It's safe to say that AAA games have been in a downward spiral for a while now. When exactly this change began is up for debate, but it's not an uncommon complaint that games have gotten less creative, less performant and less finished at launch for at least some years. Sure, AAA games have also gotten a lot prettier, but to get there they've also gotten nakedly obvious about how little they think of the average consumer's intelligence between seventy dollar price tags, deluxe editions, pre-order goodies, season passes, microtransactions and more. All of this, according to the big publishers, is necessary because of the enormous risks involved with developing an AAA game. The consumer demands high budget photorealistic games, so by and large that's what publishers will make. It's necessary to ship out unfinished games and sell them piece by piece because otherwise, they'll never make a profit.

I can't help but wonder, how is it possible that they think this? Is this really a good reason to chase after that last 10% of photorealism when it costs millions more in development when consumers can't tell the difference? Is squeezing a few more dollars out of your customers really worth the risk of ruining your company or your product's reputation? Haven't indie sensations like Minecraft or companies like Nintendo proven that this mentality is bass ackwards for decades now? And, most importantly, if it really is this risky to develop an AAA game in the current industry, why even take that risk when there's hundreds of millions of dollars on the line? Why not just make a bunch of smaller games?

The actual reason is simple: the people at the top of this industry don't understand the market that they're in. If you showed them Sonic 2006 and Sonic Generations side by side and asked them which of them is the beloved one, they wouldn't be able to tell you. (They might even pick the former because it looks more "realistic".) This is why so many large companies keep making the same mistakes, because in the process of trying to extract as much money out of consumers as possible they end up pissing them off when they inevitably take it too far without even realizing. That's why we keep getting the same mediocre games filled with the same uninspired and greedy design trends as every other modern game, because that's the only thing they know that will reliably sell, and by god do they have good reason to think that. For all the internet's griping, franchises that have gone stagnant ages ago like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and Fi- I mean EA Sports FC still make their publishers millions each year. Their fans know what they like and will gladly fork over another seventy dollars for a new installment, so why change a winning formula?

That kind of mentality is exactly why the industry is heading the way it is right now. Budgets have become so bloated that even a decent hit can't make its money back anymore, and if you can't tell a good game from a bad one, how do you know what to invest in and what to cancel? The answer to that seems to be to make less new games and more sequels, remakes and reboots because supposedly that's less risky. Not true. You can easily destroy the reputation of a well-beloved franchise by accident if you don't know what you're doing, and a small new IP flopping isn't nearly as bad as when it happens to a recognizable one. After all, we can't forget about all those profitable spin-offs, tie-ins and merchandise. Franchises can always recover from an awful game, but that seems to be happening less and less as the years have gone by. That might have something to do with publishers being less willing to invest another fifty million into an IP that recently bombed even if it's because of bad management, it might have something to do with the creators of those beloved IPs no longer being involved, who can say. Either way, there's only so many recognizable IPs you can burn down until you've run out of them. At that point, you're stuck with ashes.

So what does the future hold for the current AAA industry? Well, from where I'm sitting in my comfortable analyst's armchair, I don't think it has a future. As long as people who don't understand video games remain in charge, they'll continue this unsustainable model, investing millions into flops and trying to push trends that will never catch on even among video game players (who aren't exactly known for being consumer-savvy). All those millions of dollars of profit are nice until they run out and the majority of the industry crashes under the size of its billion dollar budgets and dumb greedy decisions. That might sound dour, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. As long as there are people who get creatively inspired, there will be great games. As long as people want to keep creating, there will be great games. As long as there are people that seek them out, there will be great games. This industry is still relatively young and can still take all kinds of unexpected turns, and from the ashes of the old industry we can always build a new one. One where, I can only hope, the people in charge know what they're doing.

Maybe a crash is exactly what the video game industry needs right now to breathe some new life into it.

If you're anything as insane as me, then being creative isn't just something you do for fun in your free time, but something you need to let outside of you to survive, and suffering from block can be the source of much guilt, stress or even depression. That's why we (me and my friend DJ Coco) want to share some of the tricks we've picked up over the years in the hopes of helping out others who are in a similar situation.

From the start, you definitely need to have a plan. Some developers swear by game design documents, some don't, but at the very least I can say that just writing code or making assets without any plan in mind is a great way for your motivation to fizzle out quickly. I've never used a GDD myself, but I always write down ideas and draw concept art to solidify what I want the game to look and play like. The finer details of your plan depend on what you need, but what I definitely recommend is keeping it low scope but flexible. A lot of indie developers like to plan out big games with lots of content; don't do that. What I don't mean is that you can't make a big game, but that you shouldn't plan for it. You can't predict the future. In the chance that you get bored or burned out, an early exit strategy is valuable. By keeping your plan flexible, you can design your game in such a way that you can easily keep on creating more content if you want to or cut content that can't be finished on time without harming the overall game's quality too much, which is a much easier way of producing a big game.

Depending on the kind of game you're making this could be easy or hard, but there's plenty of ways to handle it well. You could plan out the beginning and end from the start and improvise whatever comes in-between, like how Conker's Bad Fur Day did it. You could structure your game like a TV show by segregating the plot into episodes or mini-arcs, like in Mass Effect 1 or Saints Row 2. There's definitive benefits to keeping your plan flexible so it's definitely worth experimenting with.

Now that a plan is in place, the best way to tackle it is to break it down into milestones. Even a small game can be a large beast to handle, so by using milestones you'll get a much more consistent sense of progress rather than a feeling of endless despair at how much longer development will take. The feeling of seeing the game take shape in front of your eyes is the best motivator to keep yourself going, but don't make the mistake of showing everyone your progress too early. It's understandable to want to show others what you've made, but it can dull the excitement of making progress for yourself and it can be disappointing and stressful if development happens to hit a speedbump.

Of course, there will always be moments where you simply don't feel like working. That happens to everyone, and giving yourself a break sometimes can be good for the creative process. What I've seen happen to a lot of indie developers is that, while they're losing their motivation during development, they get an idea for a new game that they suddenly want to work on instead. The motivation behind working on a new game is hard not to give in to, so it helps to think about what causes you to feel this way. Is there a problem with the game or with you? Is it not coming out as you wanted it to, or are you just stuck on something tedious? If it's the former, it's worth evaluating if the game has issues that prevent you from working on it. If it's the latter, it's worth keeping in mind that every game has its tedious parts during development. Be sure to write those ideas down so they don't fade away. If you still think they're good later, you can come back to them. If you don't, no big loss. Either way, what's most important is getting out of that rut. What always helps me get out of it is forcing myself to work on something. That sounds counter-intuitive, but by slowly adjusting yourself to get used to the process again it can really help you get back in the creative mood.

