Some spoilers for Vagrant Story ahead
Vagrant Story is an action RPG/dungeon crawler from the 2000s made by Square, you play as Ashley Riot, a super elite secret agent from a task force called the Riskbreakers. Your mission is to hunt down Sydney Losstarot, an evil twink with mysterious powers, who just kidnapped the son of a Duke and took him to Leá Monde, a magically charged place where no one can truly die and where people can get magical powers. There's also some Knights of the Cross who are chasing Sydney for their own nefarious goals.
The way the game plays is that Ashley crawls through various dungeons and beats monsters with his butt out in the air. There's two key elements to the game's combat: The first is that you need to time your attacks right, the second is that each weapon has an affinity that increases the more you use it against certain monster types, and decreases for others, so you should try to switch weapons often. You do this by accessing a very convoluted menu, because shortcuts weren't a thing in the 2000s, I guess.
Sometimes, you have to go through several rooms of one dungeon before a timer runs out to make it out of a dungeon section. At other times, you need to solve the most annoying block puzzles known to man. Mid game, you need to traverse snowfly forest, which is haunted and requires you to map it manually because in this section of the game, the in game map will tell you where you are, but not how each section of the forest is connected with each other.
The game rewards you for enduring through all of this with plot advancing cutscenes filled with homoeroticism, and the coolest looking monsters of the PSX era. Each boss fight comes with lovingly crafted single case animations. The ambiance of the game is amazing.
Traversing Leá Monde is very annoying because Sydney, who controls Leá Monde and the souls within, needs to see who of all the people chasing after him is good enough to inherit his powers. So the game's mechanics feel very in sync with the story.
In the end Sydney isn't the real bad guy and you never fight him, he does love to summon dragons and you do fight a lot of those, but the real enemy is the captain of the Knights of the Cross, who wishes to use the power of Leá Monde to enact a fascist regime, so you defeat him instead. Despite not being the final boss, Sydney messes with Ashley's head a lot. It seems Ashley's memories may have been tampered by the task force he's in or it might just be Sydney messing with his head.
Ashley meets some characters that seem to confirm Sydney's version of events, but some others that contradict this. The game is constantly suggesting theories of what's going on, or how characters relate to one another, but it never fully confirms it. It expects you to intuit that Rosencrantz, who claims to be another Riskbreaker, but usually allies himself with the Knights of the Cross, is a scumbag ex to Ashley and Sidney both. That Sydney and his right hand man are partners in every sense of the word. That Ashley and Sydney really should date. In short, that everyone is gay.
The game has a very succinct prose, so whatever is said, is only said once and it expects you to be smart enough to keep up with it's plot, it's puzzles and it's mechanics. I like it when games trust me, the player, to be smart.
2018 has been quite a year. It began with me moving out of the neighborhood I shared with my abusive parents and quitting a job that was bad for me. Then I traveled through Europe for almost two months and popped by Feral Vector, which means I had fun and met wonderful people.
Around July I gave a talk at BIG Festival, which means I now know Brazil and got to see some pretty birds while drinking tons of coconut water. By September I was anxious and tired, mostly because my laptop and kindle died on me, but my journey through the world wasn’t over. I still had to go to QGCon with my friend Nadia to show La Maupin there. I had fun and the people I met there were great, but Canadian food tried to kill me several times. I survived.
A while after I came back from Canada I endured the death of one of my cats and simultaneously landed a job abroad. This means that if all goes well, I’ll be moving to Berlin by March.
2018 has been the year of bitsy, which means I started using the tool and made four games and a Spanish tutorial. I’m also trying to build a Latin American spin off of bitsy boutique. I’m still working on the launcher because is it just me or javascript is hell?
In other maker news. I’m trying to make a cat feeder so my cat stops demanding food from me at 4am and can demand this from a tiny robot instead. I also got a Barbie branded toy laptop to make an interactive thing. I wanted the thing to be a parser game, but the display is really bad at showing text and really great at showing dancing pixel monkeys.
I made five Twines this year. Penélope espera sola is the only one in Spanish and also one of my favorite ones. I want games was a really simple entry for Manifesto Jam, You wake up in a new town was made for procjam and made everyone feel something different. I believe this is cool. My other two Twines are horror themed. They’re Redacted and Let us in.
I also made some things that were self indulgent and hard to describe to other people, but I love them just the same. Like, Should you pick up the phone?, Sky Station, and Doom Fetito.
Doom Fetito got featured in Kotaku several months after its release. At first this was okay, then it got weird. So weird a website claims I’m a lawyer, so weird that I now know way too much about Christian memes and people who believe in reptilians, so weird that I had to make a tool to mass block people on Twitter. The tool is serviceble, but I have to add OAuth support to make it accessible and it feels too much like real work, so I’ve been putting it off. Please help me do this.
I did a lot this year, but it’s not as much as I would have liked. For instance, Matajuegos went on hiatus, which was sad, but necessary. Rest assured that we will be back.
