Meh Development Retrospective

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Fenrir-Lunaris
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Meh Development Retrospective

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I wanted to preface this by saying that I have mixed feelings about allowing game authors/developers to review their own games. It's not that I don't think they can be objective about their own work - though that does happen from time to time - but that in an amateur setting there's a tendency to think overly highly of your own game while glossing over or outright ignoring its flaws. And that's part of human nature, and there's nothing wrong with feeling a sense of pride in something you've worked on!

But at the same time I feel like sometimes it's important for an artist/author to explain why they did things the way they did, and to help shed some light on their creative process. What they wanted to accomplish, where they fell short of their vision, and where they'd like to see their work go next.

I'd like to think this retrospective is more of the latter than the former.


It was a few years ago that I first touched on the idea of an RPG from a shopkeeper's standpoint. That was back in the days where I really started to get into Deep Space Nine (Quark is the best), and how instead of a crew of professional scientists and engineers going out to discover strange new worlds, the show would be about those worlds coming TO THEM. And each week it would be about some new and weird aliens who didn't understand human/federation customs coming to the station and not really knowing the usual social rules that we're so accustomed to. The game I had in mind would reflect that in a sense - a shopkeeper would offer various services at his store and do their best to cater to the unpredictable whims and demands of their patrons. And so, in july of 2004 I released the infamous "Barely Legal Bitches" during the Terrible Game Contest.

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It was the most complex game I had ever created as far as the scripts went, but it basically had a simple premise. A randomly selected patron would enter the store, and it would be up to the player to match up an appropriate escort for that customer, along with whatever special extras they'd probably like in the hope that the patron would pay out for a more "entertaining" evening. The more money a patron shelled out, the more funds the player would have at their disposal to hire additional girls, afford better services, and ultimately pay off the main character's outstanding college loans. That was the funniest part - you weren't out to save the world, you were just trying to pay off a ridiculous debt in an equally awful way. You couldn't actually lose either - as long as you were patient, or just kept mashing the spacebar, you'd eventually manage to make enough money to hit the goal and win the game. I eventually tried to expand it by adding a town outside the shop where you could explore, as well as adding more patrons to the random roster, but I felt like I had screwed it up by moving the focus away from the shop role, and making it more of a standard RPG. For the most part the original incarnation of that game was the better of the two, though I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

A few years later, I decided to revisit the core concept of a "Shopkeeper RPG" in a more family friendly way, this time with a greater focus on the customers themselves. And so in 2010 I released the first incarnation of "Meh" for another Ridiculous Game contest. The story was about a young... Man? Dog? Wolf? Mandogwolf. Anyhow, young Fenris was just starting out on his independent young life like most folks do - by working in a low-paying cashier job and having to deal with terrible customers. And by terrible customers, I of course mean sheeple.

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There would be no negotiating with these awful creatures - nothing the player would be able to do would make them happy, you'd be constantly berated, and it would only be a matter of time before the main character would give up. In short, it would be an endurance match to see how long the player would last before they went crazy. Or if you screwed up by accepting some pot from the marijuana sheep, that would end your game pretty quickly too. Depending on how well you'd do, the poor cashier would get a different ending - usually moving back in with his mother. I don't think it was ever possible to get the BAD ending due to a scripting bug, and that's probably for the best because frankly it's the most dark and hopeless ending to a game I've ever done. The only bright spot in that game was that years later, Fenris would somehow or other end up with "his hot girlfriend" and they'd look back on all they had been though and laugh - without any explanation for how they had got there and with no prior introduction either.

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There were a few problems with the game though - the scripts were a mess, sometimes your sanity wouldn't go down, and that it just wasn't possible to add any new customers to the rotation. Sometimes the player's sanity would drop, other times it wouldn't, and it was impossible to tell whether the player would get any particular ending. In short, the player didn't actually have any real control over how events turned out. I had accidentally created a game on rails years before Final Fantasy XIII came out. And in hindsight, a game where you had the ILLUSION of control had the potential to be a MUCH more funnier and edgier tale, but I wasn't yet ready to make that kind of game yet. I had other responsibilities, especially considering the economy had crashed and there were no more job opportunities in my town...

