making a thread so as to not clutter the devlog. i’ve been tinkering with a little spy platformer in godot for a while now but feel like i only started working seriously on it over the xmas break.. before that was just a long period of like, accumulating materials, learning to use godot and trenchbroom, trying to learn a workflow to make, texture, and animate 3d guys more consistently. thinking about what i was doing or wanted to do bc frankly “spy” as a genre is often.. not that interesting to me!! what do i like about it? disguise, paranoia, pop-surrealist goofiness, fantasies of anonymity, crazy lairs. gothic horror movie monsters of yesteryear who now have solid jobs with the state department, where nobody seems to mind that they have robot hands and a special room for chaining up people to be eaten by poisonous crabs. but so much of it is also like, fantasies of professionalism that don’t interest me at all (james bond is a 10yo’s fantasy of “having a job” and george smiley is a 55yo’s fantasy of being the one office worker nobody would dare to replace). or about the sancity of this or that failing empire which interests me even less. i like the avengers, irma vep, fritz lang’s spionne, monolith’s no one lives forever. i like “spy” as a third-hand fantasy in other forms more than i like “spy” as a genre in itself, perhaps. spies in the house of love. be careful what you say, don’t give yourself away. odds are you won’t live to see tomorrow
anyway i will use this thread to dump when i’m tinkering on stuff i guess, or to post movies i’ve watched and am thinking about, or whatever else.
here is a little 2d area i’m still working on, using godot’s phantomcamera plugin (godot update: i’m enjoying using it a lot!). i like the dollhouse effect, it’d be nice to have more background rooms you could glimpse with funny stuff happening in there.
classics of spy theme: the weirdly memorable husky one to “special mission lady chaplin”. i don’t really care about the theme song to “deadlier than the male” but as someone who mostly knows scott walker’s solo stuff it was a little startling so suddenly hear him in this context.
oh yeah, i forgot to say: this game is a 3d platformer, because i’ve been making games for almost 20 years and so concepts like “shame” “self-respect” “artistic ambition” have been burned off of me as though by an acid bath. besides, why shouldn’t i make a 3d platformer. who’s going to stop me? your world peacekeeping organizations? ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!
well the main reason is that there’s a 3d platformer starter kit i tried when i was learning the engine and i found it kind of absorbing to load in my little guys and hop around. i did want to make something with at least a few more “movement options” than the killer games bc all those took place basically in corridors, which is fine, but means you can’t get too weird spatially or else you’ll have the “cool stuff happening in background while you walk on a track in front of it” problem. i’m doing my best to avoid things i dislike or don’t care about in the 3d platformer format, including collectibles, combat, and the concept of “schmovement”.
it did feel like a nice fit with the spy thing as well, although something a little surprising to me abt the genre is that it doesn’t always feel very interested in space. i think this might have actually been one of the genre innovations of the metal gear solid series - where you’re generally not so much infiltrating an “enemy base” as much as some other structure that’s been hijacked. your enemies have respatialised it in their own benefit (guard patrols, cameras etc) but are still implied to be comparative newcomers to the territory, and snake beats them in part both by learning the areas better than them and also by learning the underlying geography that “the base” secretly relies upon: not just vents and maintenance routes but also natural structures, local ecology, weather conditions etc. so it’s been interesting to go into the genre with that framework in mind and see how often or infrequently the abstract question of like, “managing national integrity” gets mirrored more directly in questions about control of a space and what that entails.
everyone knows the outlines of the situationist derive thing but i only found out recently they also tried doing it with walkie talkies, to communicate with each other across different zones of the city to see if they could rediscover a lost synchronicity. secret agents…
does the idea of double agents/ double crossing enter into your meta-theory of this genre? I am now re-watching X-Files with the head-canon conceit that Scully is very much a spy-figure, and that she is indeed sent into the x-files with the mission,purpose and intention of spying on Mulder for the powers that be
I Love this analysis and it feels like something from IC 1.0
In Deus Ex you do feel like a spy creeping around the UNATCO offices. That space has been built from the ground up to direct power. The administrators we can presume had/have near total control over the layout and logistics of the space. In the Deus Ex world its much more at the level of incidental encounters that overlapping contradictions are exposed - an email you weren’t meant to read, a book that expands your perspective of the world beyond the narrative set up by your informants. Space has a more rigid status in that text , territory rather than terrain…
i guess to me the double agent thing is also a professionalism fantasy, in that it always seems to revolve around a distinction between someone’s social requirements and an authentic self - eg scully starts out as a mole in mulder’s office but switches sides, ada is only playing with leon or is she? i think the only time the divided loyalties stuff has teeth for me is when they give in and make it explicitly homoerotic, as in something like point break - but there’s a movie called A Dandy In Aspic i’ve been meaning to check out in part for its take on the premise (a double agent ordered to kill an enemy spy who is himself under another name).
