Getting deep into October. Once again, I have an idea for a Halloween game, but no time to make it. In the meantime, here are a handful of Halloween games I’ve made in the past:
Dr. Creepinscare’s Pumpkin Patch Match
Monster Hug
Village Vampire Feast
Jack O’ Lantern (ZZT—it’s not good, but it is Halloween)
I created the original Koi Puncher in 2012 as one of the 25 games I made in a two-week period and submitted to Glorious Trainwrecks’s Pirate Kart V event. The game was made in four hours, from start to finish. The title came from an email conversation I had with siblings Jared Allred and Jane Allred, who have a nephew who actually punched an actual koi (which, for the record, I do not endorse—please treat koi with respect and absolutely do not punch them).
When I sat down to make Koi Puncher, the title was all I had.
Koi Puncher is very simple. Terribly simple. Almost everything about Koi Puncher is there in the title. You play a koi puncher (here imagined as a burly, shirtless white dude giving off mild Conan vibes). The koi puncher swims in a pond and punches koi. To leave the game, your koi puncher leaves the pond. That’s it. That’s the game.
That initial installment was made in four hours. Koi Puncher MMXVIII was made in four months.
And not just four months of leisurely programming, either. I spent more nights than not staying up way past my normal bedtime, Saturdays spent hunched over my desktop, trying to refine and polish a game that still boasts an intentionally low-fi, hand-drawn, amateurish vibe.
Near the end of 2017, I committed myself to making a new version of Koi Puncher. The game had been a hit at some local game dev showcase events at Shoryuken League in Eugene, Oregon, and I can credit Brit and Cullen at doinksoft for encouraging me to revisit it and give it a little extra pizzazz.
I’d toyed with the idea of revisiting the game before. Despite its spontaneous, hurried creation, I was really satisfied with the way the game felt. The way the koi moved and the player character animated were weighty and comical.
There were two main things I wanted to add: multiplayer functions and koi genetics. I’ll get to the latter in a minute.
But I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought I’d be spending a few weeks on it. Weeks became months, from the very beginning of January to the 20th of April.
In the same two-week game-making blitz that gave birth to Koi Puncher, I also made a quickie multiplayer version I called Koi Puncher: Championship Edition. While the first game was about punching koi at your leisure until you had your fill, Championship Edition gave you a second player (a palette-swapped, dark-skinned Luigi to the original player character’s Mario) to compete against for two minutes. In a sense, I felt that was a betrayal of the original game’s spirit, but I was testing the waters.
I wanted MMXVIII to retain the focus on pure koi-punching, but I quickly realized that with up to four players, it’d be fun to include versus modes like the Championship Edition. This, in turn, also led me to creating single-player score attack modes and, later, challenge minigames. So while I keep the pure koi punching experience at the game’s center, it becomes a small activity center with a multitude of game modes, for both solo players and groups of friends. I wanted Koi Puncher MMXVIII to work as a party game.
I decided I wanted to let players choose from a roster of thinly sketched characters. There are ten playable characters in all (eight available at the start, two unlockable) to choose from. I also wanted to support four players with as few as two gamepads and as many as four. I vastly underestimated how complex that would be. Coding all of this was a whole new level of challenge. I learned a lot about programming in GameMaker Studio.
In the original Koi Puncher, when two koi with the same body markings—out of a set of four—run into each other, a new koi can spawn. To keep this from going too overboard, I gave them invisible breeding buffer timers and sex distinctions, so reproduction would only happen if a koi of sex “1” met a koi of sex “2.” This very small idea about invisible characteristics got stuck in my head, and back in 2012 I had begun to think about a game called Koi Breeder, a simulation game where the player would select koi for breeding, each of which would have a long list of genetic characteristics invisible to the player. There would be dominant and recessive genes that would influence color, markings, fin shape, and more. I never quite figured out how I wanted the game itself to work beyond the genetic idea, so I shelved it, but never quite stopped thinking about it.
So Koi Breeder fused with Koi Puncher. Each fish in the game has a handful of genes, and the way they appear is based on how those genes are programmed to express. I never did well with biology (fun fact: I have a recurring theme in my nightmares where I’m failing the biology class I am retaking and can’t graduate from college), but my high school-level, oversimplistic understanding of gene expression led me to a place where I can fake it well enough.
