2B — Thursday, November 3, 2016
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
INDIE GAMES
From Page 1B
More recently, the runaway
success of Toby Fox’s “Undertale”
has grabbed the attention of
young
game
developers.
A
heartfelt,
character-driven
role-playing game with simple
graphics and beautiful original
music, “Undertale” was Fox’s
very first video game (he had
previously
worked
on
free
modifications for other games),
developed in GameMaker: Studio
using Kickstarter crowdfunding.
His
on-the-first-try
breakout
hit is one of the reasons aspiring
developers like Riehl are so
dedicated to indie success.
“That one (‘Undertale’) was
huge for a lot of people, and I’m
certainly included in that,” Riehl
said. “The impressive part is that
Toby Fox is just this one man. I
mean, he had like a few people
supporting him, but this small
development team made this huge
successful game that everyone
has been talking about.”
It’s estimated by some sites
that the 25-year-old Fox has
made eight-figure profits from
“Undertale.”
But
for
most
independent
developers, it’s certainly not just
about the money. As artists, indie
developers are given the freedom
to experiment and implement
their creative visions exactly as
they want to. They often work
on their own schedules, and are
given agency to choose exactly
with whom they’d like to work.
According
to
Ye
Feng,
a
developer at the new Shanghai-
based indie studio, Pixpil, there’s
simply a lot to love about working
as an indie developer.
“That’s too many to list,” he
wrote in an email interview with
The Michigan Daily. “Essentially
everything you can imagine about
doing your stuff rather than your
boss’s.”
Pixpil is currently working
on a post-apocalyptic action,
role-playing
game
called
“Eastward,” which has recently
garned a ton of buzz on Twitter.
They’re a team of eight, and
a lone third-party investor is
funding
them
independently.
Their game is inspired by games
like “The Legend of Zelda” and
“Earthbound,” as well as Studio
Ghibli’s unique visual animation
style. They’re keeping details
about the game’s plot under
wraps.
“In
‘Eastward,’
there’s
a
middle-age man (who) travels
with a mystery white-haired
teenage girl, but that’s all I can
say for now,” Feng wrote. “Sorry.”
Eastward’s
pixel
art
is
haunting, stylized and uniquely
animated and lit, and the beauty
of its design has caught the
attention of thousands of fans on
Twitter. GIFs of Eastward’s pixel
art frequently go viral on games-
focused corners of Twitter.
“Yes, sometimes we feel just
lucky on Twitter!” Feng wrote.
“To be honest, Twitter is more
developer friendly and gathered
quite a lot (of) pixel artist and
retro-style-lover-gamers.
As
a
niche market, people are so eager
to see something awesome or
done in a new twist. For example,
we have an in-house engine
(that) enables dynamic lighting,
and sometimes (Pixpil designer)
Tommo will make some neat little
animation to make the scene look
‘alive.’ I think that’s basically why
we’ve got some warm welcomes
on Twitter.”
Feng told me that Pixpil
accomplishes
their
beautiful
3-D lighting effects using tools
written for Moai, a popular open-
source game engine. He credits
widely available engines like
Moai, Unity and GameMaker
with leading a wave of brand-new
indie developers making great
games.
“If you take a look into
human history, every time a true
revolution/evolution
happened,
there was always a kind of
massively-easy-to-use technology
behind it,” he said.
Riehl agrees. “It’s become
so easy now to get into the
game development field if that’s
something you want to do,” he said.
“Obviously it’s not for everyone,
but if you’re a programmer and
you’re interested in game design,
it’s really easy to just go download
Unity and just start looking up
tutorials on how to use it. And
after you spend a few hours, you
can make a simple platformer
where you, like, jump around and
grab a star, or something. So I
definitely think the availability of
these tools has led to an increase
in volume of indie games and
possibly quality. Now we have
people that might have great
ideas, but before they couldn’t get
into the field. Now it’s really easy
for them to get a hand in game
design.”
Some independent developers,
though, prefer to write their own
engines. Chevy Ray Johnston is
the architect of the FlashPunk
creation library, a set of tools
designed for assisting developers
creating
games
with
Flash.