i’ve been thinking of spy gadgets but the main one that keeps coming to mind is that the eurospy picture Dick Smart 2.007 apparently has a machine called BGR, or “Beautiful Girl Radar”
the game continues ok, i worry about it being too of-the-killerish or recycling too many “bits” that are still in my head in some form but i guess this first one again is meant to just be a kind of pilot letting me figure that stuff out as i go.
i had the interesting challenge recently of trying to make my first banal area, like one of those small scale interstitial corridor bits used for pacing or character notes, it was fun trying to hit a balance between something that felt comparatively grounded and lowkey and something that still felt, like, vaguely interesting to bop around.
right now everything i’m doing is straightforward lvldesign stuff but i’ve also been trying to compile more are design goals that i’m nowhere near
whenever i post character models here it’s bc i still find them a bit of a pain so i feel like i need to show them off more as a result. but i think i only have a couple left to do for this episode.. and not even that many more levels, although that still feels a bit further away
recent spy movies: charade w/ cary grant and audrey hepburn, it was fun, twisty and funny in a way that feels hard to imagine being done this offhandedly again. it’s not the focus but feels startling to see a movie which is all about ex-OSI guys trying to kill each other for murky doings during the war after subsequent cultural consensus that that one was the good spy agency.
related to above discussions on double agent stuff i think it also has one of the more effective takes on this, since it’s not really about the agonies of someone with two selves so much as it is playing with the very movie related question of whether you can like someone without knowing anyone about who they are (answer: yes.. if it’s cary grant)
the next thing i need to do is try to get into the habit of being more playful with animations and poses for my lowpoly guys. it’s been surprising when i’ve tried it how much more effective the result feels than my habitual “stand in one place vaguely bobbing up and down” go-to. new problems!!
so happy to see a thread made for this project; it looks awesome!! also, 2 things:
1 - i wouldn’t really worry about it being too “of the killer-ish”. the dialogue you’ve shown off does remind me of the killer games a bit, but the overall visual style seems to be very different. honestly, the character models remind me a lot of earlier 3d games of yours like lake of roaches or pleasuredromes of kubla khan (the latter especially so), so it definitely doesn’t feel like solely “riding on the success” of aotk or anything to me personally.
2 - what software do you use when modeling characters? as someone who’s pretty much given up on leaning blender lol, i’ve found myself enjoying experimenting with slightly more “niche” (though some of them aren’t really that) 3d software. i mainly use blockbench cause i like doing low-poly stuff (plus it’s easy), but i’ve used paint 3d, pov-ray, and am currently trying to figure out anim8or. do you use any of those, or something else entirely?
thank you! i’m glad it reads a little differently, and yeah, i’ve been wanting to make a larger-scale game with similar kind of blocky 3d guys for quite a while… this one sort of feels like a way to get that impulse out of my system so i can go back to 2d again for a spell.
the modelling software i use for characters is called “wings3d”, it’s an old free one, the same oe i used for those older games too hah. unfortunately you can’t animate directly in it so i brute forced learning just enough blender to do rigging and animating with the meshes i export from wings - for me the main advantage of the latter is that it’s a little clunky and limited and specific, it feels easier to play around when you only have about 50 options instead of about 50,000. i haven’t tried too many other modelling tools but i like that this one definitely doesn’t feel like it has all the cruft that i associate with industry-level tools
have been lazy but getting back to painting more objects. the big stone heads are based on that boulder carved into the shape of john wayne’s head but it turns out if you try and draw something like that from memory it’s hard not to end up with busts of mussolini instead.
i also took the game to a local games night to see whether jumping around was intelligible to anyone. the levels were confusing but people seemed to like doing big crazy backflips indiscriminately around the level. which is good. idk about indie games or whatever right now i feel happier just imagining dumb hobby level little toys that sit half played on someone’s hard drive, holding secrets.
new octopus bc all my existing octopus models were in older versions of blender that i didn’t want to bother to figure out
i also got moving platforms going. pretty late in the day for a platformer but idk i’ve never cared much for them. you wait for it to get close and jump and wait for it to go somewhere else then jump again… bah… on the other hand i am childishly delighted by being able to climb on moving cogs and wheels and things and it’s all pretty much the same system, so that’s been fun.
dipping in and out of the various gerry anderson shows still. thunderbirds especially is so beautiful, that mix of gauzy spaceage exotica backdrops and dinky little dollhouse aspects, how aren’t there a million and one aesthetics blogs just cataloguing every meticulous background from this show??