These tricks might not work for everyone, mind. This is just what helped us and figuring out what does and doesn't work takes some trial and error, but it's worth it to find out what works best for you. Now if you'll excuse me, I've been meaning to finish drawing some assets I've been putting off for weeks now.

My hope to write more in 2023 was both a success and a failure. A success because I kept it going for longer than I imagined, a failure because I didn't keep it going for as long as I wanted to. I could throw out a dozen excuses, but during the hecticness of the past few months I simply forgot to write more. It's the good kind of hectic, thankfully. I'm not going into detail because this isn't that kind of blog, but the past few years have been such a Loop-the-Loop that having life go the way I want it to for once has been a rather welcome change of pace. That has left me with less time and motivation to be creative, however.

The problem with free time is that you have an abundance of it when you're young, but as the calendar pages turn you slowly lose most of the free time you have until there's not enough time or motivation to do much of anything. The day you get excited over having hours to waste is the same day the ritual is finally complete: the free time during which you did nothing that felt like such a torture as a child is now like a treasure, and when you realize this you have officially become an Old Person. Hindsight truly is the cruelest seductress.

I still have plenty of exciting things lined up which I hope I'll get to show off in 2024, both related to games and writing. Sometimes both. I hope you get to see them, and I hope everyone's new year will be excellent.

Borrowing the lexicon from my pretentious art teacher for a bit, the raison d'être of a video game is, simply put, to be interacted with. Therefore, it only makes sense that the best examples of telling a story through a video game would use their gameplay to do so, yet this is what many designers tend to forget. Both story-heavy indie and AAA games make mistakes like failing to integrate the story and gameplay well, neglecting the gameplay - either occasionally or almost entirely - or railroading players so hard that the game might as well play itself. This isn't so much because the designers of these games don't want you to play their work, but because it's hard to tell a specific story when the player can break it in numerous ways. Emil Pagliarulo once somewhat infamously claimed that the designer wants to tell a story and the player wants to rip it up to fold into paper airplanes and throw them around. So does that mean there's no good way to bridge the gap and tell a story through a game in a way that lets you tell the story you have in mind while still handing over some authorship to the player? Absolutely not, and there are several good examples of games that prove as much, but the one I want to highlight in particular is the original Deus Ex. Not so much because of its quality of writing, which is rightly legendary, but what it does even better is how the game tells its story.

JC Denton isn't a very good debater, but his one-lines are so memorably written and performed that they achieved Internet fame anyway. "Do you have a single fact to back that up" is a favorite of mine.

Deus Ex tells the story of JC Denton, an employee of international anti-terrorist organization UNATCO, as he blows the lid off a massive government conspiracy and heads deeper into the rabbit hole of conspiracies to stop the people at the top of it from taking over the world. The story gives us many good reasons to travel across the world to see varying locales, from New York to Paris to Hong Kong, talking to various people with interesting viewpoints while exploring cities, underground tunnels and secret bases, resulting in a lot of variety at a steady pace. You will always visit the same locations and talk to the same people in the same order to advance the plot, but what makes the game so replayable is that the game constantly gives you choices. Not just in how you handle various obstacles in gameplay, but through the story as well, even if it's not always as obvious. The trick to it is that you're never given a choice too big to derail the game's narrative, but you do have plenty of small and medium-sized choices that result in varying permutations of said narrative (except for the endings, which are allowed to break away from it of course).

In Warren Spector's Deus Ex postmortem at GDC, he admits that a lot of the game's choices are "smoke and mirrors". That might be so, but it is a rather convincing set of smokes and mirrors. For example, before JC leaves his employer, almost all of your colleagues are invulnerable. That's definitely a cheat, but unlike what Bethesda games might have taught you, it's not necessarily a poor one. Choosing to kill them before there is any reason to do so isn't a choice most players would make unless they were deliberately messing around or trying to break the narrative on purpose. You can, however, ignore your objectives (frustrating your colleagues), kill innocent civilians (intentionally or not) and even harass the administrator in the bathroom, but the worst that will happen is that your boss threatens to fire you. You can never mess up badly enough to make that happen, but the way the game implemented these choices into its gameplay to make them feel natural, the acknowledgement of your choices by various characters causing them to have different opinions of JC and the frequency of these choices do make it feel like the world of Deus Ex is more believable than the world of even most modern AAA games.

For some reason, the top class agent of an international anti-terrorist organization starts out with the aiming skills of a toddler. Luckily you don't need good aim to kill terrorists with rocket launchers.

What definitely sells the illusion, however, are the more impactful choices you can make and the way they're handled. In the first major branching point of the game, JC has caught Juan Lebedev, a financial backer of the terrorists you're hunting down, in an airplane at his private airport terminal. He surrenders, citing a UNATCO policy against killing unarmed prisoners, before JC's colleague Anna Navarre walks into the room and orders him to execute Lebedev. In any lesser game, the presentation of this situation would've overemphasized every action you can take, which would make it feel artificial. In Deus Ex, these situations aren't presented as a choice at all. You can follow orders and shoot Lebedev in cold blood, and the game definitely feels like it's pressuring you into doing so, but you can also walk away. Or kill Anna. This isn't easy to do because she has a bad habit of exploding once dead, which can take out JC and Lebedev if not careful, but now that Anna has served her narrative purpose she's completely expendable. You can even stay one step ahead of her and put explosives at the entrance of the room which will kill her before she gets to make the execution order, and this even gets a unique line of dialogue from JC where he shifts the blame to Juan for the booby trap in the resulting argument with his boss. In games that use invulnerable NPCs for story reasons and where the primary way of interacting with it is through violence, turning God Mode off at the right time helps a lot to keep the player immersed.

Other such choices, like the fate of Paul, Smuggler and Gunther are handled in the same way with a complete lack of overemphasis, and this is what makes the choices feel so naturally integrated with gameplay. If you want to make a choice, you do it. As a result a lot of seemingly inconsequential choices you make can end up benefitting or hindering you later down the line, and the game keeps this up so well that you can replay it numerous times and still find yourself surprised by all the specific actions characters can react to. In that sense, you aren't so much changing the narrative as you are contextualizing it. You might not get a wildly different story every playthrough, but any time it feels like the game should let you take an obvious action it usually will. This way, Deus Ex can tell the story it wants while still letting the player make choices that feel impactful. Designing it this way means that choices can't actually be very impactful, but if the trick is executed well enough, most players won't even care because they'll be gushing over how detailed your game is for decades to come. There's a reason why "brb reinstalling Deus Ex" was such a popular meme before the days of cheap storage.

