the friendgame i've been blogging about the past few months is out! amphigeum is a nerd ass puzzle dungeon crawler i made the music for ^_^ it's really fun so play it! make a map! read my semi-official guide if you need to (and even if you don't — it's writing i'm proud of)! i wrote a mini post mortem of my own to talk about the music and guide, as i usually do. just past the links.
i myself got an entry done for the erohorror vn jam. silksong ate up two weeks of that but it was worth ittt the game's good! and it didn't set me back too much because i had a clearly defined and narrow scope. nods sagely. go play four fangs bite into her tender flesh. devlog in this here blog post, but i'm not linking because i want you to read about my friend's game first uwu.
no spoilers in this segment! read fearlessly.
after puppy eyeing and please-let-me-hit-ing him in a few discord calls (and probably irl) i managed to secure a spot in the game's ost. nods sagely. the barbutaesque crypt-like silence was always really really important to the game but the title screen had no such restrictions, and once that mouse was becookied i also got to make music for the boss and a semi-secret room. that you now must find so you can listen to it (it's also pretty good for the gameplay).
my guidelines were just to have watery sounds (and for the boss he referenced tunic's ost, but we'll get to that), so i had free reign. since the game was so austere, and the dungeon felt kinda like a cave to me, i went for an exclusively percussive palette. i used lmms's mallets plugin for the base drums (they're "stick hitting on wood" sounds) and let that be the main event, just playing around for a rhythm i liked and layering extra drum tracks here and there for intensity. then came the singing bowl for a drone to add a little more fullness. that's actually a sample from freesound paired with a synth playing the same notes at a slight delay. sporadic chimes and bubbling water then served as ambiance. and of course it's been reverbed to hell and back.
when it came to the boss, tunic has a very synthy ost, so it was time to let a second type of instrument hit the daw. i can't compose (or synthesize) for shit, so i made a simple synth with the triple oscillator and just vibed a basic melody with long sustained notes, for the most part keeping to just 3 or 4. setting the instrument itself to always play minor chords made the sound a little fuller without me having to figure those out myself. a flute comes in with a similar melody and a very low volume, just for a bit more variety. both of them are still "under" the percussion, because that's the main Sound of the game. got that bad boy in two different bpms and he made them crossfade once the boss is under a certain hp threshold, which is pretty fancy.
so as i had the most information about the game as he developed it, i was the first to playtest! and he had already promised a pint for the one to solve a certain secret, upgradable to better one for getting the secret ending. i'd have done it for free, but you know i am a beer guy. it was a nice weekend of hunting, partly over discord, partly on the subway, and partly with just me texting him occasional questions and insights, and i made the guide to reflect that process, because cracking the game open was so much fun but i really needed some hints and figured others would too.
i'm really happy with the guide! i've always wanted to write a gamefaqs type guide, and this was the perfect opportunity. since puzzling out the game is almost purely a matter of information, the goal was to help filter signal from the noise, and i feel the red truths help with that by having you think through what you know (every single hint is directly relevant [at least i think so]). i'm listing the useful facts but you're expected to come to the conclusions yourself, because that's the fun part of working on a puzzle. and when it came to the full walkthroughs, making clear the reasons why something or other was the solution was the most important part. not to toot my own horn but i kinda wish this was the standard for puzzle game guides...
also: as a result of this approach there's some important information that the guide does not spell out at all, even in the walkthroughs. i just trust that you're able to find on your own that there's a secret heal room over at 4B, since you know the room exists and how to activate the ourobouros. maybe i could add a red truth to help with that, but i think it's overkill.
i think the gist of it is: the guide is tonally matched to the game, and it's inviting you into an inside joke of sorts. i don't really need you to smoothly beat the game. i'm not polygon or rock paper shotgun or fucking game8, turning games into checklists that feel like chores.
ok my dev thoughts will be pretty brief for this one. i certainly won't write more words of paratext than of the vn itself, right? also i'm not worried about spoilers for this one so pick your poison between reading first and playing later or the other way around.
