A Game For My Wife

Rather than tell my whole history with RPG Maker, I'd like to talk about my most recent experience with it. I'd been wanting to get back into using some form of RPG Maker for a while now, but after hearing that Ace was coming out, decided to wait. The new features sounded very cool and I thought if I'm going to get back into this, I might as well do so with the best version available.

In early July, I downloaded the program and began re-teaching myself how to do everything. Right away, I was struck with an awesome idea... for my first project in Ace, I would make a game for my wife's upcoming 30th birthday.

This was an ambitious idea insofar as I haven't tinkered with RPG Maker in half a decade and was pretty rusty. In theory though, it sounded fun, both for me to assemble and for her to play. This gave me a window of about three and a half months to think of a basic game, make maps, populate it and test it. I decided to go with the base tilesets because this didn't seem like a good time to mess around with something too unfamiliar.

The obligatory mine cart level.

The basic idea was to make a large building that served as a hub for a game about exploration and simple puzzles, wherein she would find clues that revealed the whereabouts of her birthday presents in real life. The scavenger hunt aspect was cute, but ultimately, my main goal was to get birthday messages from as many of her friends and family as possible and put them in the game.

I got to work and immediately found it very easy to pick up the map-making again. I started with a vague plan to have a three floor mansion with three or four areas per floor, a basement and vast underground area, and a small adjacent town. Since the game was based around exploration rather than narrative, it was necessary to make all points accessible, yet equally survivable at all times, which meant tailoring the fights to be either escapable or beaten with only the main character.

Speaking of characters, I also put sixteen of her favorite fictional characters in the game to serve as party members. Malcom Reynolds, Repairman Jack, Wheatley, Indiana Jones, Arya Stark, Dr Horrible, Jack Sparrow, Eric Northman, Sherlock Holmes, Dagny Taggart...

Other small features around the game:

• a gallery that brings up pictures of my wife's favorite things when you click the paintings
• a music and picture slideshow memorial for her dog that passed away a few years ago
• coordination mini-games, like avoiding spikes, boulders or flames, or chasing kids around
• cognitive mini-games where you solve riddles or push blocks
• a chess game where you fight the pieces instead of play chess

All party guests assembled.

In the end, the game wasn't as polished as I'd intended, but I finished it on time, everything pretty much worked as intended and it made her happy enough to cry when she listened to all of her friends and family sending their love. Shockingly, she had no idea I'd made her a game until I presented it to her. She had a great day, and that's all I really wanted. In the meantime, I can't wait to start my next project. I don't know what it will be yet, but half the fun is figuring out where to go next.

The Payday 24-Hour Charity Livestream

Timed to coincide with the release of Payday's new Wolf Pack DLC, Steam community member Ryan Johnson will be hosting the Payday 24-Hour Charity Livestream on August 8th.


This will be the first Payday-related charity event and is sponsored by the game's developer, Overkill. All donations are ultimately intended to go to the Child's Play charity, the goal being to raise a modest minimum or $500. The livestream can be found at www.twitch.tv/vysem4h and will run from 12:00 pm EST, August 8th to 12:00 pm EST, August 9th. The original announcement can be viewed on Youtube.

"I had the idea back in March, and I messaged Overkill about it in early April, Simon Viklund (audio and creative director for Payday, and voice actor for Bain) messaged me almost immediately saying you have our full support and will help promote the event. On a side note, it's kinda funny Bain is the one helping me set everything up because that's also his job in-game," says Johnson, who is known in the Payday community by his Steam handle, VyseM4H.

The many faces of Vyse.

The stream will feature a rotating roster of volunteer players from the Steam Payday community. The plan is to do a special challenge for every $100 milestone. The challenges as described by Johnson himself:

• The $100 Noob Lube Challenge - People who have never played the game before join me as I run them through an overkill difficulty map. Every mistake they make, including failing the heist, will result in me getting slapped a lot by my sister, who is former military.
•  The $200 Three Stooges Challenge - Simply any time something bad happens in-game (getting tazed, knocked down, etc) my sister will be standing behind me slapping the **** out of me.
• The $300 Mystery Challenge - This will be revealed during the livestream.
• The $400 SOURCE Challenge - I will consume one drop of The Source Hotsauce (7.1 million Scoville units) and run a heist, which I did for a previous video and which almost put me in the hospital.
• The $500 Mystery Challenge -  This is a secret for now, but I'll announce it after I recover from The Source. I promise you it's ****ing nasty.

