I was told once that endings often come before beginnings. It’s a strategy of writing often used in film, where you come up with a premise, a background story and a universe, then decide how you want your particular tale to end before you’ve even decided how to start it. It’s a great technique, one that has yielded excellent results for me (in my own opinion, anyway, I adore the ending we’ve come up with for Simoebic Dysentery, for instance). I’ve been thinking recently about video game endings, or more specifically, how bad most video game endings are. This is startling considering the simplicity of many of the stories and downright weird that resolutions wouldn’t be met inside some of these stories.
This was sparked after I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game that has a reasonably interesting plot and passable dialogue. The ending, however, was uninspired at best. Yes, I realize this is a Batman game and Batman has to win and then leave the universe in the same state it started in, but at the same time I felt the story being woven was far more complex then the resolution allows for. We got to see Batman start to lose his mind a bit, start to question if he too was crazy, then, nothing. It all goes away, Batman overcomes, no problem. It’s almost as if the story was being written as the the game was being developed, then suddenly it was time to end it. The place it ended up was not the place I was expecting — in a Batman story this is a bad thing. The resolution doesn’t match the early implications and the ending was tacked on, essentially useless. It didn’t resolve the story of Batman, it resolved the story of the Joker.
This is a common trait in video games, sadly. It’s as though an idea is created and then suddenly the game starts being developed — but where is it supposed to end up? What is the resolution? Some of the greatest endings have been great because they truly resolved the story. Look at a game like Shadow of Colossus, the ending (although surprising) wraps everything together in a shocking and beautiful way. It was obvious from the get go, right after that big reveal, the designers new this was going to be the ending. Metal Gear Solid 3 is another great example, the killing of the Boss was an end point that must have been decided on early. Bioshock has one of those moments too, so does Deus Ex and countless others.
But countless others don’t match up to the hundreds of thousands of games that have no clear ending. Look at a game like Mirror’s Edge, whose ending makes absolutely no sense because it’s built as a trilogy. What’s the resolution? There isn’t one. What’s going to happen next? Well, judging by the sales, we may never actually know. This isn’t a risk game developers should be taking. We as players, as readers, as viewers, need to have resolution by the games end. More importantly, the resolution needs to END the story. It needs to finish the arc, leave us with a sense of understanding and allow us to move along. Ambiguity isn’t an ending, it’s a parlor trick. It’s something you tack on after the credits just in case you get the chance to make a sequel. But this arc, this first movement should be completed by the finish of the game.
There are thousands of great games out there and hundreds of thousands of great ideas. But it’s the responsibility of any storyteller to finish what they start, and I don’t feel the majority of games do this. It’s a problem perhaps solved if designers and writers start writing to an ending, not from a beginning.
Most regular readers here will quickly acknowledge that there has been an abundance of Simoebic Dysentery related posts. This one, the one you are reading right now, continues that trend. However, I hope to delve a bit deeper into the process thus far — the process of learning a new means to tell a story through trial and error. I’ve dreamt of working on a video game for the majority of my cognizant life. In the past, I’ve worked with Mojiferous (who’s developer diary that was recorded during the uDevGames contest (you know the one, the contest that we one 1st in “Originality” and 3rd in “Audio”) can be found here) through other facets including: a remix album, sound effects for Zoltan! and beta/QA testing for Atomic Combat 2.0. However, Simoebic Dysentery is the first project that we’ve worked on together from the ground up. Idea to (eventual) fruition. That being said, I’d like to discuss a bit of the history, from the origins to the present state.
