have betrayed him since youth. They are well off – the wardrobe opposite stands in thick-set mahogany, polished brass features lending it esteem and functionality (implied) – all that’s left of some relative somewhere down the line whose name, at present, is beyond his conscious recollection.
“D’you ever read the obituaries?” He’s now prompted to (internally; within the enveloping surface, or the boundary of a thing; within the body; beneath the surface1) remark on the many strokes of his wife which he is fated to remain alien to, unto time, unto death.
“No.” The book evidently makes for better reading.
“Would you be – would you; would it interest you to write – could you write one; would you write an, uh, an obituary for me?”
“An obituary?”
As stated.
“About whom?”
“Myself, I think.”
A fine powder stands in the moon’s way, taking on the form of amoeba, of copy paper, of juniper berries, of an irrational sequence of nouns. There is much that stands in the way of the light; else all there would be, at the end of time, would be; is – light.
:
“You’re not thinking of dying soon, are you?”
Not much can draw a woman out of a page with ____ on it.
“‘course not.”
♪ Between the night and the night ♪
♪ Is a city and a day ♪
♪ And neither shall stand in the sunset. ♪
“I guess I been down to thinkin’ ’bout makin’ a trip up the Raccoon, figured with those roads and all that-“
“You’ll be fine.”
“”There is some inclination to insistence; what could be more damning but to recognize such an insufficiency in communication that one would have to re-iterate oneself. “Be quiet.” It was calculus that stole stillness from the moment.” You’ll do this for me, yeah?”
“What, write an obituary?”
“Soon, if thou mayest.”
Why must all suburban fiction be about surfaces? This one is formica, that one granite, or marble, laminate, all parts of the same body – the question being: which one?
“You’ll make coffee tomorrow?”
“Perhaps.”
“Well –
“We’ll see, I guess.”
There is a future in which he breaks the tar of the evening and takes the schnauzer out and, ‘pon returning, finds a wife who writes all her love letters as obituaries. Or she might forget his request, as is probable; and he might blank on the same matter – at the hand of death, of old age, or of a good night’s rest.
The lights went out at 10:37:32 PM, or 22:37:32 in military time, a few ____ too late in the eyes of one or another, but such are the times.
“There’s a white snowman,” she says. “A white snowman.” The baby opposite babbles in the baby-babble of its country of origin – the States, as it happens to be. “What has many colors?”
The child is learning to speak – “Owū, owoo, owao” – yes, an owl. The trimming of the room is a facsimile of a character from a popular children’s book, tacked in this pose here, that pose there, ever repeating itself. The first word a child is likely to understand is its own name. He – no, the other man – thinks he is a pre-psychological creature. There is a car parked fifteen feet away from the library entrance – a ‘big’, ‘red’ car as he will soon learn to describe it.
John Erik lapsed into his body once more and thought that he might like a couple of crows for dinner. A choir of birches pulled down to his legs and he thrust his digits out to a raven, who crowed and stumbled and wept air from his feathers and bid good-night to the child and set himself in the path of the moon (or was it the sun?) The down-pour clodded the tarmac into a run and John Erik thought that the rain was much like mother’s Saturday porridge, though it rang a tone of dead chickens, which was quite unlike the worm-piss of age-old buckwheat and stew water.
Harry approaching, John Erik thought that a good deal of this world looked like mother’s cooking and he cast his eye into the storm-drain and placed Harry under arrest.
“Crow, I say,” he said.
Harry knew not what to make of the invisible handcuffs and bid John Erik to take them off: “You are hurting me.” He started to cry but John Erik had good sense about him and plenty of scruples and thus complied with his request. Relieved, Harry looked up and saw two weeks of progress on a Supercuts “little boy’s haircut.”
“Where you been?”
“In my heart,” said John Erik; he’d seen it in a movie.
“I’ve been in the bathroom.”
He cackled and John Erik realized that he’d have to fetch his eyes from the iron if he was to have a proper exchange with Harry.
My latest, ‘breaking the gates‘ [sic], spawns two statements on my end that will come to the dismay of the game’s non-existent fans: 1) ‘breaking the gates’ was not intended (at its inception) to be a horror game, and 2) ‘breaking the gates’ isn’t a horror game. The fact of the matter is that, per the time of writing, this shabby slice of shovelware has garnered 63 views and 15 downloads; per my ‘analytics’ screen on itch.io (the website on which I am hosting the game), 15 site visits were via the ‘https://itch.io/games/newest/tag-horror‘ page and 8 were via the ‘https://itch.io/games/new-and-popular/tag-horror‘ page. Some substantial part of the game’s visits have been via the game’s ‘horror’ and horror-related tags, and I am thus unrepentant for knowingly mis-classifying this shitty walking simulator of mine.
