Tag Archives: Aliens

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!!

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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.

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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!

The Hive Abroad

The Hive Abroad is an experimental, nonlinear sci-fi short story about friendship, community, and changing yourself.

You can read it here.

It is also available on itch.io, because that’s where the twines are at now, apparently

I began working on this story in 2013. I finished it in early 2015 with the help of Andi McClure (code) and Julie Fiveash (art).

Andi wrote a Twine macro for me which allowed me to queue up passages for the player to navigate as if they were a timeline. Having this code made designing and testing the story’s structure 10000x faster and easier. Take a look at Andi’s website.

Julie drew images used in the story’s navigation UI. Take a look at Julie’s website.

This story was written in Twine 1.4.2. You can find the story’s .tws file here. It contains all the javascript used to make the nonlinear navigation work.

More word stuff I’ve enjoyed recently

Aliens by James Cameron

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I recently read the shooting script for Aliens. If you enjoyed that movie (or any well-made action movie), I highly recommend you take a look at this script. It’s pretty damn excellent. Use the above image to find a good copy to read.

Destroy/Wait by Pierre Chevalier

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A beautiful little Twine poem. Strong imagery. A melancholic mood.

Solarium by Alan DeNiro

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Structurally complex Twine story in a post-apocalyptic Cold War setting. The story is told in a looping, circling style, which Alan previously used in We Are the Firewall. His stories bring the reader back again and again to the same passages, but give them opportunities to experience those passages differently. He is the only Twine author that I know of who currently uses this style in this particular way. Besides the fun structural stuff, though, this is a wonderful story with a surprising and satisfying ending. Very much worth playing through completely.

Broke Down by Saguaro

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As you read each passage of Broke Down, you have the ability to add or remove detail, making the story more or less complex. Sometimes the details you add are interesting and funny. Sometimes they hurt, a lot. I like this (and Solarium to a certain extent) because I like stories that have “mechanics”, that have consistent and interesting ways of changing or presenting the text. One day I want to write a story that has a whole bunch of link “mechanics” like this one, all interacting in unusual ways.

Device 6 by Simogo

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Simogo previously created Year Walk, a popular iOS game about Scandinavian legends. Both Year Walk and Device 6 present worlds which the player must explore via strange and novel navigation methods– methods which encourage a refreshingly frank and direct interaction with whatever’s on-screen. Unlike Year Walk, however, Device 6 is a textual experience. It’s not hypertext, it’s not parser– it’s something completely different and weird.

Instead of linking to new areas or entering commands, the player scrolls along vertical or horizontal panes and lines of text that twist and turn to imitate the shapes of the imaginary spaces the story takes place in. Pictures appear in frames and slowly scroll or pan by beneath the text as players swipe from side to side. Some of these panes contain pictures of ancient electronic equipment, which the player manipulates using obscurely-labelled buttons. Sound, too, is central to many of the puzzles. A few gems require the player to do unusual things to the iOS device itself in order to uncover the solution.

The game’s visual presentation is all about layers– layers of text, layers of images– and the story itself echoes this. There are several nested layers of narrative in this game, and nested protagonists, too. Some of this is never completely explained.

It took me only about an hour and a half to play Device 6. I completed pretty much every puzzle within 5 minutes or less. None were particularly hard, but they were all satisfying to solve.

I highly recommend taking a look at this game if you have the time and money.