And some great writing helps too, of course.

My mom bought a gaming PC for my 14th birthday, and while it was incredibly overpriced for what it was, that didn't matter to me; it was mine and I could do whatever I wanted with it. As the only computer games I was familiar with were free Flash games on Newgrounds, I asked around on various communities what kind of games I could play on a slightly outdated hunk of junk like mine. I forgot who exactly was responsible, but someone recommended I try this old hacking game called Uplink, and so I found a torrent on ThePirateBay and tried it. I make the following statement with zero hyperbole - that single throwaway recommendation changed my life. Various hours later, I fell in love with it so hard that I made a Steam account just so I could buy the game and support the developers properly.

Uplink's interface might be outdated and slightly janky, but dammit, it still looks very cool.

If you're unfamiliar with it, here's how it works: Uplink is a hacking simulator reminiscent of old hacking movies like Sneakers and Hackers, where the portrayal is less about realism and more about flashiness. You play as a hacker who does various odd jobs like changing people's identities or destroying valuable data. At the beginning of the game, hacking is as easy as using the password breaker on a password screen and finishing up in less than five minutes to avoid getting caught, but the game quickly starts bombarding you with new concepts - deleting logs to avoid being tracked down, shutting down security systems that get in your way and travelling through local area networks. The game is never outright unfair, as most information you need to get through the game can be found in the in-game help section, but certain concepts require a bit of trial and error before you truly get how they work and that can result in you getting caught by the authorities, which results in an instant game over. Thankfully, starting over and getting back to where you were before isn't as daunting as it seems due to Uplink's fairly open structure. While the game is a bit on the short side, there's enough depth to its mechanics to feel satisfying to master, and the realization that a game that gave you so much trouble at first has turned into a total cakewalk can't be matched.

Before Uplink, I only really played games like Mario, Grand Theft Auto and Alien Hominid; games that might or might not feature mature content, but were decidedly arcadey in nature. They didn't care that much about immersion or emotional engagement. Uplink was a different beast: it pulled me right in with its beautiful ambient soundtrack, retrofuturistic visuals and gameplay that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Sure, it might not have any fancy 3D models and complex shaders, but I still felt absorbed in a way no other game had done before. Its gameplay was highly addictive and its presentation deceptively brilliant, with a story that would've been deemed too ambitious for an AAA game even at the time. I became an obsessed man, looking up everything that I could find about the game and its developers, buying their newer games Darwinia and DEFCON and reading the Uplink design documents on the Bonus Disk religiously. Before Uplink, I never gave game design much consideration. I never thought about all the possibilities games have to tell unique stories or how certain game mechanics can make you feel certain emotions. So what is it about the gameplay that makes it so engaging, so immersive and so much fun? Well, the answer might not be what you'd expect: even though there's plenty to praise about Uplink's design, it manages to be so engaging and immersive because it isn't actually that much fun.

Fun fact: the Trace Tracker's beeps were a last minute addition. There is a world map upgrade that shows you exactly how far the administrator's trace is, but nobody buys it because it doesn't beep.

That might make it sound like yet another pretentious indie game that sacrificies good gameplay in service of a Very Important Message™, but that's not actually the case. The anticipation of planning your next attack, the tension as the trace tracker's beeps become quicker and quicker as the system administrator starts closing in on you, the euphoria of a successful job that gets quickly swallowed up by the creeping paranoia of whether you properly correctly cleaned up after yourself or not - Uplink is a hurricane of emotions, but a lot of the emotions it invokes aren't exactly what you'd call positive ones. In that sense, while the game can be fun, it can also feel very tense, obtuse and frustrating, and that's important. Without that, the experience would not nearly be as effective at making you feel like a real hacker as it is, even if the moment-to-moment gameplay pretty much boils down to a script kiddie simulator. The way it goes about it elevates it to something much grander, something truly innovative and memorable, and in that sense "fun" is simply too limiting a term to describe Uplink's design.

That might sound silly to a lot of players, because "if the game's not fun, why bother", right? But there is an actual precedence for this claim, for example horror games. Most people play horror games not to feel amused but to feel spooked, and those two emotions are almost directly on the opposite end of the emotion wheel. If a horror game is fun to you, then it's doing a very bad job. Another good example is Pathologic, a game that deliberately goes out of its way to be an unpleasant experience to sell the setting of a plague-ridden town in a very effective and memorable way. Even though I find it hard to recommend it, I also find it hard to dismiss it as not being worth your time. And I don't want to ruin people's laughs from back when Neill Druckmann infamously claimed they didn't use the word "fun" during development of The Last of Us 2, but that is a valid way to design your game. The way he phrased it made it come across as more pretentious than he meant it to, but the gameplay of TLOU2 invokes a lot of the same emotions that Uplink does: tension, paranoia, and euphoria. If games really are an art form, then limiting the design to what's fun is ignoring so many other emotional reactions your game can inspire in others.

That doesn't mean that designing a fun game isn't valuable, but it does mean that it's worth exploring emotions through your game that aren't directly adjacent to fun. With all the opportunities the medium of video games has over others, it would be a waste not to.

Starfield, too, is very fascinating. Not so much because of what it is, but what it represents. Like Bethesda's past single player games, Skyrim and Fallout 4, it received a lot of favorable reviews from critics and seems to have sold a healthy amount of copies, yet Bethesda's fans seem rather sharply divided - moreso than usual - over a game that, on the surface, seems very similar to the studio's output over the past decade, and a lot of the criticism that can be found about the game online is scattershot. There doesn't seem to be a clear consensus on what exactly the game should've done, but a lot of the criticism do draw from the same well, whether directly or indirectly: Starfield is a game that fundamentally does not play to Bethesda's strengths as a studio. In simpler terms? The problem is the setting.

To boldly... wait, I've seen those exact same rock spires two minutes ago.

So what are Bethesda's strengths? Well, if nothing else, their games can be very immersive and engaging, and no other developer makes a game quite like they do (and QA testers across the world are thankful for that every day). It's hard to sum up their design philosophy in one sentence, and it's probably pretentious of me to try and do so anyway, but here it is: "let the player do whatever they want, whenever they want, with no wrong choices, in a world that feels believably big". The past decade of Bethesda games have added "and must be playable until the end of time" to that philosophy on top. It's a design philosophy that has resulted in a lot of well-beloved games that have gotten a lot of praise for their immersive qualities and environmental storytelling and also Fallout 76, but there are flaws with this mentality that aren't inherently obvious. For now, let's focus on the "believably big" part of that equation.