 "The whole theme of the challenges is that children are suffering in hospitals worse than I will be, so I dont mind suffering," Johnson explains.

Overkill has provided some incentive for the most charitable donors in the form of official Payday masks (signed and unsigned), a Payday tie and a Payday money-clip. The items will be awarded by the most generous donor getting first pick of a single item, the second most generous donor getting second pick and on down the line.

More details can be found on the Steam forums in this thread or by contacting Johnson through his Youtube channel.

Payday DLC Triggers The Zombie Apocalypse

Apparently, the world ended with a heist.

In Payday's upcoming DLC, players will be hitting Left 4 Dead's Mercy Hospital, possibly in an attempt to steal a sample of the zombie virus from patient zero. The above video seems to show a single patient in an isolation chamber, someone possibly cutting the power to the hospital and a massive firefight in darkened hallways. Though details are still vague at this point, it's safe to assume all does not go according to plan, given that the virus later proceeds to ravage the human race.


The DLC represents a somewhat unprecedented collaboration between Valve and Swedish indie developer Overkill, which was recently acquired by Starbreeze. Most of the info revealed thus far about the project has come from the Payday Steam forum and Overkill's Twitter feed, but an official press release has yet to surface.

Payday's Executive Producer Bo Andersson has been a prolific, if somewhat evasive presence on the Steam forums, having initially hinted at the crossover in March saying, "We have begun doing something evil as well. Something SICK!" A month later, Andersson also let slip about the possibility of new zombie masks as well.

In a recent interview with PCGamesN, Valve developer Chet Faliszek said, "... I want to make sure that people don't think the prequel is coming. If that happens, then it will make this other thing we're doing feel uncool, when the thing we're doing is really cool. I mean, the problem is, if you make a rumour, and you can make the rumour anything, you're going to make the rumour really, really cool. And that makes everything else sound less cool."


The slow trickle of evidence became a flood with Payday's most recent patches introducing a wealth of clues to the game's existing levels, such as a set of Left 4 Dead health kits laying discarded in a corner, a portrait featuring a very Zoey-like young woman, and a poster referencing zombies. Steam forum users were quick to notice the references, with speculation settling on a Left 4 Dead crossover very rapidly.

 

Faliszek also e-mailed Kotaku today, saying "There is a little cameo from one of the L4D characters (the comic should give you a hint) and a fun little easter egg with a payoff later in Left 4 Dead." Could this be related to Valve's recent tweet about working with a familiar voice actor again? Left 4 Dead fans may remember in the comic companion to The Sacrifice campaign, Bill had a crappy time at a doctor's appointment.

The crossover itself appears to be mostly cosmetic, in that the Payday gameplay will remain the same while taking place in a pre-outbreak Mercy Hospital. Overkill has not stated whether actual zombies will make turn up in the new heist though it seems unlikely. Perhaps the Payday crew will receive some Left 4 Dead themed masks? In addition to the Mercy Hospital heist, the DLC, referred to by Overkill as the Wolf Pack, will likely include:

• 2 other heists, Undercover and Counterfeit
• 3 new weapons, an AK assault rifle, grenade launcher and machine pistol
• The Big Game Hunter crew bonus
• A deployable sentry gun
• New Technician upgrades and raised level cap

Overkill has stated that players who choose not to purchase the Wolf Pack can still play the new heists, but will be unable to personally host them. Whether the collaboration will also result in new content for Left 4 Dead remains to be seen, but it's possible something could show up in Valve's upcoming Cold Stream DLC, which has been extensively delayed. Hopefully Overkill will announce a release date in the near future. Regardless, this is shaping up to be some amazing content.