Mutations can happen, too, leading to the possibility of extremely rare koi colors, patterns, and body shapes. Ultimately, there are thousands of possible koi that can be found in the game.
So eager was I to tackle this koi genetics idea, it was actually the first programming and design task I set for myself. It was fairly simple to draw the various possibilities of body colors and patterns (which are dynamically created from a handful of component sprites), but getting inheritance to work the way I wanted took a long-ass time. I can’t exactly remember, but at least the first six weeks was primarily devoted to tweaking everything about koi genes (and I’d continue to fiddle with it throughout production).
Most play sessions will not last long enough to see some of the weirder combinations that come through breeding (selective breeding is somewhat possible if unruly, since koi will disappear after three hits, removing them from the gene pool). So to allow players to create a permanent reserve of prize koi they could develop over time, I created the “home” pond mode, letting players keep their favorite koi.
The dynamics of koi inheritance, though, is completely aesthetic, affecting absolutely nothing about the core game. Most players could probably play MMXVIII without ever noticing the genetics, let alone fathom what was going on under the hood. This, honestly, is still my favorite part of the game and one of my favorite things I’ve ever done creatively, largely due to its surface frivolity.
The last few weeks of development on Koi Puncher MMXVIII had very little to do with punching koi. The five new ponds I’d created were surrounded by a lot of empty grass and dirt that I’d sparsely populated with trees and shrubs. It was empty, in contrast to all the liveliness in the pond.
Suddenly, it occurred to me to add cats.
Initially, there was going to be one cat. A tuxedo cat modeled on the two lovely cats in my house, Boris and Natasha. It would appear on rare occasions, sit at the edge of the pond watching fish, and run away when a player character got near.
But why stop with one cat? Why not take that same cat sprite, recolor it, and make, like, half a dozen cats?
So I did just that. Different cats live at different ponds. They sometimes curl up and take naps. But is that all there is in this world? Koi and cats?
Then I made birds. Different kinds of birds. And turtles. And even a peacock that appears under very special conditions. They all have their own behaviors. And then I even added little interactions between them. Suddenly, the world around the weird little ponds of Koi Puncher was bustling with life, little ecosystems.
Koi appear in Temple of the Wumpus
Again, this has nothing to do with punching koi. All of this is completely independent of the mechanics of what the player is doing. The games I make have long featured animals (Watch Ducks, Owl Forest, Ungrateful Birds, to name a few), and this new use of wildlife unlocked something in me that I’m continuing to explore in the games I’ve made since (Temple of the Wumpus, primarily) and am working on now.
There’s more that I could go on about at length here. Programming and balancing the challenge minigames was fun and rewarding. Creating the game’s unlockables (something I’ve liked to do in my “bigger” games, like Caverns of Khron and Explobers), consisting of two player characters and two maps, caused me to scrap and rewrite some of the game’s core organizational structure. The game also has some really deep-cut references to Caverns of Khron, which has led to more metareferentiality in the games I’ve made since (for example, the original koi puncher character makes a cameo in my remake of Aaargh! Condor).
Koi Puncher MMXVIII is absurd on a number of levels. It’s a ridiculously simple, almost aimless concept that functions almost identically to games I spent no more than six total hours developing, but I spent four months reworking and expanding it, adding in fidgety little things around the edges. I wouldn’t have expected it, but it’s somehow become one of my favorite, most personal games.
A year after its release, I’m releasing a small update to Koi Puncher MMXVIII, bringing it to version 1.1. It fixes a bug in the ice stage and makes it less likely that you’ll run out of koi in a multiplayer game (koi now have more hit points in those modes). If you haven’t given it a shot, I hope you’ll step into my bizarre, koi-punching world.
And please, again, don’t punch real koi.
____________________________________________
This post was cross-posted at itch.io.
As I was furiously working on my Emotional Mecha Jam game Orbital Paladin Melchior Y the other week, the tenth anniversary of my first GameMaker-made release, About a Ball, whizzed by without my notice.
