Lately I've been returning to my game graveyard and reanimating abandoned projects or rebuilding them from scratch.
My ludum dare 25 entry, Valkyrie, is the fourth or fifth incarnation of a sci-fi drama I'd been wanting to tell for some time; but the first COMPLETED attempt as well! Unfortunately, being a 72-hour thing, the game is pretty bland-looking.The story is initially simple: Lan is a Valkyrie – the secret police of a feminist extremist dictator in a modern-norse post-nuclear-winter wonderland – and she's being sent on a hostage rescue mission. The boss of the Valkyrie Guard and unofficial ruler of the nation is the hostage, and it's Lan's job to kill the terrorist leader and rescue her boss. Complicating this simple mission are Lan's long-buried childhood memories which nag her throughout. It's a shooty game with lots of dialogue cutscenes developing the story, and three different endings. Pretty short, but hey, it's a weekend jam game.And no, I didn't enter it in the You Are The Villain jam to jokingly imply that women are evil. The theme applies to Lan's personal baggage, not the setting.The second game whose grave I've defiled is Suspension of Disbelief, which is decidedly gorgeous in comparison to Valkyrie:
I've found some great freeware tunes for the game, and also have an acquaintance who wants to give it a go, himself. I've tweaked the gameplay a bit and now it's just waiting to see what kinda tunes my friend comes up with. I'll probably post it over at gamejolt, as usual. Six worlds, seven goofy characters, and a slew of moronic weapons ranging from shotguns to bowling balls to soda machines.
the second game looks really interesting.
seeing as i enjoyed Nightmare Toys, i'd really like to give these a try.I played your LD game and to be honest, I didn't really enjoy it. The concept was really uncomfortable, a bunch of feminazi's killing lesbians while talking about bags of dicks with southern American accents; it seems like a really specific, and fucked up, sexual fantasy.
The gameplay itself was pretty bad, I got fed up with it and just quit. Holding a firefight against a tiny moving target without any decent way of aiming was a total pain in the ass, the first time I died it was against the first two enemies. Ammo was too sparse for the amount of times I'd invariably miss. The walls seemed to repel the magnet Lanette keeps in her back pocket, effectively preventing me from assessing the game's collisions.Sorry, I'm kinda harshly honest. I understand this was a Ludum Dare game so you were strapped for time. The whole story idea still weirds me out, though.I'm off to try SoD, it looks significantly less disappointing.@ Charlie Carlo: You're taking it too literally, dude. Homosexuality is still considered a derogatory thing even in the future – the term "fag" is used a lot, too, but it doesn't mean they're referring to actual homosexuals. The terrorists were male prison escapees. The whole thing is based on the concept that "there'd be no war if women ruled the world" (which I think is absolutely insane: human beings are corrupted by greed and power regardless of race, gender, etc.) and how scary it'd be if someone with that sort of black/white worldview had the power to enforce it. Unfortunately with only a weekend to tweak the writing, I can only establish so much about the setting without blowing it up into some epic thing (or making it too vague trying to condense it).
The gameplay I don't blame you for being irritated with – it's rough, and I may or may not be able to smooth out the edges over time. Considering I'm not happy with the tiny sprites either, I may do a complete graphical overhaul. I was never sure if I wanted to make strafing separate from attacking (which means adding another button, which I really don't want) or leaving it out (so people can still complain that it's too hard to hit things).Or I might just let it rot in its current state and forget it ever happened. I haven't decided.Whilst your intention was a genuinely good idea, the execution was lacking. That's ok, no one's perfect. Considering the hyper-sensitive nature of our society at the minute, you've gotta work extra hard when it comes to gender and race issues. I think it's ridiculous, personally, but that's how it is.
funny thing is, the women who know the Valkyrie story love the shit out of it. it seems like men more often shy away from gender issues much like white people more often shy away from race jokes.
I don't find it offensive, I find it comically ridiculous.
It's the same reason I don't watch anime.anime fantasy was the furthest thing from my mind, but whatever.
@ Juju: can you point out where the execution is lacking? I'd like to try and fix that, if it's possible to do without having to expand the damn thing into a larger game. which probably isn't possible, but it'd be worth a shot.I meant it's similar to anime's level of absurdity in chosen settings and how their universes tend to just have some big, over-arching gimmick stapled on.
I mean, you're talking about an evil regime with massive political power, wherein the only revealed members are witless rubes. It's like if neo-nazi's ruled the earth, or the Stormcloaks somehow took over all of Cyrodiil. The gender inequality thing is entirely unfounded, there would never be such a power-gap between the two genders in either direction without the entirety of the species falling apart. Gender relations seem worse in this than back in the Bible times when women were treated as property. Although, I may just be angry about the fact that it's a universe where hapless bigots rule the world, any glimpse into what the world might be like if Hitler had won just unsettles me to the core.Also, I COULDN'T AIM WORTH A DAMN.Sorry, you can just ignore me, I'm in some mode of being a nitpicky bastard.In that regard, yeah, it's an absurd setting; but I based it on an absurd principle, so it probably can't be helped. "There would never be such a power-gap between the two genders in either direction without the entirety of the species falling apart" was sort of the ultimate purpose of the whole thing, which is why there's people staging terrorist attacks on the hapless bigots in charge.
Nitpicky is a-ok! I just like to know exactly where everyone's coming from when they praise or criticize. I don't know that I quite fixed the aiming issues, by the way: she doesn't lock in the wrong direction as easily anymore, at least.