Here are public-facing blog posts I wrote while creating the game.
Okay, so I know I said yesterday I was embarking on this thing called It is as if you were playing a videogame, but something came up so now I’m putting that on hold and embarking on something else. Turns out there’s a two-week-long game jam called The Mystic Western Game Jam being run by JUEGOS RANCHEROS and I find myself wanting to try my hand at it (despite being rather busy at the moment). In particular, there’s some chance that if I were to make something actually good it could plausibly be shown at the Marfa Film Fest, and I love me some Marfa, so that’s about as much motivation as I need right there.
So I’m thinking of…
…WAIT! What if you steal my probably-quite-mediocre idea and make a fortune?! Or worse still you submit a better version of it to the game jam and edge me out?!
…NO WAIT! You have your own potentially-mediocre idea to get on with? You don’t really care about stealing my ideas? Sure? Sometimes they’re okay… no? Okay. Crisis averted.
Anyway I’m quite interested in dioramas at the moment so I want to do my own approach to that, having working on a diorama-ish game with Jonathan Lessard called Game Studies (forthcoming), and having played and enjoyed Adam Wells‘s Grimsfield just the other day. Westerns (perhaps especially Mystic ones?) are very much centred on landscapes and their traversal and kind of looking at them and being impressed, and I feel like dioramas are an interesting way to approach that.
The other thing I’m interested in is working on something that includes “diegetic user interface elements” that are in the form of traditionally non-diegetic interfaces from computers. Confusing? Yes, that was to me too. In essence I’m interested in having things like dialog boxes (with “OK” and “Cancel” etc.) or settings panels with sliders etc. be objects in a 3D world, and in this particular case I want them to be a bit like artifacts from some forgotten past.
Bringing me to the final piece of the puzzle I’m trying to cram together, which is the sonnet Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley – its focus being on the idea of coming across the vestiges of a great (and rather arrogant) previous civilisation. I think that’s where I’ll try to get my “mysticism” from somehow, anyway.
All of this involves me miraculously conquering Unity, an engine I am not especially comfortable with, and Blender, a 3D modelling program I am not especially comfortable with, enough to put together what feels, right now, like an aesthetic effect that may very well just not work anyway. It’s very unlike my usual process which is to have a complete idea more or less immediately and roughly know what I’m going to do, just working out the details. That’s the one good thing about game jams from my perspective – not so much the working with other people (though I admit to occasionally enjoying that), but being pushed into a quite radically different mode of thinking about game design and creation.
So off we go then? I’ll tell you how I do. Probably poorly. Sorry in advance.
Started doing some things in relation to the new Mystic Western game today. In particular I bravely started my frenemy Unity and poked around to work out some basic things like rotating the camera around a diorama-thing and having a day-night cycle to make shadows move and lights light and so forth. Also did some early testing of the whole idea of having dialog boxes/interface elements in the scene – particularly the idea that they would emit light, like screens, so that even at night you’d be able to see by the glow of a dialog box. That kind of thing.
Along the way I started worry about where my actual mysticism was going to come from. I toyed with the I Ching (having recently read The Man in the High Castle), but I know more or less nothing about it so it seemed like a cheap shot. There’s always the idea of just claiming “this is mystical” aesthetically, too – i.e. “here’s an object you don’t really understand in this context (perhaps with the sound of panpipes or whatever), and I assure you it is a very mystical matter indeed.” In effect I’m still going to end up leaning pretty heavily on the underlying quality of ambiguity that all good mysticism comes along with – it’s a great safety net. Doesn’t make sense? No, it’s mystical.
But as I was pottering around I realised that a really great “mystic text” to attach to the game would be The Oregon Trail. If you think about it, it’s kind of the ultimate “Western” of videogames? The whole game is literally fixated on going West! Plus I have an abiding love for that game (as many people do), with its hilariously punishing bouts of dysentery, broken legs, exhaustion, and more. Plus it has plenty of landscape, crucial for the Western genre.
So that’s my current lead – working out how to treat The Oregon Trail as a kind of background narrative/text for this game of mystical dioramas. It’s pulling me away from the generic nature of just “A western” (like cowboy hats and six-shooters), which has its pros and cons. I like Western movies too, and there was an appeal to channeling that. But I think having something really particular for the underpinnings of the game will help – it gives me a reference point to ask questions when I’m stuck with a decision. For example if I’m wondering what objects should exist in my dioramas, I simply “consult” The Oregon Trail to see what objects are in it. In that way it’s like the I Ching for my design process. Along with that it’s nice because it’s such a classic piece of “ancient” videogame history, tying somewhat into the Ozymandias theme I’m wanting in this thing. Helpful.
Also helpful, it gave me a chance to work out titling the game other than just referring to it as Mystic Western which was not so great. I toyed with You have died of dysentery naturally, and also Broken Leg (which sounds a bit like a place as well as a misfortune), and The Wagon (dumb) and The Trail (too obvious), and It was up in the mountains… (a tribute to Laurie Anderson). But eventually I started centring on liking it being a place name, since the game is a place. The Oregon Trail starts in a town called Independence, which is good. But it’s also a word that means other things and isn’t clearly a place, so I added the state abbreviation to get a game called:
Independence, MI
[Edit: On discovering that the state abbreviation for Missouri is MO and not MI, I thought I’d just change the game name to Independence, MO but… somehow I just don’t like it? “MO” just doesn’t work for me. So instead I’ll go with Independence, Missouri instead. There.]
Anyway, that’s where I am now. Somewhere on the Oregon Trail.