So I’ve now been working in GameMaker and GameMaker Studio for over a decade. Before I purchased a license for GameMaker version 7, I hadn’t touched game design since 2003, when I collaborated with WiL Whitlark on the 24 Hours of ZZT game AdversiTurtle (I’d cut my game-making teeth in ZZT starting in 1997). My intervening six years had been devoted to filmmaking, having worked on over a dozen comedy shorts in some capacity with my collaborators at Bombdotcom Productions. In early 2009, I was wrapping up post-production on the feature film comedy I directed and co-wrote with Enoch Allred, Legends of Minigolf: The Flamingo’s Challenge. Somewhat to my own surprise, when I imagined my next creative project, I found my mind wandering back to video games and thinking I had some ideas about the intersection of narrative and gameplay (perhaps of interest is that one of the first projects I imagined was a Persona 3-influenced, visual novel-style adaptation of my own film Legends of Minigolf: The Flamingo’s Challenge)
I was reading a lot of anna anthropy’s articles about level design and was inspired by both her use of GameMaker in the creation of games like Mighty Jill Off . Not really sure where to start, I found a multi-stage tutorial Derek Yu had written on the TigSource forums walking the reader through the creation of a simple scrolling shoot-‘em-up. I followed along, creating a small shmup starring a space lion fighting black blobs. I improvised some power ups and other features and started to feel comfortable with how things worked under GameMaker’s hood.
My game-making ambitions were vague (outside of some way-beyond-my-scope blockbuster-budgeted pipe dreams), but I knew I had long wanted to develop a game like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link but with a stronger narrative and emotional component. I’d definitely have to learn how to make a platformer.
I downloaded a few sample platformer templates for GameMaker, but the kinds of coding I saw other people using didn’t mesh with what I’d come to understand about object interaction and movement from Yu’s tutorial. I was also still drawing lot of my programming intuition from my teenage experiences with ZZT. So, instead, I took the GML (GameMaker Language) scripting I’d learned from my lion shmup, and painstakingly fumbled through the basics of jumping and movement (note that half of my ZZT output was made up of various types of platformers).
It’s cliché, of course, for amateur game-makers to hastily draw shapes (especially circles and squares) as the placeholder objects in their experiments, but I happened to add eyes to mine and began to think of it as a little character in its own right. Its enemies naturally became different, more angular shapes with crueler eyes. My experiments with collision, obstacles, and movement led me to crafting a small series of passages for the ball to traverse, and soon I found that I’d created a small network of rooms that folded in on themselves. I was making a game that I thought was actually kind of fun. I started implementing some of the ideas about level design I’d been meditating on, including the idea of the player’s goal being visible from the very first screen of the game.
About a Ball (a more or less meaningless pun on About a Boy, a title befitting an episode of a Saturday morning cartoon) is a brutal game. It took me a couple dozen tries to beat it again this morning, despite its short length. The version I have here is actually an updated and revised edition from 2012. Its original incarnation was even more brutal, with only five lives to lose before it forcibly kicked you out of the game (completely unnecessary, since the only progress that carries over from life to life is tripped switches and blood-stained spikes).
It has a fixed, awkward jump with no gradations and no variability (there’s no sense of gravity, as you fall and jump at the exact same rate in each frame, in much the same way as my old ZZT platformers, and you don’t hover at the peak of your jump). However, the game’s sole stage is designed around this limitation. There’s no real story to speak of here. From the moment your red ball appears in the industrial warehouse-esque environment, the player only knows they have to make their way to the Lemmings-esque portal on the other side of the starting chamber’s wall.
The game has an absolutely opaque, inscrutable scoring system based on time spent and (maybe?) lives lost. My score from my most recent completion was 62,682. I can’t tell you what that means. It would’ve been higher if I’d taken less time.
At any rate, About a Ball was released to my blog on February 13, 2009. This was before GameJolt and itch.io provided a good place to house free game releases, so it was almost certainly entirely played by people in my social circle. I wouldn’t complete another game until 2010’s Pirate Kart entry Watch Ducks, even though I did attempt a handful of narrative platformer ideas with scopes way beyond what I was ready for. My experience mucking around with the interactions between About a Ball’s platforming mechanics soon led to a half decade of focusing almost entirely on tongue-in-cheek riffs on game clichés like the scoring system in Watch Ducks or wholly mechanical explorations of tweaks on the basic grammar of platforming games like Bulb Boy and ExpandoScape, mostly developed for quickie Glorious Trainwrecks events.