ART
Glancing through my emails from the end of December, 2008 through early January, I can get an accurate glimpse of the some of the earliest stages of the process. The original idea, the one that sparked the whole thing, wasn’t related to the inner workings of the body at all. In fact, it was a weird “puzzle” game in which you were given a big gun, and had to blow up walls, but you only got a set of bullets. Pretty stupid really, but what it did do was spawn a slew of idea’s from Mojiferous. These ideas, pitched back and forth eventually lead to the idea of a game in which you play a virus and are attempting to navigate the bloodstream to kill your host. Originally the game was from an isometric point of view but technology, time and tech forced us into an overhead view. Also, after some fact checking, the virus was switched to an amoeba. The origins were remarkably crude, considering where we ended up:
I’m told that the main problem we were running into at the beginning were derivative of Mojiferous wanting to render the entire graphic set in the game — basically no call to jpg’s, png’s or predrawn hoo-haw. What we ended up with is a mashup of this system with the anatomy drawings from everyone’s favorite anatomical guidebook (which was the primary focus of the art style, narrative, and a building block to the basic premise of the game. Thanks Dr. Henry Gray!)
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
ORIGINS
Our first real face to face was conducted at a coffee shop, where we sat notebooks in hand, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy open on the table and coffee spilling over the cups, talking, talking, talking. This, I remember thinking to myself, was collaborative creation. It was the epidome of this weird bohemian vision I’d created in my head of what it really meant to be on the brink of a creative cusp. This wasn’t a game, it was a revolution.
Of course, this was all quickly lost after we began the process of actually making the damn thing. Life’s an interesting thing, because it tends to get in the way of a lot of things. Here we had two Graduate students that were working on a hobby alongside 40 hour a week jobs and classes. One of us operates as an early person, the other at night. So the majority of our conversations would now take place via email and phone — but for the moment I was stuck waiting. The problem with being a “designer” is that after the idea comes crapping out of your body, after the pen is finished with the paper, your job is done for a while. So I had to sit back and wait for Mojiferous to get me the level creator toolkit.
We also had a hell of a time coming up with a name for this damn thing. In fact, we went through quite a few:
- An Amoebic Adventure
- Amoeba Lung
- Amoeba Brain
- Amoeba Castle
- Amoeba Mumbles
- Lone Amoeba
- Amoeba Sandwich
- Amoeba Grease
- Amoebic Onslaught
- Amoebic Avenue
- Amoebic Aggression
- Amoebic Enterprise
- Amoeba Attack
- The Shits
- etc.
MUSIC
During this time I was supposed to be working on the soundtrack. Which I was — and by mean working on it, I mean it was forming in my head. I don’t write music, I’ve never believed that I had the ability, but I do improv and I improv well (and by well, I mean I enjoy myself, not that I play well). Eventually, I plopped down in front of the keyboard and recorded four hours of music. Then I cut it down. It’s available you know, in case you missed the thirty-six other mentions on this very blog, here.
But none of the above things are really all that interesting. These are the types of things that one would expect from a little indie game. Lots of meetings, testing, late night and early mornings.
NARRATIVE
I do believe I’ve learned a significant amount of skills through this beginning process. First and foremost, the ability to talk about a project like this and bring it to fruition. We aren’t there yet, but I have no doubt in my mind that we’ll be there shortly. For me, the most interesting aspect here is the narrative. I consider myself a writer before all else and for better or worse that’s my chosen path. With a game like this, a puzzle game, it seemed almost absurd to combine story with gameplay. But I believe that Mojiferous and I have worked out a compelling reason to play this — and not just for the brain twisters.
When one talks of narrative in regards to a game, it’s important to understand that narrative and story aren’t the same thing. I’ve looked at this before. The interesting thing for me with Simoebic Dysentery was that the narrative was the entire reason for the game’s existence. We were actually using the setting (a human body) as both a playing field and a character. The two were interweaved and as the game progressed, this became more and more apparent. The actual plot of the game is fairly simple: Man goes to Amazon. Man contracts disease. Man tries to rid himself of disease. Man… well, I won’t give you a spoiler yet, but it’s fair to say that the man will either live or die. These plot points are revealed in game, through voice overs coming through the body and into the setting.