Chipping at the Backlog

In looking at my backlog, I'm somewhat less inclined to dip into it than to examine why it exists and in what form. In a general way, it can be used to observe how my taste in games, methods of purchasing them and the platforms I play them on has changed over the past decade. Looking back now, some major attitude shifts have occurred without me even really noticing. Analyzing how these changes came about makes me question whether I actually have it in me anymore to tackle much of my backlog.

I actually did pick something out to play, 3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3), but perhaps predictably, I ended up not feeling particularly engaged by it. I'd picked up Dot Heroes upon its release in 2010, played through the first couple dungeons in the game, put it down to try something else and utterly forgot it existed. I'd bought it on the strength of reviews and podcast recommendations and to be fair, everything good I'd heard about the game was true, but I hadn't taken into account my aforementioned changing tastes. Rather than write a dedicated review, I'd prefer to simply highlight a few of its notable mechanics.

Not Exactly Legendary

Dot Heroes boasts a genuinely charming concept, especially for RPG players fond of the Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy games on the NES. As with those games, the story is more or less arbitrary. A silent hero defeats a power hungry bad guy by gathering magic trinkets strong enough to fight the bad guy's trinket. Given the ability to alternate characters when reloading, I played as a wolf in a sheep suit and a cartoony dust cloud brawl, both of whom were designed by players. Story and characters aside, the game's real draws are the gameplay, which borrows its key elements from A Link to the Past (SNES), and the bizarre graphics, which attempt to translate 8-bit 2D sprites into modern but blocky 3D.

The game has at least one sword-as-giant-dick joke. Yeah, they went there.

The basic gameplay is a mixed bag. Dot Heroes' full health sword, rather than shooting a projectile, thrusts out a gigantic blade. With upgrades, it can be swung in an arc that hits almost everything on the screen. Wielding such a ridiculously deadly weapon is great fun, but lose a sliver of life and your sword becomes tiny and insufferably underpowered. The game's fixed perspective often makes it hard to see where you're standing in relation to your surroundings. It's much too easy to miss tiny-sword attacks on monsters because you aren't lined up quite right, and you constantly get caught up on corners of things while walking.

Of all the Zelda games, I've only really enjoyed two: Legend of Zelda (NES) and its superior extrapolation, A Link to the Past. I'd hoped Dot Heroes could channel my love for those games, but it wasn't to be. I think it's fair to say when you primarily play current gen games, it can be difficult to go back to older gen stuff without the warmth of nostalgia urging you on. In this case, similar gameplay just wasn't enough for me to stay very interested. In addition to a nasty amount of needless backtracking, my enthusiasm was greatly dampened by a couple of infuriating bugs, one of which caused me to lose several hours of progress.

Fancy Feast

The funny thing about evolving tastes is they creep up on you; sometimes you don't know your palate has changed until you attempt to indulge it. I suspect there are quite a few games in my backlog that I bought out of habit, despite no longer really finding them that palatable. I don't buy new games nearly as frequently now, so a large number of them are for the PS2, which makes them even less appealing. It's like switching back to hot dogs after eating a bunch of steak. Hot dogs were tasty back in the day, but steak is almost always better.

Atari games would be... I dunno, Spam, or maybe dog food.

Looking over my backlog I can see how online gaming came to distract me from single-player games. I see PC gaming taking precedence over consoles, digital copies starting to outnumber physical copies. There's my waning interest in series I'd previously loved, like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Grand Theft Auto. I see my shift from playing mainly Japanese games to mainly Western. The considerable size of the backlog speaks to how I budget my time extremely differently now. So much change... so many alterations in attitudes formerly thought rock-solid.

Despite my hesitation with a few of them, I'd still very much like to dust off more of these forgotten games, as well as finish 3D Dot Game Heroes. When I had to replay a few hours of the game after crashing, I listened to a few podcasts while playing to mitigate the tedium of redoing everything, and it was a damn fine way to pass some time. It's true that I find the game's design a little dry, but not every game has to be the pinnacle of craftsmanship and innovation. It's far too often that we gamers forget that.