February 2013

February 1, 2013

Deconstructing the Apartment

It is done.

Ignoring news of a deadline relaxation for January I pushed through and published The Apartment at a few minutes before midnight on January 31st, 2013. I also monetized it, and as of this post I’ve made sales. This is the first project that I’ve felt worthy of both the Dark Acre name & people’s money. I hope you feel the same.

None of this would have been possible without the support & encouragement of friends, family, & fans. A special heartfelt thanks goes out to the following people:

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. #1GAM\ When Kaitila announced the jam a couple of month ago, I was skeptical. I’ve stated on more than a few occasions that I only have the time, energy, & brainspace for a single focused game jam once ever few months, & up until January ‘13 that had been comfortably addressed by the Ludum Dare 48-hour competition.

I’d also just spent two years wrestling with what the ideal production schedule for myself & Dark Acre was supposed to be. Initially it was 8 weeks. Then it was whenever. Most recently it’s be a year-long earmark for the Cyberdrunk project. But for whatever reason, as January moved forward & more progress was made on the Cyberdrunk thing I figured I should allot some time for other public efforts.

And maybe, just maybe, publish something for money.

2. New Framework via LD48 no.25\ When the last Ludum Dare entered I was pleased to discover I’d finally put together a reasonable framework for communicating narratives. In other words, I had built—from scratch—a story-telling engine that took some advantage of the Unity3D platform. So began the Cyberdrunk project.

I realized that I should also spend time iterating on & polishing the framework, so at first I thought I’d do that via Darkades. But adventure games require a fair amount of time to complete; they’re not just poopy little projects that can be spat out in a day. So combine a month-long “jam” with some emerging self-built technology & maybe there’d be something cool at the end of it. And there was.

3. Kontent Kreator\ Coupled with no.2 above, having a solid framework meant more time spent making stuff for players to interact with & less time worrying about whether it would all work. I think for this project I spent more hours in 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, & Google Docs than I did in Unity3D. That was an amazing feeling.

4. Calling it “Art”\ I think there’ll be more to say on this in the coming months, as I prove out more of these projects. For now, I’ll refer you to the “artist statement” that adorns the main menu:

My work explores isolation and decrepitude both mental and physical.
With influences as diverse as Brutalist architecture and post-modern cyberculture, new models of narration are created from exploring the discomfort of the human psyche and emergent digital mediums.
Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by storytelling and its effect on the imagination. The fugue state entered when enthralled by media becomes the definition of immersion, and it is this feeling that the work tries to capture.
As the narrative unfolds based on a willingness (or unwillingness!) to explore the environment, the player is left with a sense of relief or emptiness at their condition.

Approaching this work with this kind of attitude informing my creative decisions seemed to make all the difference in the world. I leave it up to you to decide if the resulting experience can be classified as art or not.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. Working Until Drop-Dead\ I was adjusting content in the finished commercial build right up until 23:55, five minutes before putting it up for sale. A very risky maneuver, and going forward I’ll be leaving far more time for final polish & testing.

2. No Warning\ As of this post I’m working on a way to put in a personal warning to players that the content may be disturbing to some. I apologize if the work has caused anyone undue duress, & it is certainly not intended for a very young audience. I blithely assumed that since most of my followers were adults that it wouldn’t reach too-young eyes. Also such is the danger of self-publishing without a standards & ratings board to pass through.

3. Long, Long Nights\ My obsession with this project only seemed to grow as the deadline loomed, & by the end of it I was nearly manic in my efforts to bring it to completion. The pacing is something I’ll be looking to improve in the future to avoid going bonkers with stress.

A FEW MORE WORDS

It’s worth noting that on January 24th I had my final face-to-face depression counseling session. I also seem to have not needed my antidepression medication since the 20th. Can making games you believe in cure depression? I don’t know. But I do know I feel a whole hell of a lot better about everything than I did a month ago.

Let’s see if we can’t carry this feeling forward.

Chris Priestman had this to say on his now-defunct blog Indie Statik about the above post:

Dark Acre Jack made a game worthy of his, ours and your time. It’s a point-and-click obsessed rummage around an apartment. A lonely one. Aren’t you so lonely? While you’re waiting for the game to load, why don’t you think about of the old times, the good times, the not so lonely times? Oh, and now you’re also a care home resident and need to find your glasses before investigating your surroundings, where you’ll find more loneliness. Jack also deconstructed the development of the game, which is a much better way to describe it than a “post-mortem”. Can we stop using that now? You know, because it implies you’re ripping apart something that is dead when games are very much alive!

