Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2023-09-01

New Month New Me. New Ramble!

It's Labor Day Weekend (at least here in the States) and that means... absolutely nothing for me because I don't get paid holidays anymore! But I hope you're getting some rest at least.

It's already September that means... it's officially the one year anniversary of the Endless Monday Monthly! And the 9th monthiversary since I stopped making them in favor of starting a foolhardy video game project. Turned out okay though.

Above: Just 28 more for Overwhelmingly Positive...

I've been incredibly inactive online so I haven't really been doing much "passive marketing" for the game (that's what I call posting art and stuff to remind people that I exist which leads to more people finding my game via my social media profiles if they're interested in what I make (seems cynical now that I think about it - the idea of posting art for fun having a marketing effect)).

The Autumn Content Update for EMDND is on pause while I wait for some people to get back to me about stuff. I wasn't having a super amount of fun working on it anyway because I'm kind of eager to just move on to the next thing. I feel all storied out after pouring my entire life's worth of stories into EMDND, and I'm itching to do something a little more gameplay oriented.

Speaking of "the next thing," I finally started making a prototype for one of the game ideas I had for Game 2: The Second One.

Above: Game 2 Prototype 1. Working title: Operations Oncall. Second working title: Press The Button To Fix The Graph... Please.

The main gameplay loop is simple. You're a new Operations Team employee at the Corporation, looking at a computer screen. Your primary job is to press the button to fix the graph. You do it before the blue line reaches the red line or very bad things happen. Longtime Endless Monday fans will recognize The Button To Fix The Graph as being one of the first pieces of lore established in Endless Monday Comix form.

As your onboarding buddy, Hana gives you increasingly complex tasks as you go through your training, with increasing responsibility and increasing level of access to the corporate systems.

The (hopefully) interesting part comes from having to juggle this with more and more alerts and calls that you have to address as time goes on, all the while progressing through a story that happens in the background, talking to people and digging into emails and logs and other places you're not supposed to be digging, to uncover a deep and possibly sinister truth. Of course, the story and ending will change depending on your actions and decisions in the game.

I played a few games this week for research before starting this prototype. I found that games like this eg. doing something menial over and over (The classic Papers, Please being the quintessential example) really need a good story or narrative to be fun. Answering the question of: "who am I, and why am I doing these boring tasks?" Can I empathize with the player character? What happens as a result of my actions, who am I affecting with my decisions (and do I care about them), what happens if I do or don't do the thing I'm told to do? What's important to me, and is there something bigger happening that I'm a part of?

So, much like EMDND, Game 2 will also be very narrative-driven, focusing on a self-contained storyline within the Monday Gameimatic Universe (MGU). In this case, the menial tasks will just be the method by which the narrative is delivered, and not really the primary focus of the game itself.

I basically made an entire fake OS for this in like a day. I'm actually really proud of that. lol

Above: (gif) Mondaysoft Binbows

So I'm gonna ploink away at this for a week, and see if I can't make something interesting out of this. It's a little different (okay very different) from my previous game, but I'm even less confident that I'll be able to make something interesting doing another VN like EMDND.

The tone already feels less lighthearted and goofy - as for whether that's a good or bad thing, we'll see. I know the audience might have certain expectations now that they've played my first game, but then again maybe it's good to establish that I won't be making the same style of games forever early on lol. If the game is fun at the end of next week, I'll keep working on it. Otherwise, I'll reflect on lessons learned, and start on a different prototype idea.

My long term gamedev dream, for Far-Future-Me, is to be known for making narrative games that excel at telling interesting stories in a fun way, no matter what genre or form the story takes. Oh, and also to have Goodsmile Company notice me and make a Skye Nendoroid.

I've already spent too much time philosophizing about and attempting to justify a game that I might not even continue working on. Let's just see where we're at for the next Ramble. :)

Thank you for your support, as always. See you next week!