I managed to take a sort of sabbatical this year, thanks to lucking in on some money and some small freelance gigs every now and then. If I’ve managed to travel so much throughout the year, it was because most of the events I’ve been to as a presenter have covered the costs, either partially or fully. It has also been possible, because some really kind people have lent me their couch. I’m super thankful for that.
I’ve spent no small amount of energy in trying to find alternatives to GDC for people in underdevloped countries and marginalized communities to go to, because going under a huge financial strain for a place that doesn’t care about you, sucks. This means I’ve been taking notes of every event I’ve been to this year and you should get my thoughts on QGCon, BIG, and LevelUy someday. My thoughts on Feral Vector are already out there.
I’ve been also telling people from other countries that they won’t be seeing me at GDC and that saying “see you at GDC” to most people who live in underdevelopment countries might be insenitve. Another thing I’ve been telling them is that things in Argentina and Latin America in general are bad and scary right now. People get really down, but they also seem to really listen to me, so I’m surprised.
2018 has been a bittersweet year for me. My wishes for 2019 are safe, legal, and free abortion in Argentina, and the end of fascism and neoliberalism. No matter what happens I will still be making small games.
On October 7th Emily Short came to Buenos Aires and gave a talk called The Uncanny Mirror: See you in the AI during MICA. The talk covered the ways in which the term AI is used by academia, videogame developers and the general public, before diving into explaining how our modeling of AI systems can reflect some ignored aspects of humanity. It used three of Emily’s projects as examples of what we can use AI for and what it can teach us about ourselves. What I found most interesting about the talk was the importance being conscious of our own biases so we don’t pass them on to an AI that will mindlessly reproduce them.
After the talk, there was an IF meeting of sorts in which people from the local IF got the chance to chat with Emily about our work for a bit. What follows are some links referring to IF works and resources that popped up during the talk.
IF Works
Other IF and procedural works mentioned in the meeting were Dwarf Fortress, Event[0], Stories Untold, and Cypher.
Tools and Resources
I made a game for a friend with another one during Global Game Jam 2017. It’s called Waves of Revolution and it’s a bit goofy in the good way. It uses a HTML5 VN engine I’m working on with favorite antarctic person and for that very same reason it got featured in Malditos Nerds. You can’t really use the engine yet, there’re bugs and docs are missing but you are free to grab the code for my game and extract the engine out of it and experiment a bit.
I was going to submit an SMS experimental game for the Spring Thing, but I couldn’t finish it in time. I think I’m gonna scrap it and rework it in another way that doesn’t makes me have to thing so hard in having plausible explanations for things. I will also make it in sequel.
I used Resist Jam to translate one of my Twines, Like Civilized People. The translation resonated with people abroad, so I’m glad I managed to carve out the time to do it.
Paradoxically, after the Spring Thing was done I did a Tiny Twine called A room of one’s own and a Texture story called The Sun Rises. I like the Tiny Twine better and I wish I would have made the texture thing in time for the Spring Thing, because it’s an okay experiment and it would have been nice to submit something since I said I would.
Now I will make a game for Adventure Jam and whatever else I come up with.
2016 was a crazy year. I did all these things:
- Matajuegos bilingual blog about videogames, society and the people who play them. We publish an article bi-weekly, once a week if we’re on fire.
- Latch Trap a Twine about being trapped in a shady bathroom at the suggestion of Paolo Pedercini.
- Se nos llena de agua el ranchito a Twine about aliens and the Antarctic originally made for teaching Twine that turned out to be too complex for it’s intended purpose.
- I made a twitter bot for Tweetfairy because the game would break biweekly if no one tweeted.
- I also started a game for Ludum Dare that I never submitted nor finished called Meltdown. It’s about things that made me super anxious and how I felt about it.
- With Matajuegos we created a printable game to teach people how to write IF when no computers are available. It’s been battle tested enough by a nice teacher from Rosario so we’re planning to release the rules on itch.io soonish.
- I gave freelancing a shot and it didn’t work out for me and I still don’t know how to Unity, but I have a healthier relationship with Twine and game making in general. I will also try to fiddle with PICO-8 a little bit and see if it makes jams like Ludum Dare a bit easier to deal with.
I also made wonderful friends and learnt that my feelings are valid and I don’t need to be a robot to be cool.
I now know that:
- Good game and interface design is WAY more important than cool controllers.
- What works for a showcase can suck when players have to actually play the thing.
- Games that work at events can and might suck at everything else.
- That people might not care much if your design is clunky as long as you give them flashy stuff, but it will be super sad to have people miss out on the message you wanted to give.
- Use itchio metadata! It’s like super useful.
- I love writing for Matajuegos and making my own game thingies, but going to events and being public and social feels too much like work. I should do less of those for free on my spare time. Ideally, I shouldn’t do stuff that feels like work for free at all.
- Giving resources to people who are already interested in something is way easier than having to pique people’s interest in something new. Specially when you don’t have a lot of time and/or money.
- A lot of decisions on the gaming industry and/or community are based on hunches instead of hard data and I find that scary. Super duper scary. We need more data and we need to actually share it and use it.
- People don’t mind critique that much if they know you from real life. This is also scary, but not that scary.
Hopefully, you will hear from me sooner than before.