Figure 1. The first visual one is likely to encounter in ‘breaking the gates’.
‘breaking the gates’ takes place in a non-descript game-space, the floor donned with un-attributed Pixar mahogany texture and the ceiling with a repeating tree-bark texture that was also applied to the tree models. Players are implicitly tasked with retrieving a key and unlocking a door (Figure 1), which opens a gate to ‘oblivion’ (Figure 4), represented as a stark-red color-space. Players are then (implicitly) encouraged to hoist themselves into this space, which invokes an end-of-game screen. That is all.
What I’ve just described would be a 5-10 second game if not for two features: the hackneyed post-processing effects that burn through the screen, and the ‘leisurely’ walking pace (set to 0.5 units a second in Unity, the run speed being set to 1 unit). The former may have the effect of disorientating the player, and the latter most certainly impedes the rate of progress; both of these combine to form a 2-3 minute game, which also happens to be the length of the non-looping musical accompaniment to the game (more on that later).
As may be evident from my manner of speech, I’m not particularly fond of this piece – it’s a shitty walking-simulator, as previously stated, and I made it in about 10-15 hours spread across a couple of days. It’s also my first 3D game in over four years, the previous title being a piss-poor first-person-shooter that I seek to eventually top in terms of downloads (it’s been downloaded over 200 times by now). The case of things is that, from the first second of this game’s development, I had no passion for the project and simply saw it as a necessary step towards making a decent game in the future; thus the lack of quality and the dearth of effort that led to such a shortcoming.
Figure 2. Early draft for the game’s thumbnail.
The game was conceived as ‘A House with a Key’, a tranquil work where the player would exit a house, retrieve a key from behind said structure, and unlock a gate in front of it, thus ending the game. Stylistically, I wanted to employ a four-direction grid-based first-person movement system, a la ‘Eye of the Beholder’, with no smoothing in between; this is because I thought it would be a bit like how the camera cuts in Ozu’s film “Tokyo Story”, and I liked the idea of the game assuming an ordered, Zen quality, which was something I identified in the visual and narrative layout of that film. However, I discovered that this was hard to design levels for, and so I quickly adopted a more traditional first-person movement system (WASD to move, mouse to look).
The second major change in the game’s design occurred on the second and final day of development, when I decided to excise the house entirely. Here’s why:
Figure 3. Neo-Classical House.
The house I modelled turned out more ass than class, and I got lazy and didn’t want to finish modelling it or texturing it, and so I changed the title of the game to ‘Door and Key’, which eventually became ‘Door and Key: Oblivion’, and (half-an-hour after publishing the game, realizing that nobody would buy into the idea that a game called ‘Door and Key: Oblivion’ could also be a horror game) I finally changed the name to ‘breaking the gates’, which has hence kept. As implied, I opted to completely excise the house from the game-world and thus streamlined the gameplay experience accordingly.
The story behind the aesthetic change (between the tranquil, ordered scheme of what I envisioned the game as and the pixel-drunk excess of the final product) is just as petty. As with the house seen in Figure 3, most of my models weren’t elegant enough to fit within the scheme of my original vision; similarly, the code I’d created was highly unpolished, and thus I took the easy way out and swung for the ‘PSX’ approach that the kids seem to love. This approach worked well here, not because the game works or looks well so much as because of the perceivable ‘polish’ that was gained from the wax slathered over the screen, and I think the final product is thus the slightest bit more playable because of this angle.
Figure 4. The gate to oblivion.
The last thing I’d like to mention is the game’s sound design, which proved a pivotal force in establishing the identity of the final product. My initial impulse was to download and distort an MP3 of Hindi classic ‘Lag Jaa Gale’, but a quick search on the Internet Archive led me to a (hopefully) public domain Hindi radio broadcast, and it took only a couple passes through audacity to re-structure this piece as something more in-sync with the visual scheme of the game. This, I think, is the best part of the game, aside from the fact that there’s a noticeable break in the audio that escaped my notice up until after I built all three versions of the game; thus the reason why I’m yet to correct this error. But that is all I have to say for this feature.
A poor product is this ‘game’, devoid of any great weight or substance, but it is a finished product, and I am content with that. I seek to follow it with a twisty FPS, which I’d like to release by the end of the month; more details to come. For those curious, ‘breaking the gates’ is available to play on Windows, Mac, and Linux at https://mdavys.itch.io/breaking-the-gates. As always, feedback is appreciated, and so is your time.
Marin Davys 