Johnston is an indie development
renaissance man, to say the least
— he’s also the artist, writer,
designer and programmer of the
upcoming indie RPG “Ikenfell,”
an adventure set in a school for
witches and wizards. Johnston is
coding the engine for “Ikenfell”
from scratch in C#.
“I absolutely love writing tools
and software, maybe as much
as developing games,” Johnston
wrote in an email interview
with The Michigan Daily. “After
‘Ikenfell’ is done, I plan on
ramping up the software portion
of my company as well, selling
some cool developer apps. I got
into it through making games.
Different games have required
different editor tools in order to
design them, so building those
tools helped me find something
else that I love doing.”
The game looks incredible
— the art style feels quirky
and original, the battle system
looks like a unique combination
of “Paper Mario” and “Fire
Emblem” and the setting seems
like a brilliant opportunity to
tell stories of teen angst, explore
hidden secrets and live out classic
“Harry Potter”/“Carry On”-style
magical fantasies.
Gamers
are
showing
no
shortage
of
excitement
for
“Ikenfell.”
Johnston
received
$61,787 in funding for the game
on Kickstarter against a $25,000
goal — that’s more than Toby
Fox
originally
received
for
“Undertale.” He’s even managed
to attract aivi & surasshu, the
composers for Cartoon Network’s
“Steven Universe” (Johnston’s
favorite cartoon), to write the
game’s music.
“I’m so excited about this,” he
said. “They’re game musicians,
and I’m a fairly well-known game
developer, so we crossed paths
eventually. We didn’t know each
other that well, but I cold-called
(because I adore their work on
‘Steven’) and (sent) them a bunch
of screenshots and details about
the game and asked if they were
interested. They haven’t started
working on the soundtrack yet,
but I’ve told them I want them to
experiment and try some things
they don’t normally get to try. I
want the music of the game to
have a voice of its own. You can
expect vocals in at least a couple
of the game’s tracks.”
“Ikenfell” and “Eastward” are
both superb-looking projects that
have managed to secure enough
funding to last through the course
of development. But if you’re
planning on getting into game
development to make money on
easy street, you may want to look
more deeply into the realities of
the industry.
Recently,
Vice’s
Waypoint
published extensive interviews
with several game developers
about the harsh lifestyle that
comes with game development,
and
the
sheer
difficulty
of
managing large-scale projects
and experimenting with new
kinds of game mechanics. To
make
matters
worse,
other
journalists, such as The Verge’s
Casey
Newton,
have
grown
concerned about the financial
viability
of
the
independent
market — especially on mobile
platforms.
Both of the developers I spoke
to acknowledged the daunting
challenges behind indie game
development, and the behind-
the-scenes stress that goes with
it.
Feng
said
the
more
management-related
aspects
of game development are the
toughest.
“(The) first (challenge) is to
decide when to stop and when to
polish,” he wrote. “There’s always
(room) for improvement but you
have to stop somewhere. Knowing
when to stop is important. Second
is to hire the right person. It’s
quite hard here.”
Johnston says it’s the complex
systems behind certain game
mechanics that are the most
challenging to deal with.
“Balancing
combat
is
ridiculously difficult, and I’m still
working on it,” he wrote. “I’m
actually just trucking through
story, cutscenes and level design
right now. Once I’ve done all that
in an area, and I’m comfortable
with the progression, then I go
back over it and balance out the
battles. Balancing it is basically
just constantly tweaking, testing
and thinking outside the box
until it feels fun. It’s so much
work, and even slight changes can
have a massive butterfly effect in
how the game feels. It will be a
struggle until the very end.”
“Doing
all
the
art,
programming, design and writing
for such a large game is such a vast
amount of work I can barely even
comprehend it sometimes. I just
hunker down, put on music and
work all day,” Johnston wrote.
Independent developers are
also prone to receiving alarming
amounts of hate for their projects.
