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