In this time, “narrative” (in its most conventional definition) in my game design work was mostly explored as a humorous framing device or an ironic counterpoint to a game’s mechanics. For my more mechanical experiments I was very into an idea of games inherently possessing narrative so long as they were running—if a player avatar progresses from the starting post to the goal post, a narrative has been expressed, even if it lacks traditional representational ideas. So into this concept was I that in 2012, when I released Caverns of Khron, I left out any contextualizing text within the body of the game itself and when I approached my friend Jane Allred to write a backstory for the game’s manual, I gave it the header of merely “A Story”—its own text fairly vague, but intended to allow the player to project whatever they saw in the adventures of a purple-haired adventurer’s sword-aided descent through increasingly bizarre screens purely derived from the interaction of objects on screen.
Only in the last couple years have I started to get back to exploring the richer narrative concepts that drew me back to game design a decade ago and resulted in the narrative-light About a Ball: Knight Moves, Liz & Laz, Nibblin’, and Monster Hug all have integrated story sequences. Further, while Temple of the Wumpus leaves a lot unsaid, it is a game all about reading and studying hundreds of bits of text to guide your avatar through a spiritual journey to which I want the player to bring a certain amount of their own experience (and, by no mere coincidence, is my most direct riff on Zelda II to date). Orbital Paladin Melchior Y fuses the action shooting genre with a visual novel format. What’s more is that I’m doing all of this in GameMaker Studio, having moved beyond awkward jumps and minor tutorial variations to scripting an entire visual novel system that integrates with a shmup. Having written my first visual novel, I’m eager to continue to explore what can be done at the intersection of my focus on mechanics and level design and the power of story.
Another Halloween is upon us! I took this opportunity to update my 2012 Halloween game Village Vampire Feast for 2018! Additions include some graphical updates, a menu, gamepad support, and new music by FoxSynergy. Strategically feast on villagers to survive as long as you can!
Photo credit: Daniel Schwartz
I’m very pleased to announce that my game Explobers will be featured as one of fifteen games in the indie game showcase at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s fourth annual SAAM Arcade event in Washington, DC, on Sunday, July 22, 2018! I’ll be there with the game with two computers running a special abbreviated edition of the game built for this exhibition. If you can be there, please stop by and say hi!
You can read more about the event on SAAM’s website. Admission to the museum is free. The theme of this year’s event is game spaces.
In addition to Explobers and the other indie games, there will be classic arcade and console games be presented by MAGFest and Arcades4Home, while Boolean Girl will be doing coding workshops. Artist Saya Woolfalk will also be giving a talk at 4pm.
Explobers is available for free download at itch.io and GameJolt. Please consider donating if you like it!
_______________________
The Explobers press kit is available here.
~In which I celebrate a game-making milestone by indulging in some navel-gazing bullshit~
This website is now home to a full ninety (90) free games! The earliest game on the site dates back to September 1, 1997’s truly embarrassing ZZT game Bob: The Adventure and runs up to June 7, 2018’s Liz & Laz: Episode 1: The Control Cubes. This isn’t as interesting a number as 100 will be–I expect I’ll hit that some time next year–but if you’ll forgive me, dear reader, I’m gonna get all retrospective for a bit anyway.
Relatedly, the release of my 90th game coincides roughly with the twenty-year anniversary of the launch of my first website, Newt’s Pond, which first went up on Geocities on June 10, 1998. It was a true Geocities site, and you can see a facsimile of what it looked like at launch archived at Neocities. The site would change over the years, but it was initially home to two webpages, ZZT Planet (a place to download my (Newt’s) games) and Moo@You, a page that advocated role-playing as an obnoxious cow in random chat rooms. Before the launch of Newt’s Pond, my handful of ZZT games had been released on my cousin Glynth’s site.
