I just released a new game titled Bug Mystery? The Explosion Speaks! It’s a short visual novel (arguably?) that I made for the 2024 Glorious Trainwrecks Sekret Santa jam. I’m really happy with how this one turned out. In some ways, it feels like a return to form to the sorts of “weird” games I used to make in the late 2010’s, but I think this one has a bit more heart to it.
It’s caused me to reflect a lot on how much I’ve changed as a game developer after spending 2020-2024 making Jailbird Nocturne and how I can’t go back to being the sort of creative that I used to be. When I last made short games in 2019, I was involved in the local Philly game dev scene, exhibiting games at cons and festivals with friends, was networked well enough with the indie scene on Twitter, and was releasing multiple games per year. By the time I finished making Jailbird Nocturne in 2024, that all had changed – the pandemic and fall of Twitter had severed me from the online and IRL communites I had once been a part of, and taking a break from regular releases to make a "magnum opus" or whatever had forever changed my relationship to my creative output in a way that I’m still continuing to understand. During that time, I went from being a twenty-something full of energy to a thirty-something burnt out from a PhD program who is finding that the time and energy she used to have for creating, networking, and showcasing is a lot more limited than it used to be. Unexpectedly, making Bug Mystery has gotten me a step closer to understanding who I’ve become as a creative and how I want to make stuff going forward, but it was also an interesting game to make in its own right, so I’ll talk about that first!
Making of Bug Mystery
My Sekret Santa recipient for this year’s jam asked for a game with interesting bugs, a mystery, a betrayal, and a “talking explosion who is your pal.”
The last item was very exciting to me and would clearly be the wishlist item that would be the game's focal point, so the very first order of business was animating Peter the Talking Explosion. I’ve animated many single explosions in many games, but animating something that was continuously exploding and having it look good was a challenge. It took me a day or so before I got something that looked and felt right. Adding some jitter and randomized timing to each individual explosion helped, but just having a constant color shifting orb in the middle of the endless series of explosions helped make the explosions feel like part of a coherent entity .
The narrative focus of the items lent itself to a more story-driven experience. I was originally going to have a surprise mid-game genre shift from visual novel to twin-stick shooter, but the game was already 2 weeks late as it was, and so that part got scrapped. I don’t want to spoil too much, but if you play the game, you can tell where the action sequence would have been located. For what it’s worth, while the abrupt genre-change would have been very cool, I think the story is paced better without it.
Part of the challenge of making Secret Santa jam games is finding the overlap between something you want to make and something that your recipient would enjoy. Figuring out what the game's mystery would be was easy (someone's bug collection got stolen! that's two wishlist items with one stone), but at the end of the day, I'm not someone who's really interested in writing mystery stories. This lead to me including a gay romance subplot, because that IS the sort of gremlin I am. I decided that the protagonist, Maggie, would be recruited by her ex-girlfriend, Eleanor to find her missing insect collection. Maggie hopes to win Eleanor back by solving the case. Peter, being an exploding entity of reason and concerned friend, thinks this is a terrible idea. I also needed to add a third character to the game to provide another option for the story's culprit and betrayer, so Eleanor was that character.
As for Bug Mystery’s style, I was primarily inspired to make music with a cute 8-bit-inspired tool called Lovely Composer. Until this point, all of my games’ music has been made with the MIDI software Anvil Studio or by doing live recordings. I’m very happy with how the two tracks I made for the game turned out! There’s something about the simplicity of the sounds used for chiptune music (square waves, sine waves, and so on) that I feel enables it to be more expressive than when working with MIDI. Being able to change the type of sound wave being played mid-note is an extra means of expression that isn’t possible with the more “modern” software I was using before, and the ambiguity of the pure beeps and blips of chiptune affords you a certain amount of creativity in what the different types of sound available to you can mean, if that makes sense.
Having decided in advance that I’d be using Lovely Composer, the game’s art style was also heavily inspired by the limitations of 8-bit computer hardware. This meant that (with the exception of some bug photos) I limited myself to 4 colors for every art asset (2 of those colors usually being black and white), and to the 256 color 8-bit palette. I did some cursory research to find a screen resolution that was plausible on a machine from the era, leaning towards the larger side for convenience, and settled on 576x384. I don’t obey all of the limitations of 8-bit graphics and audio processing – the game features overlapping sprites, the screen resolution is higher than that of the NES, and Lovely Composer is capable of playing more sounds simultaneously than was possible on an actual 8-bit game console – but my goal wasn’t to make something that was faithfully retro, but something that was stylistically coherent.
Making games going forward
Bug Mystery was my first attempt at making short games again ever since completing Jailbird Nocturne, and I learned a lot by attempting to return to a style of game making that (with the exception of Vaudeville & Sword) I haven’t engaged in in over four years. I was so eager to return to making short games again that I overlooked that making Nocturne had changed me as a person and a creative. Going forward, I don’t think I’ll be able to make short, weird, funny games in Game Maker in exactly the same way that I used to, if at all. Making Jailbird Nocturne had given me a taste for worldbuilding, writing complicated and dynamic characters, and injecting personal experience into my stories that makes it hard to return to shorter, less “serious,” less "personal" works (which is not to say that previous games I made were neither serious nor personal, but my more recent work feels like a step up from what I used to make).
To my surprise, making Bug Mystery wasn’t actually all that exciting to me until I wrote the final cutscene, which was inspired by an experience with someone I briefly dated in my early 20’s. That was the moment when the game became more than the sort of quirky game I would make back in the late 2010’s and became something more personal and, I hope, more impactful. The end of development was also when I started writing the game’s music with Lovely Composer, and getting my feet wet with a new tool confirmed that making games with the same software I’ve been using for a decade (in the case of Anvil Studio) or two (in the case of Game Maker) might not be sustainable. 15-20 years later, writing collision code and text boxes in Game Maker is starting to get a little old.
In plainer terms: by attempting to go back to being the type of creative I was back in 2019, I learned that I am no longer that person. Growing as a creative doesn’t always mean you just get better at making the same sorts of things with the same tools. Sometimes growth means making new things with new tools, even if that means starting over and becoming a novice at something yet again. For me, moving forward means telling longer, more personal, more serious stories using tools that do away with much of the tedium of game development. For example, while programming my own movement code in Game Maker is “more impressive” or "legitimate" than letting RPG Maker handle that for me, the paradox of being an experienced games programmer is that writing movement code is just not that interesting of a challenge to me anymore, and using a more “casual/accessible” game making tool is becoming more appealing to me. Part of me is wondering if I should move on from games altogether and just write fiction, but I think I enjoy music composition and combat system design way too much to make that move just yet.
In even plainer terms: despite swearing to myself that I would never make anything like Jailbird Nocturne again, the next step in my evolution as a game developer is to keep making more big-ish RPG Maker games. Or maybe I’ll get serious about working in 3D. Either way, expect more chiptunes.
Before I take that leap, I have a couple of other plans: I recently replayed Monsterpunk, a technically unfinished but otherwise playable-from-start-to-finish open world monster simulator that I was making from 2014-2019, and found that it was a lot of fun! Despite missing a lot of planned mid-game content (and it will remain missing), it otherwise wouldn’t take much to get it to a playable state and finally release it.
After that, I need to evaluate how I feel about the Cardinger sequel that I’ve been working on on-and-off since about 2020. Maybe it’ll be my final Game Maker Studio game for a while, or maybe I won’t even finish it and just release print versions of the cards I designed. We’ll see.
After that, I hope to get my hands dirty with a new RPG Maker game. I can’t wait!
In any case, thanks for playing Bug Mystery! It’s a fun little yarn, and I hope you enjoy it.