“Fez” developer Phil Fish, one
of the subjects of “Indie Game:
The Movie,” infamously quit
the video game industry after
being the victim of coordinated
attacks from #GamerGate (a
movement
against
increased
gender inclusivity in gaming
culture) after expressing his
vocal support for Zoë Quinn,
another independent developer
who made international news
after being subjected to daily
harassment and threats from
#GamerGate. More recently, the
developer of the extraordinarily
promising-looking RPG “Knuckle
Sandwich,”
Andrew
Brophy,
has been the victim of what
appears to be a coordinated
hate-campaign from 4Chan’s /v/
imageboard, posting swarms of
negative comments on a recent
promotional
gameplay
video
uploaded to his YouTube channel.
But despite the challenges
inherent
to
the
profession,
the
independent
development
community
shows
no
signs
of
slowing
down.
The
in-development games featured
in this article, “Ikenfell” and
“Eastward,” are merely the tip of
the iceberg for excellent-looking,
ludicrously creative video games
being made by small teams.
Johnston recently pointed me
toward “Cryamore,” an anime-
inspired
action-RPG
with
beautiful pixel art that received
nearly $250,000 in funding on
Kickstarter. Gabe and Michelle
Telepak,
the
couple
behind
the
adorable
puppy-themed
exploration game “Butt Sniffin’
Pugs” is so close to hitting their
$60,000 Kickstarter goal, with
less than a day left to go. And
only Tuesday, a Norwegian indie
development
studio
released
“Owlboy,” a game nearly a decade
in the making, to overwhelming
acclaim.
I suppose that I should admit
to you that I’ve been working
on my first independent game
project since summer semester.
It’s a role-playing game themed
around
sexual
stigma
called
“Post Modern Girls.” And while
I’m working with some excellent
people on the project — Music,
Theatre & Dance junior James
Fischer is composing the music,
and Eastern Michigan University
art student Jane Hodges has
provided some incredible artwork
— I’m still nervous about so much.
Am I actually a competent enough
programmer to make the project
work? Am I going to be able to get
funding somehow? What if I do a
Kickstarter and it fails? What if I
get hate? What if I’m not talented
enough to make video games
after all?
I pestered Johnston to give
me some advice. His words were
stern but salient — and I think
any independent developer could
draw something helpful from
what he had to say.
“Keep it simple, and don’t add
all this complexity to the game.
It’s way too tempting to add new
features because you feel like
the gameplay isn’t deep enough,
but adding more stuff is not the
solution to that. All that does is
water it down. Find the strongest
aspects of the system and see
what you can do with them, how
you can bend and stretch them
and create new puzzles and
problems out of them. ‘Portal’
isn’t fun because they kept adding
new guns, it’s fun because one
gun is all you really need. I think
if more RPG developers think
this way, we could see some really
interesting new games.”
Wolverine
Soft
holds
open
meetings every Monday from
7-9 p.m. in 3150 DOW, and
encourages
first-time
game
developers to attend. “Ikenfell” is
expected to release in June 2018.
The development of “Eastward”
is
chronicled
on
Twitter
@
pixpilgames.
FILM COLUMN
T
his
column
contains
spoilers
about
the
seventh season of “The
Walking Dead.”
Last
Sunday,
“The
Walking
Dead” returned for
its seventh season,
carrying
with
it
the promise for the
resolution of season
six’s cliffhanger —
who does Negan,
the show’s latest
murderous villain,
kill? There are so
many reasons why
that’s a bad cliffhanger, but that’s
another column.
Negan’s first victim is revealed
early on in the episode. Abraham
— a middle-tier character on the
fan favorite scale — gets a barbed-
wire-wrapped baseball bat to the
head. It’s gruesome and hard to
watch. But it’s nothing compared
to the next beat down in which
the show returns to its source
material and has Negan kill
Glenn (who barely escaped death
last season) like he does in the
comic books. The scene is horri-
ble and unnecessarily so. So much
visual time and space is given to
Glenn’s bloody head. Even after
he is reduced to a pile of essen-
tially meat pulp, the camera con-
tinually returns to his corpse.
Intense violence is not new
in “The Walking Dead,” or any-
where on screen for that mat-
ter. I’ve heard it preached for
years that violence on-screen
makes kids more violent because
it desensitizes them to it. And
that’s true, but it’s important to
acknowledge
different
repre-
sentations of violence and gore
on film. The kind shown on the
season premiere of “The Walking
Dead” is some of the most dan-
gerous.
