Games

wowza. this game is a toybox in the weirdest way possible. i had recently decide to cancel development on another (cough) game and now (then) i had one BAJILLION assets i had to decide how i wanted to use. predominantly, this meant spritesheets i had been working on for MONTHS. which meant this game was now a big fucking square hole for all my small circle shaped pegs.
and honestly?
i think its fine.
yeah its short, yeah its scrappy, but it IS a jam game and i think it does everything i tried to make it do relatively well. i think its moderately intriguing artistically and narratively (while having catagorically less sauce than TGLAD).
i also really like the music i made for this game :3
(idality is gonna be my favorite track i've made for a BILLION years)
(oh also I'llnester_3 too i guess)
i remember the clock being weirdly buggy for so much of development and i put SO much time into it, only for it to be the least interesting aspect of the game.

originally, this game was gonna be a horse-race-betting simulator, where the player could place different stamps on their wrist watch to make things happen on the racetrack and skew the results, but that ended up being way too large in scope for both me, and the jam. but maybe someday i'll pick it up again because conceptually i do really love that idea.

sigh.
okay.
this game is um. a lot of things. and i need to decide how i want to parse them into text.
to start. this game is "about" very little. this game is meant to be my reflection and my emotion.
and i felt ugly and i felt angry.
"growing lungs and drowning" was a pretty good take on how i was feeling when i made this game.
i'm not gonna come out and tell everyone what this game is about, but the amount of diverse and unique reflections and ideas i've seen online are genuinely fascinating.
i'm not trying to be dismissive when i say TGLAD feels like pareidolia in game form. people see so many things in it, while by itself it practically means nothing.
it feels like a small truth hiding under one billion layers of silk and refusing to come out. it's weird.

I have Alpha Beta Gamer to thank for this games explosion in popularity. They covered it shortly after I released it and since then has become my most popular title by orders of magnitude. And while that is amazing (trust me it is amazing) its also the age-old story of unachievable expectations i have set for myself.
three guesses why i've only made one game since this one.
but, i'm trying not to let that stop me. i still very much so enjoy the process of game development, but the anxiety around producing my next 'masterpiece' is very overwhelming.

submission for the low effort game jam. yeah.

if Bloodletter was my kitty horrorshow kick, DROTT was my yames kick. i havent even played too many of his games, but his art style and themeing was too good an opprotunity to not try. this also sparked my fascination with interface-as-game, which i havent really explored too much since but i would like to. overall this is just a shitty jam game thats a little funny and not much else. 5/10

ope guess when i discovered ENA
fr though ENA inspired like. everything about my creative process once i hopped on board around when extinction party released.
for me, the internet was a sacred space up until i was halfway through middle school (like um. 2016), and my only internet access was through coolmathgames.com god rest her soul. so exploring world that revitalized the idea of an internet that had endless horizons, all calling your name, while also being carefully inacessible is extremely appealing to me.
anyway. ena has continued to wreak inspiration onto me and this game marks the easy starting point of that trend.
i dont think Bodies in the Backwater boasts a whole lot besides character. I like the music. I like the sprites. But the mechanics are lazy and there is very little to do. not to be overly harsh though - i still hadnt figured out how to do a raycast/interact system (actually i dont think any of my games have one except crab trap, yikes)
ironically, as inspired and derivitive this game is, i think its also the start of me branching into my own ideas and style of games and art.

my least favorite game to date.
based on a real life missing persons case and explored very clumsily, i do not like this game. if given the chance i would not make it again.
i made this game in a kitty horrorshow-themed fever and it kind of comes off as half-competent, but i personally think it's a lazy recreation and i could have done better. sorry to be so harsh past me, it's a tough world.

my dip into the style of releasing games in a self-proclaimed bundle (much like haunted cities)
i actually think these games aged pretty okay.
Oillark is pretty, albeit boring once the initial visuals get tiring.
Three Hearts in Various Stages of Decay remains unsettling to me, and might frankly deserve a remaster.
Weeping Well is the weak sauce. it's just boring with a lazily slotted-in implication for suicide when the player gets "bored". not my best work by far.
someday i might think about retrying this style of releasing games if i decide to make smaller games in a bundle, but for now i think it stands fairly well on its own.

my very first game
i was first inspired to make games from a video essay by Jacob Geller about Kitty Horrorshow's Haunted Cities V4. the way he talked about taking your agony and realizing it (especially in his description (and beautiful voiceover) of Lethargy Hill) really resonated with me. not that i necessarily had untold anguish to disperse, but taking your emotions and using them in that way was something i was extremely interested in.
that being said. Little Eavesdropper is not the emotional barrage i might have hoped for. it is a shit game, but by virtue as a shit indie gamedev, i leave it up because people deserve to know where i started.

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