Liz & Laz is a fitting milestone for a personal game-making history that starts in ZZT. I was inspired to create it when revisiting some old ZZT “engine games,” particularly platformers. Engine games were ZZT worlds that used ZZT’s standard, uneditable four-direction player character to touch other objects that would manipulate a scripted player object. Playing some other vintage platformers led me back to thinking about some of my own. This dual player mechanic is actually pretty interesting!
My first engine game was Punctuation People, made in the summer of 1998, a game that began its life as an attempt to make a Super Mario Bros. game in ZZT (all the game’s enemies are modeled on Mario enemies, a fact somewhat obscured by the ASCII character set). It was my first game that wasn’t a sloppy “comedy” adventure game. I was thinking of Punctuation People with its awkward occupation of a sizable portion of screen real estate. Like a lot of engine platformers, it surrounded the player on all sides with control objects. I was also thinking of my 1999 Lemmings clone Zem! 2 in which the player instead has indirect control over Zem, who marches forward mindlessly, but the player can have Zem perform actions by moving themselves along a row of buttons and touching them. The additional movement the main player object is required to perform impacts the rhythm of the game significantly.
Liz & Laz started out from this observation about a ZZT genre as something intended as a kind of intentionally frustrating homage; I thought I’d make it a brief sketch of a game that I’d tinker with for a couple nights and then release half as a joke. I was surprised at how compelling I found the mechanic to play when testing it, though. Soon I was polishing up animations and fine-tuning level design (I was also inspired visually by the glorious platformer games by Kabusoft which I’m in the middle of writing up for my new review blog Jots on Dots). I reinterpreted the ZZT command objects to a human-sized gamepad and decided I’d make it a two-tiered platformer, in which Liz in the control console jumps on gamepad buttons to make her unseeing partner Laz walk, jump, and shoot.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and when I counted up how many games I had on the site, I was delighted that my 90th game had so many connections to places I’d been before.
It is perhaps unsuprising that at this phase in my game-making I’m reflecting on my past work a lot. The 90 games housed here are spotty in quality and it’s sometimes a little weird to me that unfunny “comedy” games I made when I was 14 sit presented here with almost equal weight as games I’ve spent three months polishing. But I like that uncurated retrospective of my own work. And I’ve been taking surprising inspiration from it, as well as revisiting and rethinking the scenes I was a part of.
My output has been spotty, with long lulls. In 2012 alone, I released 38 games, including Caverns of Khron, which I worked on for 11 months–all while attending school full-time, working part-time, and relocating to Japan for a year of study abroad (I should note that 25 of these were made in the span of two weeks for Pirate Kart V)! This was a giddy period of experimentation and exploration, when I was getting good enough at Game Maker to make more complex games quickly, was standardizing and streamlining my bag of programming tricks, and was brimming with mechanical and aesthetic ideas I hadn’t tried yet, all drawing off the infectious creative energy at Glorious Trainwrecks. Between 2013 and 2015, I released no games for almost two full years, occupied by other interests, life events, and the beginning of grad school. Most importantly, making games didn’t sound all that fun for a little while.
My creative impulses ebb and flow. Since ending my game-making hiatus in the spring of 2015 with one of my personal favorites among my games, Shadow Wrangler (like Laz & Liz another Lemmings-inspired game that could be defined as “platforming by proxy”), I’ve been making a few games a year and tending toward larger, more polished projects. It’s harder for me to sit down and make a game in four hours like I used to six years ago; I’ve become increasingly interested in stronger game cohesion and narratives, accessible player experiences, and more careful, focused development in my practice.
I have some very exciting plans yet on the horizon in 2018, and some of it is going to involve revisiting unfinished projects and a return to old titles and ideas (a return to Zem! might even be on the table). At the same time, I’m really not sure where things go from here. Liz & Laz, like a lot of my games, started as a lark that spun into something else entirely (and a 1,000-word, self-obsessed ramble). I’m about to head deep into developing a game for the Wumpus Jam I’m hosting (please join!) and I only have a vague sense of what that’s going to look like. Thanks for playing!
(And thanks Alexis JAnson for STK!)