I spent the next few years working on and off on Vikings of Midgard, and when i wasn't doing that, it was working in the same dead-end job, desperately trying to make money, paying off ever increasing bills, needing MORE money for fixing the truck/car, having infected teeth pulled (or when I couldn't afford even that, just suffering through the pain), and just generally being totally miserable. Thellos kept getting sicker and sicker too, but his adventures could probably fill an entire book. The long and short of it is, when people feel like they don't have any future, they get desperate. I'd suggest playing THIS masterpiece for a bit before continuing reading this retrospective:

http://www.castleparadox.com/gamelist-d ... p?game=705

Meh eventually became sort of an allegory for *MY* story. Working for practically nothing, struggling to stay one step ahead of ruin, and legitimately TRYING to keep a happy face on no matter what. Fenris and the horrible shop got referenced several times in some of my other projects - in Vikings of Migard, and in No More Villains where he showed up as a vendor as well. It was like life never moved on for this guy, and he was still doing the same job, still making ends meet somehow, and still trying to keep up his spirits no matter how bad things got. There was unfinished business still there - the story of how he earned his happy ending. How he hadn't given up hope yet, and neither had I. I had to return to Meh.

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A reboot of Meh, or a sequel, had always been something I eventually planned on doing, and the 2013 8-bit contest provided the opportunity I needed to revisit the story of Fenris and the terrible customers. My knowledge of scripting had improved a bit, and perhaps more importantly I had a few stylistic ideas to help make the game become better than it was originally. I decided early on that the game would almost wholly test out the idea of using transparent backdrops as extra-large character portraits. I also wanted to do this because the contest rules never specifically said anything about backdrops having to have a limited color palette, and I figured that every trick I could pull off to improve the game's presentation would be a step in the right direction. I also decided early on that most of the sheep customers would be based of well-known internet memes to add a bit of humor to them.

Most of the backdrops were digitally rendered in about a week, saving time to work on the other graphics. To save time, I would also downgrade the color-quality of the previous's game's 16-bit sprites instead of making brand new ones. Downgrading the tiles proved to be a non-starter for several reasons, but the main reason was that I wanted to include a lot of white in the walkabouts, and the best way to do that was to simply make the "white" areas of each sprite transparent and make the tiles of the shop nice and bright. I took the time to add more details to the store's interior than the previous game's, so the 8-bit version of the game actually became a more visually interesting experience than its predecessor. Gone were the bins of nondescript blue stuff - they had become replaced by pencils, folders, a drink cooler, and an actual display of AA batteries for the marijuana sheep to fawn over. There would be actual shelves of ink behind the registers, trashcans, and the store's logo on the wall. It was starting to feel like a real place.

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I decided early on that the game's focus would be split into different types of encounters - friendly faces, and recurring headaches. These would be further divided into a series of single-time encounters with these characters, so that as their individual stories wouldn't ever repeat, and I could use the completion of these stories as part of the game's hidden checklist to see which endings the player had unlocked. Repeatable customers would give the player a choice - take the hit to Fenris's dwindling sanity, or allow him to give his customers a piece of his mind and hopefully not take the hit at all.

If a customer complained about the service however, then the hit to Fenris's sanity would be worse than if he had just played along with them. Once his sanity ran out, the game would be over, and the player would be rewarded with a number of different endings depending on their actions over the course of the game. Not all encounters with NPCs would be bad though...

The player could encounter a few weird incarnations of famous OHRRPGCE characters, including Bob the Hamster, TimTim the mighty gnome, Surlaw and Mr Triangle too, mostly as shout-outs to other game authors whose work I've admired. I thought it would be funny to depict them in their most basic of forms - Bob being JUST a hamster, Surlaw is a glorious floating sunfish, Tim-tim being an aggressively silent version of David the Gnome, and so on. Their motivations and looks are simple, they don't say anything aside from squeaks and other animal noises (aside from Mr Triangle - he just speaks in machine code), and they would ALL be overwhelmingly positive for the player to run into. This was the major departure from the first game's formula.

