dear everyone making arty story-driven flash games

[kadrin]

1: Congruity is so, so important. If you're making an arty and story-driven game, then you'll live or die on the feelings and emotions you conjure in your target audience. That means that a step out of place is much more dire than it would be for any other type of game. If your graphics, gameplay, and voice acting suggests a hilarious excursion with Bugs Bunny and your story and music are about impermanence and the value of holding on while you still can, it's going to bite you, hard. You can tell if the director of a movie is doing their job properly, and in cases like this, it feels like they aren't. You'll never get the best out of individual parts if they don't work towards a greater whole. It can work if you're doing a "sting in the tail" kind of story, but those are much, much trickier than straightforward ones.

2: THE MAIN CHARACTER DOESN'T ALWAYS HAVE TO DIE AT THE END. "THE MAIN CHARACTER DIES AT THE END/WAS DEAD ALL ALONG" IS NOT YOUR FREE TICKET TO ARTWORLD. IT'S GETTING TO THE POINT WHERE IF I HEAR NOODLY PIANO MUSIC IN A GAME I START DIGGING THE MAIN CHARACTER'S GRAVE, AND THAT CAN BE DISCONCERTING.

(Yes, this was inspired by a specific game, but all in all, the specific game was pretty good. It was just the individual bits that made me headdesk, facepalm, and other image macros. Here is a game about music that escapes the problem by pretty much having no story at all, but being really pretty and enjoyable because you're listening to wonderful classical music. It's also a hidden object game.)

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

Are you talking about All That Matters? Because I was thinking about All That Matters by the second sentence; the ending seriously perturbed me, because it was just so jarring. I completely agree with this entry!

[kadrin]

...you may feel free to remove the spy camera you've obviously placed in my brain any moment now. (Actually, I should just be pleased; obviously I can successfully communicate ideas.)

This is indeed the very game that prompted me to write. I said on the site that it seemed like the graphics, gameplay, and in-game voice clips were from one game, whereas the music, story, and out-of-level voiceovers were from another. Both games were pretty good, so I didn't mind much, but it hampered the emotions they were trying to bring up. Cute cartoony heads rolling all over the place, man. That's not a tragic storyline.

And yes, the ending was jarring, even in the story to which it belonged. It would have fit much better if everything had been exactly what it seemed - if we'd been playing through him realising in his memories that he needed to work with everyone as a well-oiled machine, and when he woke up, he reversed his "Cat's in the Cradle" careless trajectory to go home and be a family man. (To quote Guile.) But there has to be a twist at the end, and "he's dead and always was" is the easiest twist of all.

I think I blame In The Company Of Myself - that was also a good game, though I didn't like it as much as the world did. After Hedgehog Launch, everyone tried to make Hedgehog Launch, to greater or lesser success (and there are those who'd say I'm completely forgetting that Hedgehog Launch owes a whole lot to Nanaca Crash). and after In The Company Of Myself, everyone was trying to make In The Company Of Myself. But that's not easy. And besides that... I've already played In The Company Of Myself. If I want to play it again, I'll go back to the site and play it again.

Anyway, I'm getting way too verbose. Games are a form of art and storytelling and that means you have to respect them as such or your final product is going to be "ngeh?" Not every art style or game style can support every story. Or if it can, you have to be a bloody genius to make it work.