i initially wasn't really gonna join because i wanted to work on other projects, but my friend said this was like my whole shtick and she was absolutely right and i did want to make something, but nothing too complicated or involved. so to keep things simple i wanted something lighthearted and low stakes, and a 70s sexploitation pastiche was perfect for that. i also used videotome, which i've wanted to try for a bit because the tiny size appeals lots to me (also every game also bundles the engine within itself, and i like self propagation), and also it basically physically stopped me from scope creep. there's a hard cap on what can be done and i loved working without worrying about scene transitions or crossfading music or wanting to implement this or that feature. this is not an ambitious game and i loved that for me.
bundling visuals and music (and honestly writing style) together since there's so little to talk about either!
ok so i knew i wanted to write kinda like a screenplay (distant pov, pretty dry and purely descriptive), and i wanted visuals more or less to match, but i struggled a bit with really envisioning them. going for photo collage was a no-brainer though, so it was off to the free photo mines (pixabay's search suuuuucks btw). i should do collages more, they're always pretty neat.
i wish i could have gone with something similar for the characters themselves, i was thinking some close ups maybe, but that's something i'd like my own photos for, and i couldn't take them. i have specific designs in mind for the characters and sourcing images would be just rather annoying. nah i'm content with my sketches over abstract sex objects. i think it gives the vn a little more personality too, since it's so derivative in every other regard. idk! i think it looks interesting.
and then i saved everything as 50% quality jpgs because when i watch these movies they're CRUNCHY. i think it does wonders to make things more cohesive as well.
i also think the music is pretty fun. it's got a sketchy character to it but i like the percussion (mix of the mallets plugin and drum synths). and since you can't crossfade or anything in videotome, the climatic track plays right on top as a sound effect, something i've thought about doing before. it's in a different tempo and time signature and it'll play at unpredictable times so it makes for some rather tasty rhythms.
ok between this and egg tooth we're still only at two (= coincidence, instead of three = pattern) but i will nevertheless declare 2025 the year of proxy sex. it's as the saying goes: teach a man to yearn and he'll never complain about hunger again. sometimes fucking someone else, or doing literally anything else in lieu of sex, is the most erotic thing characters can do together. the absence becomes a presence and so on.
warning: these are trained professionals. if you want to hear someone's breath catch as they grind on your leg you gotta practice voicing your desires. stay safe out there ok. put the ninajirachi - delete down.
something that really stuck to me was this bit on the wikipedia page for vampyres (1974) about the vampires using men as props for their sexual encounters. hot as hell if you ask me, so i knew that's the dynamic i wanted. i actually almost left the sex out, to keep it 100% proxy shit, but i deserve to have my cake and eat it too ^_^
look i liked using videotome but it's not without its pain points. but this isn't even about them. see, you can't just open the index.html file from your file browser and have the game play, because of cross-origin something or other and security and stuff. you gotta use a server. which is fine, because python's http.server is trivial to launch, and if you're hosting on the web then it doesn't matter. but as a standalone it's kinda unchic to offer a downloadable you can't just double click to run... so i looked into electron and tauri and that was positively nightmarish! because i still need to host a server, and i could not figure out how to do that from within electron (and it's sooooo heavy anyway) and tauri didn't even install, it's not compatible with my kernel because of the glibc version and ugh pain in the ass. so if you wanna play offline you're gonna launch a python http server and you're gonna like it.
adding a fullscreen button was ok though.
also a heads up, unrelated to js woes but this is where it makes sense to say it, if you wanna make an html game and host it in neocities: free tier doesn't allow audio or video files, which is lame but i kinda get it. i just uploaded them to catbox.moe and used that link in assets.js (instead of the relative link) no problem.
it's skong central in here. go my bugs.
i love lace so much. what a fun character. literally nanami, and i said that wayyy before i saw the roses.
last one was my friend's request (yeah the same bored paramecium). he used the "ticks would be vampires" card... i had to comply. she's an ixodes scapularis ^_^ they don't have eyes so her mask is painted.
i just got rain world too. i've played it before but not for long and it was probably like 2019. now that it has coop though... yum.
well. skong and writing. and some other stuff too.
i'm a little behind on my goal but we ball. reading the starving saints (caitlin starling).
til next month!