Monthly Archives: December 2016

Frog Fractions 2 is out!!!

Frog Fractions 2 has been published! Finally!! It’s out on Steam now! I wrote and helped design one of the minigames in it. This is the first game I have worked on that is being sold for money on Steam!

Spoilers ahead! Don’t read past this shrugging boy if you don’t want to know anything about Frog Fractions 2!!

shrugboy

So: FF2 is actually called Glittermitten Grove. Like the original Frog Fractions, FF2 is a mess of hilarious minigames hidden inside a game that seems to be completely ordinary. Glittermitten is actually a chill base-building game– and for the full FF2 experience, I think you should play it and try to figure out how to get to the minigame section on your own. If basebuilding games make you rage, though, and you want to get straight to the minigames, there are ways around it.

My contributions to Glittermitten Grove are the two “SPAXRIS” sections. SPAXRIS stands for Super Passive Aggresive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator. It’s a game where you are a space marine from the movie Aliens who is trying to annoy your xenomorph roommate until he moves out of your shared apartment. You would kill him, but you are in the same friend group and have too many mutual friends. Your aggression is limited to drinking his beers, messing with his law school textbooks, changing the HDMI cables around on the TV, and flushing the toilet repeatedly while he is trying to brush his teeth.

spaxris3.png

 

Here’s the mildly-weird story of how SPAXRIS got in the game. I’ve done a lot of game jamming in the Bay Area– that’s where I’d caught the bug– and one of the absolute best games I’d made for a jam there is Desert Hike EX. Jim Crawford, the lead developer on FF2/GMG, led the Desert Hike team, which included me and a bunch of his other friends.

A while ago, a friend of mine was running a jam that I had the opportunity to do with Jim. He wrassled up a team and we went. And, like Desert Hike, the team Jim wrangled up was really good, and the art and music were great, and I was able to go absolutely nuts with the writing. By the end of the weekend we did not have a completely finished game, but we did have something that was pretty clearly hilarious. At some point, Jim leaned over and told me, “Let’s just put this in FF2.” So that’s what happened.

It’s funny that the first Steam game I’ve contributed to is something I made almost without knowing that it would even be part of a commercial game at all. I’d just got done doing a lot of writing and localization for a bunch of PC and mobile games that were mostly cancelled. (The ones that were not cancelled before release are Facebook games, and THEY have all been shut down!) Since then, I’ve gained a lot of experience and have started doing story consulting and writing on indie and AAA games, but none of those have released yet, either! I often feel like the last couple years were kind of “lost years” for me. So it’s deeply gratifying that SOMETHING commercial that I worked on in that period is finally coming out and is really good!

I am roommates with Rachel Sala, FF2’s artist and Jim’s development partner, so I’ve gotten to see a lot of the blood, sweat, tears, tiny frogs, etc. that went into FF2. I’m really glad this game has finally come out and that they can enjoy the results! A lot of great things have happened in my life thanks to knowing Jim and Rachel and hanging out with them and making cool shit with them, and I’m incredibly proud of them and the other developers!

Anyway, yeah! Enjoy the game!

One thing canceled, one thing on hiatus, new (commercial) games in progress

Hey folks, I know I’ve mentioned in the past that I will be releasing a sci-fi story collection called “Other Orbits.” I’ve decided not to do that anymore!

Other Orbits would have been an art overhaul of my already-released story The Hive Abroad, paired with two other stories that were new when I planned this collection: Redundant, and an unreleased story called The Long Slide, about a woman who is dying slowly from damage caused by the nanobots designed to keep her alive.

Anyway, two out of the three of these are now released. And I’m not really interested in finishing edits and polish on The Long Slide, partially because it’s just dark and miserable in a really unproductive way and represents the worst parts of my feelings about my own health issues. I think I’ll eventually replace The Hive Abroad with the new, art-updated version, but that’s it. Other Orbits is toast. Sorry! Nothing lost, really, though. Redundant is real good and you should play it!

I’ve got some other news which is a little more upsetting to me, though: Six Months is basically on hiatus for the first half of 2017.

The reason? I am doing too many other things. I wanted Six Months to be a proof of my writing and narrative design ability– I mean, I wanted to tell a good story, but I also wanted to create an amazing proof of skill. I wanted Six Months to be my resume, and I wanted it to be big and bold enough to cover up all those years when I was working on cancelled and failed games. But it’s been, like, three years now, and people are offering to pay me to make faster things which will be equally as good a proof of my skills, so– yeah. Six Months is going on the back burner while I get that stuff done.

I have every intention of finishing Six Months, because it’s kickass and I think people will buy it. Problem is, it’s literally novel-length. I just gotta ship my other stuff and wave it around in people’s faces and say “LOOK AT ME,  LOOK AT MY ‘SKILL SET,’ I’M GREAT!” And in the process I’m gonna learn Unity, which is going to make shipping Six Months even easier.

Anyway, here’s the stuff I’ve worked on/am working on right now, both in and out of games:

  • I wrote for Frog Fractions 2, and the stuff I wrote is hilarious, so when that comes out I’m gonna wave it hard as hell in your faces
  • I wrote for Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, which is also super cool. Beautiful weird stuff going on in that game! I’m very excited for people to someday see it.
  • I am doing story consulting and writing for a AAA game being developed in the LA area! But that’s a secret still.
  • I am going to be doing some amount of story consulting for an additional indie game!
  • My friend Nate Ruegger and I are writing a screenplay version of Redundant! We finished the first draft extremely fast and I am incredibly stoked about it. This will be the first thing I finish in 2017. It turns out that when two people who are eager to impress one another write a screenplay together, shit gets done! Fast!!
  • My friends Kent Sutherland and Brody Brooks and I are working on a new version of Words Must Die! We are making a whole new game with a slightly different linking mechanic and a whole lot more polish. We’re gonna sell it for money.

And I’m also working my day job! For years I’ve been working on side projects all night long after getting home from work, but the hours don’t match up in a way that leaves space for Six Months anymore.

And, to be honest, I have not worked on it in a month. It’s better to recognize that and make a plan to put it down (and take it back up again, eventually) so that I don’t wear myself out worrying about the fact I’m not working on it!

About story consulting: at my old job I worked with a creative partner who taught me a very specific iterative story-pitch process that I’ve now started using elsewhere. It’s good for early-stage story planning stuff and it’s great at helping non-writer team members understand the process and the possibilities involved in coming up with a story for their game. It’s also good for helping the writer understand exactly what the other parties’ critiques are about. I hope I get to use it at more places in the future because I like this process a lot and it’s produced really great results every time I use it!

Anyway, no fear: you will eventually be able to help a sweaty sad duke investigate his dead brother’s horrific grenade murder. Just not yet.