Space Funeral

there's an interview up with me on the excellent "hardydev" site http://hardydev.com/2011/01/16/interview-with-thecatamites-space-funeral/. see if you can guess the point where i started drinking while writing my answers. it also has some pics of my unreleased games (never forget...). there is also a filtered picture of me with a strange figure lurking in the background... who is this strange figure.... is this the "zapruder film" of games...

also deviantart users Setzeri and Momogirl have drawn up some amazing space funeral fanart! check it out

http://momogirl.deviantart.com/art/BLOODBATH-192893117



http://setzeri.deviantart.com/art/Space-Funeral-187443812




"keep playing those games.."

EDIT: also! if you are wondering about this mysterious "bubsy" game mentioned in the interview, hrmm hrm what is this mysterious game... why is it not on this site... the answer is that it was a game made in a week for an Experimental Gameplay Project. it is very crude and ridiculous but it is still an attempt to mess around with an actual game mechanic (the horror..) in a way i hadnt done before or since and some people have liked it. in the spirit of giving i present: Bubsy The Bobcat In 'Rip Van Bubsy' Starring Bubsy

It is winter. I am old. Moll sits in the corner with her knitting. I have no such luxury, withered hands long crippled by scripting-induced arthritis. My legs will not support me, my breath comes in harsh choking sobs like the pumping of some old bellows nearly rusted shut. I sustain myself solely on distant memories of past glories, much as a dying planet is briefly warmed by the faint glow of long-extinguished stars. I must take stock of my possessions. No, not yet. First the links. Yes. I will build a pharaonic tomb in the deserts of my soul, that I may lie there and rest at last.

The GameJolt page for Space Funeral reached 6140 downloads at last count! There are also some good comments on the game by cool guys like J. Chastain of the "Monster Killers" webcomic http://monsterkillers.com/ and indie developer Cactus Squid http://cactusquid.com/!

Rock Paper Shotgun mentioned the game here and recently wrote a very nice article about it for their christmas pc game roundup here.

Wouldn’t it be nicer to live in a world where games don’t shy away from being as stupid, offensive, smart or strange as they please, and then go racing towards their target audience like hungry sharks?

The excellent Play This Thing! site wrote an article here where the author claimed the game got him into James Joyce and Les Rallizes Denudes. Better living through chipsets!

The TIGdb indie game database has an entry along with some very nice reviews which you can find here.

Colony Of Gamers wrote a good article for their 'Free & Worth Every Penny' column here

ANIMALBOOGY posted about it here and also drew some excellent fanart:



Softpedia.com added all of my games here. I really like the descriptions, expecially the one for Veggie Tales 3D: "Enjoy an interesting hand-drawn RPG about the American Dream." hell yeahhhh

The Onion Nights blog wrote a very good article which you can find here.

And 1up.com spent a segment of the at1Up podcast here talking about Space Funeral, or "Space. Motherfucking. Funeral" as it is called here. The segment starts at 10.35 but the whole podcast is worth listening to.

Thanks to Corfaisus (pronounced curvaceous??) for pointing this out! Space Funeral got posted on the IndieGames.com weblog here: http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/09/freeware_game_pick_space_funer.html. They also refer to me by my real name which freaked me for a moment!! This paranoid post-9/11 world . . .

Also here is one of the two charsets used in this game. You can see Many Interesting Examples Of Space Funeral Citizenry. Three of these are actually other people's characters (GUESS WHICH HEH (doesn't count if you've already seen the credits!)) and two of them were never actually used ingame because they are awful.



Thanks for reading this blog!!! Please play and give me your thoughts!! I am willing to debase myself for crits and reviews!!

I've finished working out all the battle stuff and have sent the whole thing to Pokemaniac to be testrunned so with any luck it won't fall apart once someone presses the wrong button or whatever. But otherwise this will hopefully be available soon!! It's short enough I guess and I deliberately left the battles quite easy for people who don't care about battles (me) but hopefully they're not completely boring either.

I actually enjoyed working with RM2k3 a lot (adopts sepulchural tones of withered CEO semienthusiastically summarising past fiscal year for bored stockholders) although I don't think I'd use it again! Like at best it's pretty fucking fun to mess around with chipsets etc and be able to build a lot of different places fairly quickly and uh generally design stuff in a much looser way than adventure games where every person and location means a bunch of work and should serve some plot purpose etc. So it was pretty fun to make places and explore them and do it all so fucking quickly. It'sgenerally pretty awful when people talk about the best and worst parts of their own games especially in a worthless blog post but I think the parts of this that I like the most are the ones where I could just play around with new ideas and sometimes found something that worked surprisingly well.
On the other hand: the battle system sucks dick jesus christ. Like I guess it's pretty inevitable that the simplified style of the rest of the engine wouldn't work that well for NUMBERCRUNCH or whatever but I still hated it a lot. IDK it's maybe because I don't like the basic turnbased battle system too much anyway or maybe I had unrealistic ideas to begin with (probably the latter) but working with it was a uh pretty constant procedure of thinking about potentially neat ideas and finding it couldn't do them at all. I dunno I guess it's okay for what it is but even some extra switch or message options attached to skills and conditions or things or like a handful of extra options for Conditional Branches felt like p basic concepts which were arbitrarily missing like the idea of scrolling levels in Klik N Play. Also just in terms of battle flow and presentation as well as having to adapt to the default algorithms rather than vice versa. Bitch bitch bitch but I don't wanna use it again.

But yeah basically I stand by my earlier idea that the basic use of the engine was to make the videogame equivalent of those comics you draw as a five-year-old about skeletons fighting batman or something or just play around with fun concepts (like even a generic rtp game doesnt have to be about EPICHERO all the time). Like in terms of the uh flow of the engine (at risk of sounding like some awful newage guy) I think it was a lot more predicated towards speeeeeeed and rawness than any of the other engines I've tried, even if the battle system is by necessity kind of unwieldy.

Hey look an RPG Maker game. Basically I've been toying with the idea of making one for a while now, if only because I spent enough time bitching about how people were using the program wrong by obsessing over polish and meaningless technical features instead of just using the generic and easy to use program mechanics as a base for toying with ideas and imagination that I got the urge to make something myself out of basically pure spite (possibly one of the best reasons to make a game, incidentally, along with "revenge" and "neighbour's dog told me to").

Basically I think it's a program inherently biased towards the incompetent and ephemeral and I have zero problem with that! The idea of throwing together a game made of whatever ideas are nagging at you and whatever scribbles you think are funny and soundtracking it with whatever you're listening to at the time is a deeply romantic one imo, a kind of bargain-bin variant of the old utopian idea that given infinite resources and opportunity people are gonna be infinitely creative. Or just the idea of following through with your own obsessions as haphazardly as possible and seeing what comes up in the margins. I guess you could refer to it as "Termite Art" or "Glorious Trainwrecks" or even "Scratchware" but it's really just to do with how much fun it is to just fuck around and throw something together and see what happens, and I kinda think it's something that gets lost between lighting overlays and design documents and boring anime characters telling each other how they feeeeeeeeel~.

I guess what I'm saying is



and leave you with these excellent bootleg game videos to instill the correct dialectical spirit.