#mostly ms paint in terms of actual painting but i composited a lot in paint net and added a lot of filter stuffs there

[cali]

--runaway harpy- crops under cut

+printz

[jimmyandthepulsatingmass]

Developer Retrospective: The God of Crawling Eyes

It’s been a while since I did the last one of these, and Jimmy’s progress is a bit slow right now because I’ve been grading lots of essays, so why not talk about another one of my oldies?

What is The God of Crawling Eyes?

When I first found out about rpgmaker.net, it happened to be around October and rpgmaker.net had a little Halloween horror game contest that was about to start up, so I figured entering it would be a good way for me to make myself known to the community and maybe stir up some interest in A Very Long Rope.  I had about a month to crank out a game, and I ended up producing The God of Crawling Eyes in about three weeks because of work.  I had no clue that horror games had a thriving community, so the game that I spent the least amount of time on ended up being my most played.  Here’s some stuff I learned from the experience:

Nobody on the Internet cares about your development time.  Nobody cares about your limitations or if this was your first game.  If your game somehow manages to break outside of your bubble of friends and fellow devs, everyone is going to judge it based on its own merits and weigh it against every other game that exists.  That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make games to learn and grow, but if you put something in a public forum, people might just end up playing it, and you’re going to need to develop some thick skin; luckily, I’d put my work on the line a bunch in creative writing workshops, so I was used to being under the magnifying glass, but I could see how a younger dev might not be emotionally prepared to have their work dissected by strangers.  One of the most shocking things for me when putting The God of Crawling Eyes was that, within a week or so, I saw someone on Youtube playing it and translating it to German.  It’s easy to forget that The Internet gives you a potentially global reach.

Work within your own limitations.  Experimenting is great, and I think that you should stick your fingers in every part of making a game, but when you’re making something that’s expressly for other people or you’re working against a hard deadline, it’s time to use your past experience to make the best game you can.  One of the smartest decisions I made with The God of Crawling Eyes was keeping everything in black and white.  I built the game around a character who was color blind, so there was a clear story reason for it, and it allowed me to get around my weakest area of game dev (art).  Tiles were pretty simple, and character sprites and face sets were simply generated sprites that got thrown into MS Paint and saved as monochrome.  It ended up looking pretty decent other than a few things here and there (I would have cleaned up the giant monster dog sprite, for instance), and it let me focus more on showcasing my strengths.

Never underestimate knowledge.  Like, seriously: if you’re younger, just learn things.  Hell, if you’re older, you shouldn’t neglect learning new things, either.  And, I don’t just mean learn about game dev; you’ll be surprised how often you can reach back into your knowledge base and pull out bits and pieces and synthesize them into something interesting.  You find ways to use what you know--it’s just how your brain works.  A lot of people scoff at math, for example, but using math and, more importantly, the logical way of problem solving that math teaches, will help you do some really interesting stuff in game dev.  For The God of Crawling Eyes’s soundtrack, I was able to think back to what I learned in a 20th century composition course I took in college and pull from texture/density and 12-tone music.  Those aren’t forms of music I would have been exposed to in a normal setting, and the soundtrack kind of makes the game.  Now that I’m working on Jimmy, I’ve been influenced by way more.  It took me a while to get the track I’m working on now heading in the right direction, but what started making it click was thinking about having essentially two different songs playing simultaneously, which is something Charles Ives was doing forever ago and something I didn’t think I would ever use, but here I am.

Spend a long time in the planning process.  I was on a deadline, so I planned out The God of Crawling Eyes in about five/six hours.  Since I didn’t think about the amount of people who would actually play the damn thing, I wish I would have taken another full day to hammer out some stuff.  I would have designed the early game to have more gameplay to better teach the players how the game operates, for instance.  Or, I would have made the lengthy dialogue-heavy scenes skippable and added more to the game in terms of the effect of your choices so as to further underscore the theme and give players more to chew on for multiple play throughs.

Telegraph the properties of interactable objects to your players.  For the most part, I think that the gameplay side of The God of Crawling Eyes is a little rough around the edges but gets the job done, but there are some things where people got stuck that I wish I would have handled differently.  The big one is that, at one point, you have to push a file cabinet in front of a door.  I made the player have to push an object earlier in the game, but I should have made them push a cabinet for some reason.  If a character was looking for a key or something, and I made a shining spot that you could see peeking out from under a file cabinet, players would naturally push the cabinet and “cabinets can be pushed” would be filed into the backs of their brains.  I guess that probably a better way of putting this is “keep player psychology in mind.”

I think that’s about it for this one!  The God of Crawling Eyes was a pretty short game that was mostly in my safe zone, so it didn’t have as much impact on me as A Very Long Rope, but it was still an interesting experience that opened me up to the horror side of the RPG Maker community, which is something that’s coloring my work on Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass in a more nuanced, interesting way.  I’m super grateful that the community picked up The God of Crawling Eyes and gave it a play!