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The player would also consistently end up running into none-other than Cthulhu, fresh from Vikings of Midgard. Or was it No More Villains? He's also apparently running some sort of evil dungeon filled with crabs next door too. Regardless of whatever form Cthulhu took in the game, it would never spell good news for Fenris, and even standing up to him would automatically result in being shot down.

The biggest and most important of these ongoing encounters would be Fenris's relationship with Kiya, the game's required love interest. Getting a good relationship with her would be the only way to unlock the game's best ending, and set things up for a secret after-game scenario. I decided early on that the only way for Fenris to spend quality time with his prospective girlfriend would be to leave the store and actually go out into the world. This set up a few scenes where some of his character would be more fleshed out. I realized of course that a mere five scenes wouldn't be enough to fully give their relationship the time or development it needed to decently show a love story, but any gaps would have to be filled in at a later date. After the contest was over, I wanted to return to this game a third time and give it a full work-up.

The game inevitably suffered from a lack of time to get all the scenes I wanted into it, but the effort I put into it was enough for it to claim the crown in the 8-bit contest. I laughed a bit too hard at this one in particular:

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The real work of course had only just begun. I had resolved that after the contest had concluded that I would do several things to the game to prepare it for a more proper release. First and foremost would be to replace all the graphics in the game with 16-bit styled graphics, full color backdrops, and a whole heck of a lot of polish to it. Every character portrait would be remastered and given the love and attention they deserved. I would also try and find a suitable royalty-free soundtrack to replace the game's existing songs. Batty McFaddin replaced Cybersheep Dream. Finally I would begin work on adding in new scenes, updating existing ones, and just in general making it a much more entertaining experience.

The first thing that changed was the way single-time scenes were handled. After completing the OHR heroes' quest chain for example, Kyle and Bob would return to check and see if anyone had turned in Bob's wallet. This of course was another nod to the No More Villans scene where Vlad tries to use Bob's stolen debit card. Another entirely new set of scenes became dedicated to a particularly unusual kangaroo, who would often appear to cause chaos and disorder. After a few encounters with him, including painting the store purple, and another where he nyan-catt'd his way through the building (rainbow and all), he would start interrupting some particularly troublesome sheeple, saving the player some much needed sanity.

Several more new scenes were planned out as well. There would be a series involving Fenris's mother realizing he's moved out (you just NOW noticed? But you were there!) and beginning a rather awkward quest to track him down and bring him home. Yet another series of new sequences would revolve around his father's "friends" - major contributors to the game's development would be allowed to essentially write and direct their own scenes. Judging from the preliminary scripts for them, there's a certain... unintentional running gag where the poor guy gets a lot of face time with women's breasts.

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The more prominent changes to the game's story would be an expanded series of scenes with Kiya, Cthulhu, and a few newer characters to round out the game's supporting cast and set up the "after game surprise". Cthulhu's scenes in particular would begin to grow a bit darker, with him starting to outwardly try to inflict greater suffering and hardship on the main character, sending minions to attack him, conjuring up hellhounds when that fails, and even attempting to incinerate him with fireballs. As his attempts on Fenris's life grow more and more depraved, he would reveal his reasons behind singling him out (because he was there), his motivations (boredom), and his ultimate goal - to show Fenris that he has no control over what happens to his life, and that any attempt to gain happiness is a futile goal fated to end in despair. To prove his point, Cthulhu would even try to take away the person most important to Fenris... And then the REAL game would begin.

Your choices throughout the game, the people you had befriended, even the various destinies you'd have realized would all aid the player bit by bit. And even though those outcomes had essentially been predetermined - Fenris's ultimate destiny would finally be his to command. And he'd have to fight for his true happy ending.

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