Ideas and Theme

I’ve known for a while now that I’m pretty insensitive to some subjects that other people feel strongly about. So when I heard about last week’s shootings I felt pretty much nothing and just read a reddit thread about it (that’s how cool I am, yeah!). As expected, some people were angry and saying how terrible the shooter was for shooting children (because shooting adults is totally okay!); others were going on about how 24/7 media coverage encourages more shootings, which is probably true; most people were just terrified and sad that something like that happened.

Very few people, though, talked about why someone would do such a thing or tried to imagine a situation in which that kind of act would’ve been sort of justified (it will never be justified, but putting yourself in the shooters shoes, can you imagine how you would’ve gotten to that point?). So that stayed in my head for the day… Later the compo started and the theme was released: “You are the Villain”. I knew right away that I wanted to make a game about the shootings and explore the reasons why someone would do that. I also knew that, in those cases, people usually do have their own reasons, mostly because I had read a very interesting blog post (sorry I can’t find it anymore) some years ago about the Virginia Tech shootings explaining in detail the events that occurred that led the shooter to do what he did. According to that blog post, from what I remember, a lot of stuff that is said in that Wikipedia page I just linked are only half truths. For instance:

Several former professors of Cho reported that his writing as well as his classroom behavior was disturbing, and he was encouraged to seek counseling.

Written by Cho’s classmate, the post says that some teachers would just not accept Cho’s writing because they deemed it too disturbing, while the student who wrote the post thought it wasn’t a big deal. Also, some teachers would “force” Cho to speak out loud and express himself better in class when they knew he had issues with that… Anyway, it’s a lot of stuff and I don’t really remember the details. What I’m trying to say, though, is that those types of massacres are usually not without any type of reasoning behind them. It’s very easy to say someone is crazy and get it over with, but analyzing the whole situation regarding someone’s mental health, social status and whatnot is considerably harder, trickier, and may even make us feel bad about ourselves. I mean, who wants to feel like they are directly responsible for someone’s eventual mental breakdown and indirectly responsible for the death of others?

With all that in mind I decided that the game would be about a boy/girl/person who keeps going from interactions inside video games and interactions in real life (and by real life I mean the environment outside the game, but inside it… !). Their interactions in real life should be as terrible as possible, in an attempt to justify the ending (killing everyone) and their interactions inside the game should be also pretty violent, in an attempt to justify the game’s title. But this is more of a joke than anything. I don’t actually believe video games cause mass shootings! I had a bunch of ideas on how the real life interactions would be: you get to speak to your mom who hates you and resents having you around; you get excluded from a group of friends for some reason; your girlfriend breaks up with you; you get humiliated, ridiculed, bullied by a group of people in school (there’s a variation of this one when this happens as you’re confessing your love or whatever to some girl you like (and there’s a variation of this one too where the girl is in on it and she makes you believe she likes you only to get you to confess to her so that others can make fun of you (kids these days…))). I had very few ideas on how the games would be but they didn’t really matter. This was a more story focused game and if the games (the ones inside the game) themselves were fun that would’ve been great, but it was definitely not necessary.

What Went Wrong

The game itself was not fun at all. In fact, some people felt bad while playing it. While I feel pretty great that I made other people actually feel bad with something I created, I wasn’t aiming for that completely. I thought I had made the little children that you get to kill inside the games pretty funny and entertaining, but not cute and relatable to the point where players would feel horrible killing them, after all, they were just squares! My goal was to get the player to feel bad in the ending when you have to kill children in the game’s real life… I guess I’m just bad at emotions. ;_;

I should have thought way more about what I wanted the game to be. Instead of spending 20/30 minutes fixed on the idea of making the game about the shootings, I could have spent some hours trying to really nail down a creative and interesting idea before jumping to code.

I didn’t scope it properly. While I managed to finish the game, I had no time to see if it was fun, to add music or to just playtest it with other people. I spent the first day building the basic systems (platforming, enemies, guns, speech bubbles) and the second day creating content. I realized I do not enjoy creating content (compared to building systems), so it took me a lot longer to get stuff done on the second day. I also had no time left to polish the game as much as I wanted. There were no particles, music or just overall juicyness. Those are pretty simple features that really make a big difference…

The game looks terrible. I’m not an artist at all so I have to rely on primitive shapes, mainly squares. But I’m not at the point where I’m familiar enough with shader magic so that I can throw a bunch of squares at the screen and they’ll look amazing.

I was terribly unprepared. Like I said, I spent the first day getting the basic systems to work when I could have done that in less than ~6 hours had I prepared beforehand. There were many common patterns that arose as I wrote the game that I should have noticed, too. I also went in without any clue as to how I was gonna get music in. I play the piano, so I know how to compose decent (or so I think) music, but I’m not familiar enough with any tools to create a song in such a short amount of time.

What Went Right

I actually finished it in 48 hours. I created a list of things that I needed to implement and kept a pretty steady pace on day one. On day two I was sort of tired and the work wasn’t that interesting to me anymore, so I took a bit longer to get things done, but I managed to keep on keeping on (however slowly) and finished it. Also, my original idea and what the game actually turned out to be were pretty close to each other. Some details were different, but overall I didn’t compromise anything like I usually do (i.e. if something is harder to implement than I originally thought I’ll change the feature a bit so it’s easier to code).

Given that people said they felt bad while playing it, I’d say that the theme was handled pretty well. I also really liked using the sepia shader to differentiate between game and real life. It created a decent mood whenever you’re in-game. If I had a bit more experience I could have tried a more video-gamey shader, but the one I used did the work pretty well, so I guess it’s fine.

Conclusion

This was definitely a really good experience. I wanna continue participating as long as I’m ALIVE! Just the fact that there are so many games there are super duper a lot better than what I could possibly hope to create one day gives me enough motivation to keep trying to improve myself. It also reminded me how much deadlines help with getting stuff done!