Bethesda's games employed a lot of procedurally generated content back in Ye Olden Times, and it has made an uncelebrated return ever since Skyrim. There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of procedurally generated content, it's just that Starfield's use of it is so poor that people denounce it on sight. Simulating even a small part of the universe is a big task, and it makes sense to use procedurally generated content to make the universe feel believably big while making sure the game can release before Star Citizen's release and the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first. Half of the problem is the setting: all the planets in Starfield are flat, uniform and mostly devoid of life. Humanity's colonization of the stars seems to have been somewhat unsuccessful going by how few non-bandit people you find out there, and what little alien life there is can't be talked to. That's realistic, but it seems Bethesda has forgotten what's most important: what does that do for gameplay? The answer seems to have been nothing. There are plenty of obvious mechanics that would fit well in a harsher and more realistic science-fiction setting like this, and yet the game doesn't seem to care that much in exploring them outside of a select few like zero-gravity combat. Survival mechanics were apparently more of a factor during development according to Todd Howard himself, but as he explains, they "nerfed the hell out of it". Why would you not want to sell your new franchise's setting through its gameplay?

New Atlantis marks the first time in a Bethesda game where the crowds felt somewhat dense. Maybe I'm a sociopath, but I will never get tired of shooting into the air and watching people scramble.

To circle back to Bethesda's design philosophy, the problem with "no wrong choices" means that you will inevitably end up with very shallow roleplaying, which is a common criticism their recent games receive. Why can I walk into Solitude as an Imperial without issue? Why do I even have the option of building scrapyards when I'm supposed to be looking for my son? Why can I be the leader of every faction at once, even if they're supposed to be hostile towards each other? The list goes on. These games are too afraid to tell the player "no" or to give players a wrong choice. The problem with that philosophy is that while it makes their games very easy to pick up, play and put down, it also means that the world feels very player-centric and fake. The quality of Bethesda's writing has also not been a huge priority for some time now, so by design, their games are almost completely reliant on their art and music teams to pull you into the world. Before Starfield, Bethesda were the masters at this. In contrast, Starfield's setting severely limits how crazy and alien their planets can be. How does the studio that put out Morrowind fail so badly at making another alien feeling setting when that's literally what the game should be about?

The other half of the problem is the technology, which is so outdated even for Bethesda standards that it's shocking a modern AAA game released in this state, which is saying something in our current industry. The planets seem to make use of 2D noise distribution to generate stuff, a technique so outdated for terrain generation Minecraft ditched it back in Alpha, with zero artist defined rules used to generate anything. That's how you end up with the exact same ruin models spawning at the same coordinates on every planet with the same enemy spawn locations every time. Then there's space travel, which feels completely disjointed from everything else as you don't actually use it to travel. Seamless travel between space and planets is impossible in Starfield. The best way to get around is quick travelling through menus and sitting through loading screens, which are everywhere. They're so jarring it kills the last bits of immersion the game would've otherwise had. When you compare it to other games like No Man's Sky or even the unreleased Star Citizen, it's almost impressive just how last-gen it feels in comparison.

So you have an AAA game with a boring setting and some jank, big whoop, lots of AAA games do. The problem is that that sense of immersion, that magic that drew people into Bethesda's previous games, is almost completely gone from Starfield as a result. There's no sense of discovery when you encounter the same bases with the same enemies on a samey looking planet. There's no wonder in travelling through space by menus. What you're left with is a game that had a lot of talent behind it, but ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts. All of the games' flaws - the wildly fluctuating writing quality, shallow mechanics, perfectly acceptable combat and jank - aren't new for Bethesda, but without that magic to immerse the player they're much more prominent this time around.

The scale of space is such a hard thing to capture in a video game, it almost makes you wonder why Bethesda insisted on trying so hard. I'd trade in a thousand boring planets for twenty interesting ones.

So then why did Bethesda insist on this setting that creatively limits them so much, and then not at least mine it for gameplay mechanics? Obviously I can't prove this for certain, but my suspicion is that this was done entirely for pragmatic reasons. After all, Bethesda games have never been about what kind of interesting mechanics you could mine out of their settings, but about what kind of setting would fit with the mechanics they want to include, and I imagine Starfield was the same way. You can't exactly call this game focused on its "hard" sci-fi setting when you literally gain magic space powers throughout the story. The tech behind Starfield, as I went into earlier, is rather simplistic and outdated, but seeing how much content there is in the game, it's clearly not half-assed.

My guess is these simple, uniform and flat planets and disjointed travel really was the best Bethesda could do in a reasonable timeframe and budget, so the setting ended up matching what the tech can do and they didn't think it was that important for these features to be improved upon. Starfield seems much less interested in simulating an entire universe for you to explore and more interested in making the universe feel big while you're off on goofy space adventures with your crew, and while those goofy space adventures is where the game shines the brightest, it had to sacrifice a lot to get there. I don't want to say they should have been less ambitious, because God knows we could use more of that in this industry, but it's clear they swallowed much more than they could digest.

In that way, Starfield might be the most important game Bethesda has made since Skyrim. It shows exactly where their strengths and their weaknesses lie. It shows exactly what people love about their games and what people hate. Most importantly, it shows just how important good technology is to deliver a creative vision. Let's just hope Bethesda realizes all that too.

A spiritual successor (or a homage, clone, rip-off, whatever you want to call it) is very much a double-edged sword for game developers. On one hand it doesn't take much thought or experimentation to design them, but on the other hand, how exactly do you give these kinds of games their own identity so that they can stand out on their own? This is particularly an issue for indie developers, because the lower budget guarantees that you will never be able to match the original in aspects like polish or visuals.

Back in 2015, many a 3D platformer fan - myself included - were left hungering for a new game. Super Mario 3D World came out two years before, and while it was fine, the problem with it was that that's all there is to say about it. I'm not even going into detail about Sonic Lost World, and I genuinely can't recall a single 3D platformer that released in 2014. Enter Project Ukulele, a new project from Playtonic Games, a new developer consisting of a few unsatisified Rare employees. A few months later, Yooka-Laylee launched its crowdfunding campaign and quickly broke Kickstarter records as it became the fastest game on the platform to receive a million US dollars at the time. Clearly the hunger for new 3D platformers was alive and strong, yet the game itself released a few years later to much worse reception. Critics were apathetic, consumers were mixed and while the franchise still has its fans, it quickly faded out of the public consciousness. Not even the release of a much better received spin-off or the announcement of a sequel was enough to bring Yooka-Laylee back into the spotlight.

While I have talked with many people who like The Impossible Lair, I haven't talked with many people who actually beat it. The final level taking somewhere between 30 to 45 minutes might be a reason.