For me, this is interesting on a number of levels. We are afforded the unique opportunity to have a story being told by non-playable characters that directly effect the way the game is played (man goes to voodoo doctor who injects you with snail juice and suddenly you, the amoeba are forced to adapt, change your methods and learn new tactics. Think of the fire in Far Cry 2, or the rain in Call of Duty 4). These outside forces, the setting of the whole story are contriving against you, the player. It also creates the interesting dynamic of what exactly a game is. A game is, to many, something that you try to “win” or “beat.” Brainy Gamer talked about the idea of “beating” a game a while ago, which is actually what got me thinking of how one would go about creating a relationship with “win” that would, in the end, destroy the game, the idea of the game, and the point of even playing a game. Basically, if you, the amoeba win, the character, which is also the setting, dies. You no longer serve a purpose.
We were also faced with the problem of creating these voices in a manner that was both believable and interesting. We’re still hard at work on this — but our voice talent is solid, and I believe that the story is compelling enough to keep the player entertained throughout their puzzle solving. I’m not going to bother going too far into this now, because I imagine it’ll be a major point in the second of these posts (when the game finishes itself), when I’ll be able to talk more thoroughly about what I thought worked well and what didn’t when dealing with the narrative.
WHERE WE ARE AND WHERE WE’RE HEADING
As of this last week, we’ve both finished up with school for the semester. I’ll be heading back in June for a month, but we’re still given ample time to continue on Simoebic Dysentery. The future of the game is still rather daunting. We have the final proof’s of the story. We have the voice acting. We have a hundred or so levels to design. We have mutagens, add-ons, adaptations and enhancements to think about. Oh, what was that? Didn’t I mention that the game will feature mild RPG elements that allow your amoeba to evolve? Well, RPG in a loose sense, as the evolutions will come from how you attack the levels, not from a dice roll or upgrade system. The hope is that by gauging the way the player plays the game, our branching narrative will adapt to continue the challenge while the setting changes as well, flushing out its own systems and bringing in new ones. New elements will be introduced based around the ways a player beats a level (do they float through the blood stream and hide from white blood cells, or do the lyse their way through like a tank?). So far we’ve learned a lot of things. We’ve learned to keep our ideas small, to understand our own limits but still push them, we’ve learned that friends aren’t going to spend time beta testing or toying around with an unfinished project, but strangers on the internet will, we’ve learned that we have an original idea that is worth continuing with. Sure, in the end, this is “just another indie game.” But it’s our indie game dammit. And I’m already proud of it.
Busy busy and busy are the best words to describe life in Thoronia right now. That being said, I just finished this crazy audio project, which features, amongst many other things, music from the Republic of Thoronia Band. Actually, specifically, music from Simoebic Dysentery. Feel free to check out the presentation itself here. Or, if you’re in the mood for adventure, just download the one part, 34 minute audio piece here. It’s a five part thing: The Preface, TV In a New Land, Miniature Interviews With Fremont Folk Art, Wherin I Help Gort Whom is Located in the Lobby of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle Washington and Who Has No Fingers Write His “This I Believe” Essay for NPRs “All Things Considered,” and “Cairn Man and the Way Home.”
All the votes for the Udevgames Contest 2008 have been tallied up by an army of hamsters, and Mojiferous and I have walked away with a First Place finish in the “Originality” category as well as a Bronze in the audio category (for the umpteenth time, the soundtrack, performed by the Republic of Thoronia Band is available here) for Simoebic Dysentery.
A special thank you to all who voted for the game, Mojiferous and his lovely assistant Liaht, Christiné for the feedback on the soundtrack, and all the other developers in the competition.
For those of you unable to play the beta version, worry not, we’re hard at work on the full game, getting the dialogue finished up, designing new levels and such, and I’ve purchased a whip from Amazon.com to pelt Mojiferous with so we can squash all the known bugs. The game will be released on every single platform we can push the thing to shortly (ie, in this century). Thanks again folks! Next stop wonderland!
PS Anyone who played the game on their Mac’s, please feel free to email me (sidebar), comment below or sign up for the Mojiferforums to push design idea’s, bugs, crash reports, complaints or high fives.
PPS I’ve started becoming obsessed with the English Explorer Percy Fawcett, any idea how we can work that into the game?