I’m happy to announce the launch of my blog Jots on Dots: Thoughts on Digital Games. In order to explain what the blog is about and what I hope to accomplish with it, I’ll just quote the mission statement from the site’s About page:
Purpose
Jots on Dots: Thoughts on Digital Games is a blog that seeks to offer two solutions to problems I have: one, I’d like to write about games more; and two, I’d like to see small games written about more.
There are a handful of great sites that regularly recommend (mostly) new free and indie game releases (including some personal favorites like Warp Door, hmtwvcicbid, and FreeIndieGa.me), which tend to follow the freeindiegam.es model of zero or minimal commentary. I love this work and it’s supremely valuable. These sites also post a much higher volume of games than I will be able to here.
But we are in an age where there are thousands of games released every month–tens of thousands every year!–and hardly anything gets written about any of them, save for pre-relese hype and at-release reviews for the work of larger studios and a handful of celebrity indies. As a person who values criticism and scholarship, this dearth of discussion pains me a bit. You see responses on feedback store pages and creators’ websites, but these tend to be either written primarily for the benefit of the game creator or at as a sort of advertisement to the potential customer. Feedback isn’t really commentary. There are a lot of great, small games out there in the world and I want to do my small purpose to give them the consideration I believe they are worthy of.1
Here, I’m looking to write short reflections and essays (we’ll use the sloppy term “review”) that seek to work out in words what I think these games offer. Yes, I want to recommend games I enjoy, but I also want to do a kind of work on these games to expand their seen-ness, including indie games from previous years, many of which risk getting lost to time completely as they sink further and further into the back catalog of indie game portals.
Scope
I’m not limiting myself to new releases. Nor am I necessarily limiting myself to indie games. Expect to see some write-ups of old DOS games, vintage indies, and the occasional big-name game I’ve been playing lately. I’m sensitive to the fact that small, free games especially tend to be labors of love by individuals, so I don’t expect you’ll see much negativity here.
I’m a game-maker myself (see Whatnot Games). I’m also a scholar of Japanese literature and popular culture. The games you’ll see written about here will reflect my intensely personal tastes (and may reflect whatever games I’m playing to research current projects). I’m also looking to introduce small, interesting Japanese games that will be accessible to people who don’t know Japanese.
This essay was originally written for the “Glorious Trainwrecks X Babycastles” zine for the Spring 2018 exhibition of the same name at Babycastles in New York.
The “development” in game development emphasizes process. You write a novel. You compose a song. You develop a game. The term conjures up an extensive and lengthy process of experimentation, revision, rearrangement, expansion, and polish. The project folders–tangible and digital–of any number of game makers would attest to this process, full of in-development projects that failed to come together, exceeded manageable scope, or could not sustain the interest of the game’s author or team, none of which will ever see the light of day.
Jeremey “SpindleyQ” Penner’s original introduction to Glorious Trainwrecks states “this site is about nothing, if it is not about getting off your ass and creating.” The site’s (roughly) two-hour Klik of the Month Klub events aren’t game jams. They’re not don’t-sleep, days-long frenzies of activity with teams. They’re non-competitive. They liberate the game maker from the desert of half-thoughts and projects stuck in developmoent limbo by asking them to just have a thought and complete it.
To complete it and release it to a diverse community of interested individuals, no matter the thought’s genre or its execution. The games that others at Glorious Trainwrecks have made have entertained me, inspired me (both inside and outside of my game-making), made me rethink things, and fostered a strong sense of community. And the community’s always growing and evolving. It develops with new participants, new games, and new thoughts. A creative process with lots to show for it.
It’s been in development since February, so now I’m very proud to finally release the trailer for my upcoming game, Explobers! The game will be available for download very soon. Please check out the game’s official website for more details.
Around 2003, I was twenty and my friend ADV was developing a ZZT-inspired game creation system called Bang!. I had retired from ZZT a year before with the release of Zem! X, a final entry in a series of Lemmings-inspired games. At the time I was mostly focused on drawings and wasn’t especially interested in continuing game development, and certainly not in learning programming. While Bang!, heavily inspired by ZZT, used a language much like that system’s ZZT-OOP, it was much more powerful and, as you might guess, much more complex. While it retained a tile-based character system like ZZT’s, it allowed an infinite expansion of the character set and multi-colored characters, basically making sprites possible. Having primarily worked with text-mode systems, this was very appealing to me. But learning new programming somehow wasn’t.