So what exactly went wrong with Yooka-Laylee? Well, whatever obvious criticism you may or may not have about the original game, The Impossible Lair or the franchise in general, the biggest problem it faces is less obvious - it never got to step outside of Rare's shadow.

One easy way to make your spiritual successor stand out is to theme it around something different. Banjo-Kazooie has a clear fairy tale theme, with a cast of talking animals, fairies, pirates, and whatever Klungo is as well as a slightly grim sense of humor. A magician with a skull for a face uses magic powers to transform you into crazy forms which you then use to rescue your sister from a nasty old witch, complete with broom and talking pot who assures her that she is the prettiest girl in the land. In contrast, I have no clue if Yooka-Laylee was even supposed to have a theme. The two main characters are a lizard and a bat (what's up with that?), and while their designs are good, I can't tell you how they're supposed to fit in with a low-poly dinosaur, a vending machine with a face, a skeleton in a pot, a duck with his head in a jar and a bee in a business suit.

I know this gripe is super minor, but how come they never added the Yooka-Laylee rap to the game? Seems like a waste to just keep it on YouTube.

The plot of the game involves having to save Yooka and Laylee's book from said bee, who uses a machine to steal it for unknown reasons, which also doesn't quite gel together. If your main characters are animals and the villain is a CEO, having him bulldoze the forest where Yooka and Laylee live to make way for tacky souvenir shops and trendy coffee stores seems like a much more obvious fit. The villain doesn't even get his own army of corporate drones, overworked salarymen, henchmen in suits or anything like that, instead you just mostly fight gremlins. One of the bosses in this game is a wall with a face. Another is an ice block with a face.

What especially gets my goat about Yooka-Laylee's setting is that all the levels are contextualized as books, and the act of collecting Pagies and using them to expand the worlds fits well with that, yet all the environments, while pretty, are mostly bog-standard platformer worlds. Jungle, snow, swamp, casino... where's the fantasy world with castles, dragons and knights? The sci-fi world where you jump across flying cars and glowing skyscrapers? The noire world where everything's in black and white and you investigate crimes? The game simply never utilizes this potential, which feels like a waste of a good idea. At least the environments use unique setpieces, like the tribal structures of Tribalstack Tropics, the ice castles of Glitterglaze Glacier and the giant gambling machines of Capital Cashino... all of which the next game, The Impossible Lair, never uses. It does have plenty of ordinary towns, forests and factories however, like a typical platformer setting. While there's nothing wrong with that per sé, the result ends up looking like a game from a completely different franchise.

Of course themes, characters and settings aren't everything. The best way to make your spiritual successor truly stand out is to change the moment-to-moment gameplay. It doesn't even have to be in a major way, just some new mechanic that changes how players approach obstacles is enough, say by adding a dash move, a rolling move, a grappling hook... Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair both make a few changes to their respective formulas, but as far as actual moment-to-moment gameplay changes go, the ones I want to highlight in particular are Yooka-Laylee's stamina meter and The Impossible Lair's health system.

Banjo-Kazooie had a wide variety of different moves, some of which consumed collectibles to use. Shooting eggs consumes eggs, flying consumes feathers and becoming invulnerable consumes Golden Feathers, which are rare and can only be carried in stacks of ten. This makes sense in a collectathon and assures that the player will never be able too powerful, but still leaves the possibility for the player to stock up so they can go to town to fart out grenades everywhere if they wish. Yooka-Laylee uses a stamina meter, which slowly refills itself, although it can also be refilled by eating butterflies. Most of the time, however, there aren't any butterflies around, so most of your fun or important moves (particularly rolling, which makes you go much faster and lets you roll up most steep hills) simply make you wait in-between uses. The stamina meter can be upgraded, but it's still bizarre that a 3D platformer would ever make you wait to use the fun moves.

It doesn't help that Yooka-Laylee's moves have lacking instructions, which this great Design Doc video goes over. For the longest time, I had no clue the Camo Cloak ability lets you reflect lasers.

Moving forward a bit, in the old Donkey Kong Country games, your partner acts as your health bar. You play as two Kongs at a time. When you get hit you lose the Kong you're playing as, who gets replaced by the Kong in back. If you don't have a Kong at your side, you die and lose a life, and starting from DKC2 if you had both Kongs you could do some special bonus moves, like throwing your partner around. The Impossible Lair does something similar with its Laylee system, which works like this: you play as Yooka with Laylee sitting on you, similar to Donkey Kong Country Returns and Tropical Freeze. If you get hit, Laylee starts flying around in a panic for a few seconds. If you manage to grab her before she flies off-screen, you get her back. If you don't have Laylee, then you lose access to both the Twirl Jump and Buddy Slam moves, and now when you get hit you die and respawn at the last checkpoint and lose some Quills. You can also get Laylee back by ringing a Dingbat, which can be occassionally found in levels.

While it's an interesting idea to let the player shrug off damage if they recover quickly enough, most of the time it's a rather frustrating system to deal with. Laylee moves quickly and erratically, like Baby Mario on speed, and without the right Tonic she flies off rather quickly as well. Back when I first played The Impossible Lair she also had a habit of getting stuck on level terrain or even clipping into it sometimes. I don't know if that was ever fixed, but getting Laylee back in any level segment that's cramped or filled with enemies ended up almost never being worth the attempt.

But the biggest problem with this health system isn't even that, it's that you need Laylee to obtain a few of the TWIT coins. Scattered through each level are four collectible coins, and a lot of these tends to be in either situations that don't let you attempt to get it a second time (like when the level doesn't let you backtrack by cutting you off with a one-way door, or when you need to jump off an enemy that doesn't respawn) or requires Laylee to get it. It was never not painful when I ditched her because she got stuck somewhere I couldn't reach, only to realize I couldn't get the next TWIT coin because it was underneath something I needed to Buddy Slam. You could just shrug off these coins as not being worth the effort, but they are mandatory for progress. You need to pay Trowzer in TWIT coins in order to get past the various Paywalls on the overworld.

Funnily enough, the overworld itself is probably the best part of The Impossible Lair despite the Paywalls. It kinda made me want to see Playtonic tackle a full-on Yooka-Laylee puzzle spin-off.