It’s dangerous because it is
both senseless and glorified. The
whole plotline hinges on who has
power and who is powerless, the
person in power being the per-
petrator of violence. What’s more
telling is that Negan
becomes
the
cen-
ter point of the epi-
sode. The plot exists
because of him, waits
for him and then fol-
lows his actions for
the remainder of the
episode. Negan is so
much the episode’s
star that he almost
becomes the hero.
He’s good looking,
smooth-talking and easily mis-
taken for an actual badass.
He’s the kind of villain that can
easily be mistaken — especially
by people who get most of
their violent imagery through
first-person video games and
television — as the sort of Heath
Ledger in “The Dark Knight”
antihero. A clear antagonist who
steals the show with his charm
and complexity, which makes you
— if only for a second — almost
root for him.
But, there are ways to show
violence that are much more
intentional, more careful and
less problematic. “The Walking
Dead” has done it before. But,
I’ve already spent enough of this
“film” column talking about TV.
Coming out of spook season,
I’ve seen — and worn — a lot of
fake blood in the past week. One
direction, and really my favorite
direction, that good gore can go is
absurd. Slasher films of the 1970s
overflow with the cherry-red
blood of over-the-top gore.
A standout for its blood
to enjoyment ratio is “Texas
Chainsaw Massacre.” As a kid
growing up in Texas, I quickly
became familiar with the plot
on the slumber party circuit.
It has a very classic (duh,
because it is a classic) plot. A
van full of teenagers runs out
of gas in rural Texas and slowly
become victims of Leatherface,
whose weapon of choice is, you
guessed it, a chainsaw. It’s a very
violent movie, but the violence
is exaggerated to the point of
absurdity. The characters are
chainsawed, impaled on meat
hooks and otherwise hacked to
death. “Scream” pretty much
does the same thing. Its opening
scene is horrifically bloody, but it
monopolizes on its own absurdity
— this time in a far more self-
aware way — to draw a fine line
between
whose
actions
are
deemed heroic. It pulls us into the
violence only to push us, leaving
us disgusted by the brutality and
our momentary sympathy with it.
Where “Scream” finds humor,
“Texas
Chainsaw
Massacre”
finds moments of real cinematic
beauty. The final two shots, of
the blood-soaked sole survivor
being carried to safety in the
back of a pickup truck and
Leatherface
swinging
his
chainsaw against the rising sun,
are oddly beautiful. They remind
the audience why good horror
movies are scary — they make
us want their characters to live,
while shows like “The Walking
Dead” tell us we should want to
watch them die.
Perhaps “The Walking Dead”
has fallen victim to its medium.
No matter how gory or gruesome
horror movies get, most don’t
last longer than two hours. “The
Walking Dead” has already run
for over 80 hours with no end in
sight. There’s no condemnation
of the violence and it instills no
fear in its audience because after
80 hours of antagonists that are
either one-sided or literally brain-
dead, the audience has been told
“This is the way things have to
be.” Good gore tells its audience
instead, “This is way things are,
but not the way they should be.”
The right kind of screen violence
The best kinds of horror movies don’t go with senseless, glorified gore
MADELEINE
GAUDIN
One of the essential truths of
this world is spoken in the first
minute of “Jennifer’s Body:”
Hell is a teenage girl.
Teenage girls themselves will
be the first to tell you this is true.
Their teenage years are a time
period of endless oscillation
between viciousness and vul-
nerability, kindness and cruelty.
It’s no coincidence that teen-
age girls are the stars of most of
our modern popular horror and
dystopian fiction — nothing cap-
tures the melodrama and awe
and ruthlessness better than an
environment to match.
Bearing this in mind, “Jen-
nifer’s Body” ranks among the
most definitive portrayals of
teenage girls navigating the
mess of high school. It’s not
“Mean Girls” or “Heathers,”
but I’d argue it almost deserves
a place among their ranks. This
might be surprising, given that
“Jennifer’s Body” is a largely
unnoticed movie from 2009
that barely recouped its bud-
get, despite starring Megan
Fox at the peak of her post-
“Transformers” uberfame/over-
exposure.
