In the first month of the year I made a little game for the FLATGAME ANNUAL bc the mainly arbitrary transition from one year to the next filled me with ambitions, motivations, “resolutions,” &c
I broke almost every rule in the brief. There is a sound effect, there is also a single collision you can trigger. I did spend less than an hour on the art, which I drew with a ballpoint pen on a set of post-it flags to keep the scale of the sprites roughly the same, and the background on an old bank envelope. For the sound I ripped a track from a YouTube video and combined it with sound I recorded in my apartment’s shower in Audacity. Then I fumbled through how to implement the basic needed functions in Construct because I got frustrated with Unity. It took about… 5 hours of concentrated work at the most and a lot of that time was spent doing things in an inefficient way.
In the sense of producing something flat and gamey in a small time commitment I think I ended up really satisfied though. Outside of the one collision at the end of ear maze zone the game advances by itself through timings which was fun to tweak and get working in a way that I enjoyed. And also, while I recorded 8 minutes of my shower running for the super slowpokes, I feel like the song matches up fairly well to the length of the maze, which was entirely arbitrary and accidental.
Core concepts:
- Inspired by stephen’s comment that if you asked the games industry to produce short games about intimacy through some sort of game jam structure you would get a bunch of games about shrinking and flying around in someone’s inner ear… which actually sounds really pleasant, someone please take an honest crack at that concept
- Also childhood interest in the logic of game version numbering around the turn of the millenium, suddenly there were “2000” versions of game franchises and simply making the next version “2001” must have seemed lackluster so a humanly incomprehensible futurity/permanence is implied by the jump to “3000” …an aspirational permanence which real life is hilariously inadequate in the face of, as if whatever exists in the year 3000 AD will still play Sim City, as if the concept of city, the concept of regretting cutting funding, would still be meaningful?
- How a song fundamentally about interiority when written by Brian Wilson becomes a love ballad when sung by Dennis, that the interiority of mental illness/bisexuality is overlooked in favor of how it functions in relation to others, sense that there is an expectation/inevitability of being defined by relationships with others that perhaps others do not have or need to think about
- Social media positivity culture sort of shunning all negative thoughts and feelings as a “toxin” attempting to shut it out and thus feeling like the monster is already inside of the house and has always been when you can’t get rid of it. Sense that others can sense your ugly thoughts (ugly thoughts make ugly faces) and hence you get a kind of thickening evil aura with ??? options for dispersal. Back to the song, the idea of the self fulfilling prophecy, magical thinking, compulsive disorders. If I think about her leaving me one too many times she actually will…
- Ear cleaning video YouTube and everyone in the comments wondering how they got there.
- The cycle of expression, guilt and concealment, from feeling embarrassed about your fake deep freshman year poetry to being wound up to eventually apologizing for expressing your feelings (sorry I’m just being crazy) when you’d already ruminated all week on how to do it.
- Tiny, one-off eccentric projects (don’t expect much) being both a coping method within the above feelings prison and a way of gaining the confidence to leave it.
- The experience of humming a song in the shower while the first thoughts of the day start going through your mind.
Thanks 4 Playing
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