Both the stamina meter and the Laylee system don't even impact the moment-to-moment gameplay that much, but they're still the biggest changes these games make, and whenever they do have an impact they're usually a source of frustration. That really is a shame, because there is plenty they could've done instead to shake up the formula in these games. Seeing as your main character is a chameleon, why not build the game around his tongue? In the first game you use Yooka's tongue to eat butterflies to refill health/stamina and eat objects to gain their properties like a timed powerup, and in the second game it's how you grab objects. It'd be much more interesting if they built the whole game around it, letting you latch onto walls to jump off or grab onto grappling hooks to swing around levels. Those are absolutely not original ideas, but they work. Either way, as long as Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair had some notable mechanic that shook up the moment-to-moment gameplay, they could've avoided most of the comparisons people keep making with the Rare games of old. They could've even stood side by side with them.

The saddest part is that Yooka-Laylee could've been just an awkward first step as the franchise figures out what it tries to do. Many classic game franchises only started taking off after their second or third installment, after all. The thing about impressions in this industry is that for the public, the first game of a franchise is what it can be, but the second game is what it should be. Yooka-Laylee could have made an easy recovery as long as the next Yooka game they showed off was something new and unexpected, even if it wasn't the sequel. The problem was they announced The Impossible Lair instead. Even though it's a pretty good idea to use some of the original game's assets to make a lower budget spin-off so you have some more funds for the sequel, and even though some people - myself included - were excited by that game's announcement, in the eyes of the public it mostly just cemented the franchise as being a shameless Rare rip-off.

Whatever they do with the next Yooka-Laylee game, I hope they find something to build the whole game around, something that lets it stand on its own merits. That said, no matter how hard the franchise tries to become its own thing from now on, it's going to be very hard to shake off that label.

(Thanks to the Yooka-Laylee Wiki for the in-game screenshots. I've only played these games on the Switch, so I don't have an easy way to take my own.)

Back in 2013, me and DJ Coco had plans for a 2D platformer named Rad Dude. Shovel Knight was busy blowing up Kickstarter at the time, and in turn, we were inspired to try and make a sidescroller of our own. It would be an 8-bit love letter to all those old, bizarrely localized games on the NES that felt the need to shove in MACHO DUDES, BADNESS and everything else GNARLY about the 80s. It starred the titular Rad Dude and his best friend, Cool Chick, as they rocked denim clothes and used all kinds of crazy gadgets to rescue the city from an evil toymaker.

I'm rad.

I'll spare you the details because, well, there wasn't much more to it than that. DJ Coco quickly abandoned the project after it became clear that the idea was lacking, which angered and saddened me quite a bit. In hindsight, Rad Dude was clearly not going to be anything special. We didn't actually have much experience, money or vision for the game, so it never really had a chance to be anything good with the level of our skills back then. At the time, though, I didn't see it that way. I felt betrayed by my best friend as I thought we were truly onto something. In the end, with not much progress having been made on the game itself, all I was left with was a bunch of ideas and some mock-up graphics as the both of us moved on to other projects.

I took those same old Rad Dude graphics six years later and saved over them, not even caring to keep a back-up of it anywhere. With Mario on my mind at the time - Mario being the first thing I'll draw if I want to draw but don't know what to draw - I mutilated the old pixel art to turn it into an ersatz version of Super Mario Bros., and suddenly an idea sprang in my mind: I could use these graphics to make a small joke game that would look and feel like a Chinese bootleg developer made their own take on the classic Mario games.

Before...

I sent the mock-up to DJ Coco, expecting him to find it as funny as I did. Instead, he was unimpressed. "It's pretty on the nose", he said. "Yeah, that's the point," I explained. "It's going to be like a bootleg Mario, glitching out at times and whatnot. It'd be funny." "Honestly, that sounds kinda boring," he shot back. "I would just rethink the entire idea." And so I went back to the drawing board, trying to figure out what to do with this mock-up. I did another search through my hard-drive and, by luck, stumbled onto yet another old abandoned project of mine. Suddenly, it hit me. I started giggling, then chuckling, then I burst out in laughter. It was stupid, it was hilarious and it had lots of potential.

After Rad Dude's death, I started making a game in RPG Maker VX Ace. I had an obsession with Takeshi no Chosenjo at the time and wanted to make something with a similar style and tone, and so I named my game Takeshi's Second Challenge. It would be an RPG starring a salaryman named Takeshi Shi, and it was going to be somewhat unique in that you could only raise stats or earn money by doing minigames. You would increase your stats by working out at the gym and make money by doing various odd jobs. Combine that with the obligatory Dragon Quest-esque battles and a dark, surreal sense of humor and I ended up with a prototype that was surprisingly fun for what it was. (And yes, I do like No More Heroes.)

I had to hook up my old PC to take a screenshot of this.

The problem with Takeshi's Second Challenge, however, is that while I loved the idea, I didn't have the programming or art skills to do the idea justice. While it was fun to work in RPG Maker to try to push the limits of the engine as far as I could, I quickly ran into issues as the scope of the game became too big for me to handle. I didn't know how to program the engine into doing what I wanted it to do, didn't have the art skills to make it look as good as I envisioned it to be and didn't have the budget to compensate for either of these shortcomings. That's why I reluctantly decided to shelf the game indefinitely, planning to return to the game one day in the future.

And so, years later, I sketched up a bored looking Takeshi Shi, some boxes, a ladder and some bills, put them into the mock-up and sent the result to DJ Coco, who couldn't stop laughing either. We quickly started throwing ideas around: how the game would play, what kind of power-ups it would have, what the goal would be and so on. It didn't take long until we agreed to turn this into a real game after he was done developing Paperball, which we were sure wouldn't take that long. An actual year and a half later, after various patches, three DLC packs and a Nintendo Switch port, we would finally begin work on Salaryman Shi.

...and after.

As you can see, the game was originally going to be 8-bit just like Rad Dude, but I quickly changed my mind on this for two simple reasons: 1) it's boring and 2) %&$#ing stop it already. Shi could never hope to stand out in the ocean of identical looking 2D 8-bit platformers on Steam. I started experimenting with making a 16-bit art style for the game, which is the first time I tried to draw actual 16-bit art that wasn't just replicating another game's art style, but my earliest attempts were so bad DJ Coco rejected them on the spot. That was surprising, as he can be harsh, but he's usually not that harsh. He suggested simply going back to an 8-bit style, but I was too stubborn to do that. I knew I had it in me to challenge myself and put out a game that would, at the very least, not embarass me with its visuals.

How are you going to accomplish that? Definitely not like this. Yuck.

Yet the longer I tried to develop Shi's art style, the more I felt frustrated at myself. I knew I was capable of at least putting out competent art, but it still wasn't clicking for me. All the art I was putting out was garbage. I tried various different drawing tools just to see if something would change, and that's when the light bulb finally blinked on: the only times I've ever tried to make pixel art more complex than in an NES game is when I was working on ROM hacks. Somehow, that was the big difference. I installed YY-CHR and Lunar Magic, started putting a palette together and quickly drew up a few mock-ups after. I showed the results to DJ Coco, who said: "looks OK but could be a bit more original". Now we were finally getting somewhere.

