The best way I can describe the ongoing development of Karlson is this:
When I was around eight or nine years old, my older brother came home with a burned CD he obtained from a birthday party he went to for his one of friends. On that CD wasn't music, but a few games that his friend had actually made. They were all created in Multimedia Fusion 2, all used stock assets that the program handed to you, one of them featured the song Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple in all of its bit-crushed .wmv glory, and one of the games was just straight up the tutorial project. And it was glorious. As a child, there's this impression that creation is an imaginary thing. While the adults in front of your house are tinkering with the family car, you're reading a book about a car that can fly, has a swimming pool in it, and can go underwater. In reality, flying cars are a liability at best, and would count as a human rights violation if a pool was ever involved. Reality is disappointment; if the car in front of your house could fly, you'd take it to see your cousins halfway across the state all the time. Otherwise, the closest ones are about a six-hour drive, and the ones that live in another state are nine hours away—and this is nothing of the stops to use the restroom, eat, or panic about a flat tire. So when you step away from the finely crafted luxury of Mario and Goldeneye 007 and Pajama Sam and see disappointment for what it is—a bunch of aesthetically clashing assets on backgrounds that consist of solid colors put into levels with no cohesion whatsoever—a thought comes to mind.
I can do it. I can do it!
My own experiences with creating games are nothing to write home about; it's mostly a bunch of failed attempts to capture ideas outside of my range of talent. Joining the Backloggd Discord server, I was surprised to find a small, niche community on there set about making their own games. Most of the projects I've seen from that so far are visual novels, and I don't think it takes the most literate genius in the world to know why. A cliche in game development spaces is "I know how to program, I just wish that I had an artist as a friend." When you're good at art and writing but don't have a friend who can program, where else do you go? Removed from the Fish Game I played to death as a child, or the series of strange games my older brother wound up making in the same class and on the same engine that I would end up working on in the year or two to follow, the reality of game development isn't working on a car with an instruction manual in your hand. Reading the manual for any given programming language will teach you what words work, but much like a dictionary, won't tell you which one will most effectively solve your problem. And so you get stuck in this endless cycle: I want to make a spaceship move, but every time I tell it to enter a building, I start to smell the stench of ash. I spend hours looking for the single line of code that's causing this and fix it. Great, onto the next car fire.
If I was a child in 2020 hearing about Karlson, perhaps my expectations would be different. It's one thing to be given a CD with games that have already been made on it. To see the sausage getting made in all of its frustrating glory is an entirely different beast. And on top of that, to have the sausage be wrapped in a Magic School Bus-like casing makes it go from feeling like a job to a passion. Or a passion that can be turned into a job, or a skill set that will set you up for later on in life. I know that, had Dani been around when I was a child, I would have tried learning how to use Unity. I would have failed and given up because, as explicitly stated in a dev diary for this game, a single ten-minute video can constitute months of hard work and problem-solving. As an adult, I see that and say, "yeah, I get you." As a child? What the fuck even is problem-solving? I'm still trying to figure out what fractions are while the class we're next to is learning about the periodic table of elements, something that I will only learn in high school because everything is fucked.
I'm conflicted on whether or not to say that it's inspirational in the same way that knowing Who Killed Captain Alex? was made on a shoestring budget of 200 dollars is inspiring. Does it speak to the long-dormant voice inside me that wants my creative voice to be heard, or am I being deceived because the entertaining wrapper around it is focused on packaging the process of creation as a hero's journey of sorts? I suppose it varies from person to person; trying to learn Unity as a kid would have fucked me up, but for somebody else, it probably would have led to much greener pastures somewhere in the future. And in the midst of it all, I think of that CD; reality is disappointment. But who's to say compromise is always a bad thing?
When I was around eight or nine years old, my older brother came home with a burned CD he obtained from a birthday party he went to for his one of friends. On that CD wasn't music, but a few games that his friend had actually made. They were all created in Multimedia Fusion 2, all used stock assets that the program handed to you, one of them featured the song Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple in all of its bit-crushed .wmv glory, and one of the games was just straight up the tutorial project. And it was glorious. As a child, there's this impression that creation is an imaginary thing. While the adults in front of your house are tinkering with the family car, you're reading a book about a car that can fly, has a swimming pool in it, and can go underwater. In reality, flying cars are a liability at best, and would count as a human rights violation if a pool was ever involved. Reality is disappointment; if the car in front of your house could fly, you'd take it to see your cousins halfway across the state all the time. Otherwise, the closest ones are about a six-hour drive, and the ones that live in another state are nine hours away—and this is nothing of the stops to use the restroom, eat, or panic about a flat tire. So when you step away from the finely crafted luxury of Mario and Goldeneye 007 and Pajama Sam and see disappointment for what it is—a bunch of aesthetically clashing assets on backgrounds that consist of solid colors put into levels with no cohesion whatsoever—a thought comes to mind.
I can do it. I can do it!
My own experiences with creating games are nothing to write home about; it's mostly a bunch of failed attempts to capture ideas outside of my range of talent. Joining the Backloggd Discord server, I was surprised to find a small, niche community on there set about making their own games. Most of the projects I've seen from that so far are visual novels, and I don't think it takes the most literate genius in the world to know why. A cliche in game development spaces is "I know how to program, I just wish that I had an artist as a friend." When you're good at art and writing but don't have a friend who can program, where else do you go? Removed from the Fish Game I played to death as a child, or the series of strange games my older brother wound up making in the same class and on the same engine that I would end up working on in the year or two to follow, the reality of game development isn't working on a car with an instruction manual in your hand. Reading the manual for any given programming language will teach you what words work, but much like a dictionary, won't tell you which one will most effectively solve your problem. And so you get stuck in this endless cycle: I want to make a spaceship move, but every time I tell it to enter a building, I start to smell the stench of ash. I spend hours looking for the single line of code that's causing this and fix it. Great, onto the next car fire.
If I was a child in 2020 hearing about Karlson, perhaps my expectations would be different. It's one thing to be given a CD with games that have already been made on it. To see the sausage getting made in all of its frustrating glory is an entirely different beast. And on top of that, to have the sausage be wrapped in a Magic School Bus-like casing makes it go from feeling like a job to a passion. Or a passion that can be turned into a job, or a skill set that will set you up for later on in life. I know that, had Dani been around when I was a child, I would have tried learning how to use Unity. I would have failed and given up because, as explicitly stated in a dev diary for this game, a single ten-minute video can constitute months of hard work and problem-solving. As an adult, I see that and say, "yeah, I get you." As a child? What the fuck even is problem-solving? I'm still trying to figure out what fractions are while the class we're next to is learning about the periodic table of elements, something that I will only learn in high school because everything is fucked.
I'm conflicted on whether or not to say that it's inspirational in the same way that knowing Who Killed Captain Alex? was made on a shoestring budget of 200 dollars is inspiring. Does it speak to the long-dormant voice inside me that wants my creative voice to be heard, or am I being deceived because the entertaining wrapper around it is focused on packaging the process of creation as a hero's journey of sorts? I suppose it varies from person to person; trying to learn Unity as a kid would have fucked me up, but for somebody else, it probably would have led to much greener pastures somewhere in the future. And in the midst of it all, I think of that CD; reality is disappointment. But who's to say compromise is always a bad thing?
2 Comments
@ASwitchDog LMAO
ASwitchDog
1 year ago