i mean actually watching these shows, i have to admit that sometimes even with puppets i do think of the extreme longeurs of british television and the tendency to just have someone do a kind of goofy voice interminably to eat up time so that they can get the most out of each set. the real UK saturday night live begins here. but there are some fun ideas around as well. i watched an episode of terrahawks where they have to compete in the space version of the eurovision song contest against an evil witch from mars, who performs what is charitably referred to as a rap
something that’s intrigued me about the supermarionette shows since i was a kid… even though i couldnt identify it then i was surprised at how things like the colourful uniforms, rayguns, monster designs in eg Captain Scarlet or Stingray felt very unlike the american equivalent pulp shows, i somehow thought of them as belonging to a much more videogamey tradition, almost “japanese”?? or at least my very vague sense of what that meant at the time. i mean captain scarlet’s origin basically makes him a kamen rider, right. watching the shows again now it’s funny how they do often feel more like some of the goofier toei tokusatsu shows than idk american ones where people tended to wear more “civilian” coded clothing, go on adventures without institutional backing, even the cops didn’t dress like cops… i know it’s a reach but i do sorta wonder if it’s some bizarre parallel evolution to do with japan and the uk both as kind of dead empires, with a stock of residual historical imagery around things like colourful uniforms and advanced military hardware that would be a bit tacky to resurrect directly but which was still floating around in garbled dream form waiting to be drawn upon. like all the algerian stuff in moebius. but maybe there’s some weird sid and marty krofft series that is the usa equivalent of all this after all, where they send some muppet guy off to die in korea or something. i hope to find out some day.
I know it was the other way around in some cases. A bunch of early mecha shows drew hugely from these shows aesthetics, up to and including Evangelion.
The flashing text in the opening of Eva are awful similar to the text in UFO for example:
And the parallels between Mazinger Z’s launch sequence:
and the Thunderbirds:
Look at the freaking pool that opens up and the evangelion-ass funiculars
interesting!! i had no idea any of this stuff ever made it over there. i guess it makes sense that even for stuff that didn’t have an actual tv broadcast there’d eventually be robo heads trading tapes of anything that had a particularly cool drill machine or whatever.
another parallel converence that’s funny to me is that the gerry anderson store too places large emphasis on the sale of model kits. i like that this one resembles some constructivist sculpture
game iz now playable from beginning to end, just need to add some rewrites, sound + music, one or two bits of art. want to make a level select screen as well, which is my substitute for actually testing the difficulty level. still dont know what to do with it after that, dump it on gamejolt, itch, a neocities page, idk
i’m quite pleased on balance, this is my first bigger project in godot and i already feel like i’m basically back to the level of knowledge i had with unity (whatever that’s worth). trenchbroom is fun, 3d models and animations are a little more work but not too bad. the godot animation player as orchestration / event handler is pretty cool - move camera here/there, turn thing on and off, play other animation, etc, this is the #1 thing i had no idea how to handle without either plugins or else having to do a million little mangled scripts of my own, so glad it turns out doable with minimum of scripting
title screen
tried to rip off one of my favourite cutscene devices from saga frontier (in this case the road the car is on is just a turning disc)
starting game #2. i’ll probably make the actual title screen a bit darker than this since the idea is that after pressing go you drop down and get to bounce around in it as a level, i’ve been wanting to try making more stuff like those old will eisner spirit covers or the steranko nick fury ones, weirdly spatialised text layouts etc. it’s happily pretty trivial to auto-generate custom mesh colliders in godot so i’d like to take advantage of that as much as possible.. one perk of everything being pretty lowpoly to begin with…
game #1 is still in da works once i get around to putting music and sfx in. i didn’t get into the local games fest in the end but in a way am relieved, having to pre-emptively smooth stuff down and signpost more than usual so that i wouldn’t have to sit and watch people struggle with it irl was kinda depressing.. i’m ok with people flailing aimlessly and not knowing with the buttons do in the privacy of their own homes, though. i feel like i was craving more feedback midway through and got a little less needy once it was playable from start to end anyway. whether it works at all or not i am now apparently committed.
excited to do more of these, a. degen’s sent on some really cool character portraits and tom’s been sampling bongos and vibraphones for les baxtery spy musics. i’m cautiously hopeful even though, weirdly, working in godot doesn’t seem to satisfy my internal sense of having “gotten something done”, regardless of how much or little i actually do. maybe it’s a weird side effect of the platformer 3d thing where everything gets tweaked and moved around a hundred times, or maybe it’s just that i’m still internalising the new engine? i hope it clears up anyway, the best part of making games was spending just 30mins on some small thing and feeling like that bought you the right to be lazy the whole rest of the day.