That's right, there was a time where Shi looked even more like Super Mario World.

In that sense, Salaryman Shi's look isn't just accurate to 16-bit era visuals, it works on actual 16-bit hardware. Outside of the use of a few transformative effects (which could still be replicated with the Super FX chip), everything about it works with the real SNES's limits: the RGB values, the amount of colors per palette row and total palette rows, even the amount of VRAM dictacting how many unique tiles can be used at a given time. I could rave about this stuff for hours, but I'll spare you from the exact technical details. TL;DGAF: Shi's art works on the SNES.

Now the obvious question is, why would I go through all that trouble for something that's so trivial that nobody will ever notice and/or appreciate it? The answer might surprise you - it's because it made it easier to draw. The paradox of limitations is that, when you set some hard limitations for yourself, it becomes easier to be creative. After all, having no limitations at all means anything is on the table. Limitations, on the other hand, make it very easy to determine what you can and can't do. As an indie developer who's seen dozens of people burn themselves out with crazy ambitious ideas and scope creep, I've found that not many artists in this industry embrace their limitations. They get it in their head that their first game needs to have a scope bigger and more ambitious than they could reasonably take on. It's a mistake that, as you can reasonably assume from Salaryman Shi's complicated history, I've made many times myself.

And yet it really doesn't have to be that way. That's the great thing about independent games: there's much less pressure to deliver something big and perfectly polished because consumers don't expect that most indie developers have the budget for that (unless your game is priced appropiately). If it's decent, people will forgive it for not being very unique. And if it's a bit rough, people won't mind as long as you're trying something new. It really is that simple.

Salaryman Shi went on to sell about 1.400 copies. That's nothing to brag about, but it was never going to be a game that'd rock the industry or something that'd change the way people look at games, and it was never meant to be. It was a small game that me and DJ Coco made in our spare time for fun. Because our plans were never that ambitious, it was easy to just keep working on it, knowing that the final game would be done Real Soon Now™. The base game ended up only taking a year to develop, with the free DLC only taking a few extra months on top, and with its budget being so low we ended up making a pretty decent profit off it.

If you stop thinking of limitations as what you can't do, but instead as what you can, everything becomes much easier.

I remember waking up early one morning and finding a message on my phone. "Vinny is playing Paperball", a friend told me. "Holy crap", I replied. I rushed onto my computer to check Twitch and there it was, Vinny from Vinesauce was in fact playing Paperball, the game that I had been helping my best friend DJ Coco develop for the past year or so.

It was a surreal moment to say the least, seeing a streamer I loved so much play a game I've been involved with, but even weirder was all the attention we suddenly got. Cliax Games never really had a huge audience, so this was new for us. We got a bunch of fan art, some of it affectionate and some of it tongue in cheek, but more important was all the feedback we received. "It looks low budget", yeah, I mean, it was. "It's a bit slow", that's fair, something to consider for next time? "Where's the pants", "why doesn't she wear pants", "why is the cat wearing FMB boots", "no pants"...

Looks like I made a mistake.

Back in late 2018, DJ Coco showed me a screenshot of the game he was working on. He called it Paperball, and he said it was inspired by the Super Monkey Ball games, which he is a big fan of. He explained that, as the series hadn't seen a mainline game in years, he wanted to make his own successor with some additional mechanics from games like Trackmania. It was probably gonna be a small game, 50 levels at most, but it should be a fun little side-project. "Cool", I said. I was either distracted or unimpressed at the time. Probably both.

The more he showed me of Paperball, however, the more I realized something. Monkey Ball was considered dead at the time, another sad relic of Sega's better days among franchises like Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi. There were other marble rollers on the market like Marble Blast Ultra, but all of them missed that arcade-like simplicity that made Monkey Ball such a fun game to pick up and play, and Rolled Out hadn't even launched its IndieGoGo campaign yet. That gave me an idea.

"I want to help you market the game", I told DJ Coco. "This is a game which could definitely fill a hole no other game on the market does right now, and if marketed in the right way, I can see it selling very well. Thousands of copies, with some luck. The first thing we need, though, is a mascot. You can't market a game with a paper ball for a mascot." "Yeah yeah, I know", he said, "'don't worry, I'll whip up something." He showed me his something a few weeks later.

A Coco that never was, thankfully.

I don't remember what I said, but I'm sure it had to involve insults of some kind because this design still haunts me. "What are you going for here?", I remember asking. "What are any of these elements supposed to communicate? Why is she even wearing a graduation cap?" "Because she's an art college student", DJ Coco explained. "But she hasn't graduated yet", I replied with some bafflement. "And why the gloves, or giant bell, or striped tail, or those socks?"

He couldn't really explain any of his creative decisions, which isn't a good sign. He was inspired by the design of the shopkeeper in Blinx: The Time Sweeper, he told me later, but failed to bring the design together in any way that would communicate anything about this character.

"Right", I said. "I'm redoing this stupid thing, because there's no way you will sell anything with a mascot that looks like this. This bright pink is dreadful, let's give her a blue shirt and hot pink pants instead. Let's give her a beret and scarf to show she's an art student, and get rid of the gloves and all the stripes because it just makes the design too busy. Just keep the tip white." I sent a picture of what I came up with to DJ Coco, and while he was happy with the result, he insisted on adding boots and a cat bell to the end of the scarf. "Sure, that's fine", I replied.

A Coco that sorta was.

It is entirely my fault that I never stressed the pants more, as I drew the shirt over the pants in my initial drawing and DJ Coco used that as a reference for the concept art that we would end up sending to the actual 2D artist. At the time, I figured it wasn't a big deal because she's a cartoon cat, and anthromorphic cartoons almost exclusively dress in halves anyway. I'm sure it's due to the game's 2D art looking more anime-inspired than I had envisioned that it became such a focal point, but by the time I realized this it was too late to object.

Some credit has to go to the 2D artist, though, for simplifying the design's face and giving her some eyebrows as it helped a lot with expressions. I don't know who made the suggestion to turn the bell red, but it ended up reminding everyone of Pokéballs so while it ties in well with the design of the playable ball itself, we probably should've kept the pink. Thankfully, Nintendo has never had any legal objections to our games so far, which I admit sorta surprises me.

