2020 was really hard to get any work done on any of my game projects. I mostly watched TV and played RPGs and was actively depressed that year.
Since I moved back to Utah at the end of 2020, I’ve been working on projects pretty consistently, though I’ve only finished one. I’ve had a much harder time turning things out quickly. I think part of that is that I’ve gotten a lot of tiny games out oever t. Also, idk, I’ve slowed down with age I guess. Oh, and I’m not in school anymore. That has an impact.
Anyway, I was working part time at the Salt Lake City Public Library this summer/fall, and while there I got in a conversation with some librarians about possible exhibits and I asked whether a game could be featured ever and the end result was a plan that I’d make an original game based in part on Salt Lake City historical material from the library’s special collections and periodical archives (I’d already been doing a lot of reading on local history and had been wanting to figure out how to incorporate that into my game-making, so it was a nice fit)
What followed was 3 months of research and 2 months of intense game-making, resulting in a collection of four tiny games called Salt Lake Stories, which was on display on the library’s first floor alongside some of the materials I consulted while working on it (it’ll also be on the library’s fourth floor when it opens later this month, though I don’t work there anymore).
The version here is a little different from the exhibit version in that it has a hard mode (basically versions of two of the games that my testers told me were too hard) and keeps track of progress, since it’s not in an installation setting.
I ended up focusing on the year 1912 and made four games related to people/places, most of which I had some amount of attachment/interest in before I started researching for the game. I wanted to use mostly minor historical figures.
I made two platformers, one kind of a lite eight-stage version of my typical puzzle-platformer bullshit, based on a formerly existing tower on a hill (a monument to which is by a place I used to live)
The other is more of a Donkey Kong riff, ascending the construction site of the also now-gone Hotel Newhouse.
I made a puzzle game based in Salt Lake’s also now-gone Japantown, where you reassemble the front page of an actual paper. This is my most edutainmenty. It was also fun to translate the headlines and ads from the apper.
And finally a falling blocks matching game set at the old location of the city library. This was a motherfucker to program.
Each game is introduced and concluded by a short visual novel-style dialogue, using the tools I built in Game Maker Studio for Melchior Y. Writing this dialogue was weird, because it’s such an artificial thing to do with real people, to have them exposition dump the basically-book-report level of information you did on them, but I think it’s a
I agonized a lot about what stories to include, and felt a little anxious about the fact that of my four, three are white and three are men. At least only one of my featured characters is actually Mormon. I was trying to paint a portrait of all the different things happening in the city, and hopefully that comes through, as well as the obvious incompleteness of its portrait of the era. I felt a weird kind of responsibility to represent things, uh, responsibly. Not sure how successful that was.
Here’s what the display looked like:
It was pretty surreal having it so prominently featured! I do think most of the people who played it were my coworkers, but designing something for a sort-of installation was a pretty neat experience. Even though I’m not working at the library anymore, I may be taking on something of a community-member role in planning some game initiative ideas that kind of came out of this exhibit through the library. We’ll see what happens there.
The game was nominated for the Utah indie game developers’ “game of the year” award at a tiny little ceremony a few weeks back, which was super flattering.
Anyway, neck-deep in a way more polished sequel to Ungrateful Birds now, hopefully out by February. I think I might finally be really back in the habit of making stuff.