In early 2003, ADV agreed to do the programming work on a new project if I’d lead up design on a project and provide the art assets. I still had some game ideas I’d been itching to try. And so I began plans for a game based on Zem! X‘s lemming hunter concept, to be entitled simply Zem!
At the time, I was enamored with the idea of open world games and Pokémon and wanted to add a bit of that grand scope to the project. Rather than the stage-by-stage challenge of Zem! X in which the player had to shoot one lemming, Zem, in order to move onto the next level, this game would find the 
player (choosing from a dozen or so potential avatars) on a journey to advance through the ranks of the Zem Catching Agency, an organization that returned pet zems to their owners, captured zems in the wild to be sold as pets, and removed nuisance zems. As you can see, “lemmings” had been replaced by “zems,” though clearly their designs were still inspired by the critters in Lemmings. Beyond the standard, blue-clad zems who simply marched ever forward, there would be fire-breathing zems, flying angelic zems, giant cyclops zems, and even goth zems–just for starters.
The game would have free-range areas where the player could hunt down rare or unique zems to raise in ranks or earn money as well as specific mission levels. Zem! was to have a massive world map that the player would need to expend resources to navigate by buying bus and plane tickets. There were to be major hub cities and little towns, belying my infatuation with Zelda 2. Somewhere in there, plans for online multiplayer modes were also sketched out, where players could compete or cooperate via peer-to-peer connections using the characters in their save files. There would be dozens of playable avatars.
It perhaps goes without saying that plans for the game quickly became unruly. In truth, I both had a hard time managing the scale and flow of the game and I’m not sure that I ever had the clearest idea where it was all going except for some vague vision. Eventually, WiL (who was already planning to provide music for the project) took over programming, but even still the game lacked direction on my end, I hit a block, and, as a result, the project was abandoned. Basically, the scope got out of control, my ambition couldn’t match by then-ability as a game director, and it was unsustainable.
ADV eventually discontinued Bang! and began working on his next ZZT-inspired game creawtion system, Plastic, which attracted an even bigger following, if I remember correctly. WiL made some awesome stuff for it. I think I flirted with getting involved with Plastic, but never produced anything.
In the meantime, WiL, Brian Polak, and I made Tetrovny! in Bang! (we were all really into exclamation points in titles in those days, it seems). WiL made a handful of really neat Bang! games, continuing his innovative and boundary-pushing work in ZZT.
A few months ago, I uncovered some of my old notes, old art assets, and some old builds that I could still get running (forgive the sophomoric humor and drug references–we were young). I took a couple videos of the game at different stages.
The first includes the opening cinematic sequence as well as a city environment and the game’s menu.
The second is a demonstration of the game’s weapons and different zem types. I can’t believe I thought that tile-based parallax scrolling underground was going to be at all acceptable.
Below is a lineup of the varieties of zems I’d designed for the game. As I mentioned above, each would have had its own behaviors, and there would have been even more than these:
And finally, I’ve dug up a video captured by YouTube user JaqMs of a build of the game I don’t have in my archives.
I’ve occasionally thought about revisiting this project–or at least the concept–and adapting it to Game Maker. After primary design work was done on Caverns of Khron I actually began a Game Maker version, recycling much of the assets from the Bang! version, but it again suffered from lack of a clear direction, and it stalled out before I got as far as programming the tranquilizers. Meanwhile, the basic ideas explored here and in other games of the Zem! series have heavily inspired my games Penguin Mania X, Super Stone Ball, Shadow Wrangler, and the upcoming Explobers.
NOTE: If you’re looking for Bang! itself, I have the most recent release (1.1c) I had available for download here. It’s an old program now and originally came with an installer, so I can’t guarantee how well these files will work. I know someone wrote some documentation for how to use it, but I can’t find it anywhere. I may try to upload whatever games I can locate on my hard drives that were actually released, though most of what I have is my own and others’ in-progress builds.