The name was easier to figure out, defying industry conventions. "Let's call her Coco the Cat", I said. "It's short, it fits the character's slightly ditzy personality and it works with the Monkey Ball naming conventions. AiAi, Baby, Coco and so on." "Don't you think people would assume we just named her after me?", DJ Coco asked. "Eh, that's not a big deal. You created the game, and she created the Paperball art project in-game, it fits." And that was that.

The game released on March 27th 2020 and ended up surpassing our expectations quite a bit. Part of that is due to a lot of luck: I had contacted various YouTubers and streamers, ones I knew were big Monkey Ball fans, to ask if they wanted a copy. Some of them actually replied and ended up streaming the game, raising a lot of awareness, and as a result other YouTubers and streamers ended up actually contacting us to ask for a copy. That was a first.

In an alternate universe, Paperball sold well enough to get merchandise.

Of course, these days just releasing a game doesn't mean you're done with it, not by a long shot, so it didn't take long until plans for post-release content were made. The initial plan was to develop one new game mode and two new DLC packs, with their own art, gimmicks and environments, but just like with the main game - which launched with three times as many levels as planned - DJ Coco's scope got bigger and bigger, so I ended up having to design three new outfits for the DLC packs.

(Fun fact: Blitz Mode - named after Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, which infamously added a jump - and Flip Mode - where you try to control one ball with two players - were my ideas. I suggested them as jokes, and DJ Coco ended up implementing both. I should have known better as he had similarly added the Fallout Royale achievement, unlocked by getting 76.000 fallouts, based on a Fallout 76 joke I made before release. I don't make jokes around him anymore.)

In my defense, some people pay good money to dress up anthromorphic characters.

The new outfits were a cakewalk to design in comparison to Coco's original design. The toughest part was already done, so I just had to draw some new outfits. I originally wanted to go with a more 60's kitschy kind of look for the Secret Spy outfit, but it was too hard to draw and didn't really fit the environment of the pack so I ended up going with something more muted with a touch of pink. The mermaid and kimono outfits were even easier as they're admittedly not particularly inspired designs, although DJ Coco did have to "motivate" me to finish them on time by drawing intentionally bad art and threatening to send it to the 2D artist.

What was trickier to figure out were the poses - I didn't want each pack to just have the same art with a new costume slapped on top, so I had to think hard of some new ones that would still fit the character. My initial suggestion for the Deep Sea pack's game over pose was Coco getting jabbed in the back by a fishing hook, but DJ Coco didn't like how violent it looked even if depicted in a cartoony way, so it became more of a hook entrapment. I feel it's a weaker pose, but it was probably the right call.

It was during the summer of 2020, right during development of the DLC, that we were trying to bring Paperball to Nintendo Switch. We applied to Nintendo's developer program and got rejected, and with both us and the fans wanting to see the game appear on the platform, it seemed there was no real other way than to get a publisher. The company we had gotten in contact with had a good reputation and saw potential in the game, but they insisted on a five dollar price tag and a large cut of the profits (which according to my knowledge now was actually below average).

Between the publisher, the platform and taxes we would've seen maybe half a dollar per sale, and for how much work the game ended up being, that just didn't seem worth it. During the talks, we ended up applying to Nintendo again and somehow got approved this time. While their reasons for changing their mind are still beyond me, it was now official - Paperball was getting a Nintendo Switch release. But how do we incentivize people to double dip?

Of course! We add more furry cats! Cliax Games, you've done it again.

DJ Coco came up with a plan: we would release the new patch with extra content and DLC packs in September 2020, and then continue working on the Nintendo Switch port, hopefully being done around January 2021 with a release in March, one year after the original game. The idea was to release the port under the name Paperball Deluxe, including all the DLC and some timed console-exclusive content: a new pack of levels with new world themes, music, gimmicks and a new mascot character, which I volunteered to design.

After all the feedback we got on regular Paperball, I felt a bit more self-aware about designing something good for Paperball Deluxe. My first thought was to make a hippie character, as the new levels were going to be sunflower themed, so it seemed fitting enough. I ended up doing a lot more research - both into hippie fashion and character design - for the final character design, which ended up taking a lot of inspiration from various places: the sunflower headband and the beads were inspired by some photos I found, the yellow jacket was inspired by Athena Cykes from Ace Attorney, and the boots were something I threw in because I wanted some earthy colors in there.

I presented DJ Coco with the three designs you see above, and he chose the green palette for tying in well with the sunflower theme. I agreed, for both that reason and because the yellow and green contrasts well against Coco's pink and blue. The only touch-up I made after this was increasing the color contrast and giving her a brown belt as I felt something was missing, and it tied the boots in better with the rest of the design. DJ Coco named her Chrissy (get it? Chris and Coco?), and that was that. Paperball Deluxe ended up releasing March 25th 2021, using that exact design.

The loose hanging belt and shaggy hair also helped sell Chrissy as more of a slob than her sister. In a game where you don't have much time to show the character's personalities, every tiny bit counts.

I was a lot happier with Chrissy's design for many reasons, the biggest one being she's not pantsless. The second biggest reason is that her design simply is a lot stronger. Her design communicates her personality much better than Coco's, while still wearing an outfit that looks like something a real person would actually wear. The only big mistake I made was the peace necklace, which I forgot should have three lines near the bottom instead of two. Nobody except DJ Coco ever pointed this out, though, and it took him years to realize. My headcanon is that Chrissy bought it from some cheap vendor and was too dumb to notice. Man, how embarrassing would that be!

(On a side note, I was also very happy with Chrissy's voice work. Coco and Chrissy are both voiced by Aimee Smith, an absolute sweetheart of a woman who has done voicework for many notable games, and also Paperball. She nailed Coco's voice, which sounds appropiately bubbly, but we weren't sure if she could do the voice we had in mind for Chrissy. We gave her a few notes - Chrissy was a more laid-back old sister character with a whispery voice, and asked her if she thought she could do it. She ended up delivering the exact voice we wanted, much to our delight.)

So, to go back to my question at the beginning. Were the designs a success? My thoughts on the matter are complex, but I can't deny that, at the end of the day, the characters helped sell Paperball. I've seen people replying to fan art online expressing their interest in the game, and I've read reviews that admit they bought the game entirely because of the designs. That's what good designs should do, really, so the short answer is: yes, with a but.

I've been meaning to write down all the thoughts I've had about games over the years instead of bothering my friends with them. For the longest time I've been tempted to start making YouTube videos, actually, but writing takes up a lot less time and effort, plus there's no risk of Google's faulty bots slapping me around this way. Hopefully someone on the internet still appreciates written material, and hopefully some of these articles will inform and/or entertain you.

I'll try to write something every two weeks at the very least, but we'll see how that turns out.