It’s always seemed strange
to me that this movie never
attained legend status, because
it has all the elements of a cult
classic: killer soundtrack, poor
box office performance and
critical reception, questionable
special effects, a silly story and a
genuine emotional core ground-
ing the whole affair. And yet,
here we stand. Another Hallow-
een season passes by and “Jenni-
fer’s Body” still isn’t getting the
glory it deserves.
“Jennifer’s Body” tells the
story of Anita “Needy” Lesnicki
(Amanda Seyfried, “Love the
Coopers”) and her best friend
Jennifer, played by Fox. Needy is
the beta to Jennifer’s alpha, put-
ting up with all kinds of nasty
jokes and power plays in the
name of friendship.
Despite this, Needy is very
clearly in love with Jennifer.
One night, the girls go to a local
bar to see an indie band, Low
Shoulder. Later that night, the
band kidnaps Jennifer to use
her in a virgin ritual sacrifice
to Satan in exchange for fame
and success. The only problem
is that Jennifer isn’t a virgin at
all, so instead of dying, she’s pos-
sessed by a demon that turns her
into a murderous cannibalistic
monster.
Despite all the supernatural
top-layer shenanigans, “Jenni-
fer’s Body” is maybe one of the
most painfully honest movies
I’ve seen in its representation of
the nastiness of adolescence. Not
in the sense of what happens,
but in how it’s motivated and in
the precision of the character-
izations. There’s the the indie
pretentiousness of the members
of Low Shoulder, matching cres-
cent moon tattoos and all — “Do
you want to work at Costa Cof-
fee forever?” asks the lead singer
to his hesitant drummer when
he voices nervousness about
actually murdering Jennifer, “or
do you want to be rich and awe-
some, like that guy from Maroon
5?” There’s the dopey apathetic
faux-concern of Needy’s boy-
friend, who repeatedly fails to
believe her when she warns him
about Jennifer being a demon.
“Needy, I care about you as a
person” he says, “not just some
girl I made love to for four min-
utes the other night.”
Then, of course, there’s Jen-
nifer. She’s mean and callous
even before the demonic pos-
session, but she’s first and fore-
most vulnerable. You see it in
the way her voice rises an octave
as she flirts with the older, more
sophisticated band members of
Low Shoulder, in her inability to
ever hurt her best friend despite
her all-encompassing demonic
urges and in the hurt she feels
when Needy throws her out of
her house.
There’s a scene late in the
movie in which Jennifer is get-
ting ready for the big dance.
We see her reflection up close
in a small mirror on her desk.
She’s smearing makeup on her
face, and the look in her eyes
is unmistakable if you’re at all
familiar with the feeling: she’d
give anything to be anybody else
in this moment.
Perhaps the most truthful ele-
ment of “Jennifer’s Body” is the
relationship between Needy and
Jennifer. They’re deeply devot-
ed to each other in the obsessive,
intensive way that’s so specific
to the friendships of teenage
girls. Their power dynamics
shift continually from scene to
scene, minute to minute. They
love each other, they hate each
other, they try to kill each other.
It’s deeply complicated and
ridiculous in the way only high
school can be.
The main issue critics took
with “Jennifer’s Body” was that
it wasn’t scary enough to be an
effective horror movie. Now, it’s
not that the critics were wrong,
per se, just that I think they
might have misunderstood the
movie’s intentions. The movie
never intended to frighten with
jump scares or monster makeup.
“Jennifer’s Body” was about the
visceral, heart-pounding bru-
tality with which teenage girls
tear themselves and each other
apart — all bared teeth, sharp
smiles and the awful emptiness
of wanting everything so very
deeply and for far too much.
So, the weak humor and hor-
ror actually matters very little
— it’s funny in the ways it needs
to be, in ways that are true to
the characters. And it’s scary in
ways that are true to life. Noth-
ing is more terrifying than a
teenage girl willing to do what-
ever it takes to get exactly what
she wants.
ASIF BECHER
Daily Arts Writer
‘Body’ mixes teen angst with horror
It’s time to reevaluate the over-the-top Megan Fox demon film
THE VAULT | ‘JENNIFER’S BODY’ (2009), 20TH CENTURY FOX