February 24, 2013

Month 29 Report

STAGES OF TERROR

[Lost content: a work-in-progress image]

At almost-midnight on the 31st of January, last month, I watched the upload progress bar in Filezilla fill to 100% & deposit a build of The Apartment on my personal webserver.

It was the first piece of work I’d done in more than 2 years as a solo independent game developer that I’d felt was worth both my name & your time. I know I’ve said that particular phrase over & over but it bears repeating because it’s the truth. I care about integrity.

Even then it was just barely. Taken at surface value, The Apartment only represented maybe 15 days of full-time effort. Just over two weeks. It was one thing to toss it out on the front stoop for the world to interact with. It was another thing entirely to suppose that it was worth money.

It’s a hell of a thing. Like nearly all human beings living in the modern world I have my own junk-drawer filled with eccentricities. One of those is that although I know—know!—in my heart that what I’m producing is art, I’ll never call myself an artist. Some little mental roadblock has been erected, from some unmemorable event in my past, where I decided that it wasn’t the artist’s job to determine if what they were producing was worthy of the name, no. That was the job of the beholders. Or, in this case, the interactors.

Let’s not get too metaphysical here, lest it comes off as self-aggrandizing horseshit. But all throughout the development of The Apartment there were many over-riding design principles at play. Yes, I work from various manifestos: some fully-realized & others mercurial. I have rules, & one of the main ones for The Apartment was “let the players figure it out”.

So I went for what may seem at times wanky levels of obtuse & indirect explanation, if any at all! Judging by the reaction of many players who’ve taken the time to write me or otherwise publicly express their opinions on it, this product has been something of a success. Oh & while we’re on the subject of self-aggrandizing faffery let no one tell you that product isn’t a viable term for the results of a videogame development. You produced it, it’s a product. It’s also a game, experience, piece of art, nightmare, fantasy, dreamscape, diversion, waste of time, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The name by which a working videogame may be known, dear friends, is Legion.

I spent the first 5 days of this month refactoring the codebase of the Apartment. Cleaning it up, culling redundancies, improving efficiency, & retooling it for this month’s work. Then I’ve spent that gulf of time between the 6th & now building new content & herein lies the next stage of terror:

Will it be as interesting? As engaging? As worthy of the player’s time as the previous one?

And if it is will the one following that continue that upward trend? If it isn’t will my work then start a long, nightmarish slide into obscurity?

To all burgeoning & struggling developers & artists out there: if you think the stark, electric-naked fear you feel when compiling your work into a presentable form is anything, there is much worse ahead.

You just keep working. And hoping.

THE LAST WORD ON MONEY

There’ll be no detailed sales breakdown. I feel that talking about the money you make is horribly gauche, and not befitting a person of manners. Not that I’ve really got any manners, but in this I’d like to have some resolve.

Let me just say here that creating a free-to-play piece of art, publishing it for the web-browser, & asking for public patronage has netted me several months worth of solo independent development funding, & if the trend continues I should be able to keep doing what I’m doing at this level for a long time to come.

FARMER’S ALMANAC

I’ve decided to create a mailing list since, at long last, I’ve started gathering a small but interested audience for my work. I wanted an intimiate way to keep in touch with you on a monthly basis, with information that I wouldn’t necessarily be sharing across the global networks.

To that end I’ve put together the DARK ACRE FARMER’S ALMANAC. It’s a bare-bones mailing list that will send you a simple e-mail once—possibly twice—a month with some words directly from me.

If you’re interested in getting such a thing in your Inbox, please send a blank message to farmers-subscribe@dark-acre.com then an empty reply to the confirmation message. You’ll be able to unsubscribe at any time by sending mail from the subscribed account to farmers-unsubscribe@dark-acre.com.

(Don’t do any of that. There’s an updated mailing list. –Ed.)

It’s a one-way deal for now, and as the audience grows & if demand merits it we’ll expand to a public forum. For now, let’s keep things cozy & between us.

See you in 4 days.

2013.02.01

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