SAILERIUS'S PROFILE

So, I was kind of bored at around 4 AM and I decided to write this. It's written from the perspective of the everyday life of one of the minor antagonists in a project of mine (that was a horrible sentence).

Forewarning: There's mature language, some pretty nasty violence, and it's none too pleasant a read. There's little real substance to it, but I had fun writing it.

It's Monday morning. On Wednesday, I'm going to ask her out after she gets out of school. Not that we go to the same school, mind you. I don't even go to school, but she does.

So how did I meet her? Well, we haven't quite met. I guess you could say that I've dreamed of meeting her. That makes her the girl of my dreams, right? Well, she walks by the junkyard next to the old railroad tracks on her way home from school. It's about four blocks down from the bridge that chops up the city into the shitty side and the shittier side.

She crosses that bridge every day on her way home from school. That's how I'll meet her. You might think it's a funny place, in front of a junkyard, to meet the girl of your dreams. Well, it turns out that like a lot of things, “junkyard” has a pretty stupid name. You'd be surprised what all you can find in there. Especially since it's by the old train tracks. You can find gold there.

You know what a spike hammer is? It's one of those thick hammers they used to use to pound in rail spikes, you know, those huge metal nails they stick into old train tracks. Well, I was looking for someone one day and wouldn't you know it, buried under all the trash was a complete set: a spike hammer and five or six rail spikes. It's not every day you find something like that, so I decided to hang onto it.

Come to think of it, that was the day I first saw her. Maybe that's why that old spike hammer's my good luck charm now. I hang it on my belt loop and I've got the spikes in my backpack. Maybe I'll show it to her when we meet, tell her what an awesome thing I found just before I met her and how it's gotta be a sign. Girls dig that romantic shit.

I waste the day away thinking about Wednesday. I get a call from Geni, my coworker, but it's probably about some stupidass paperwork I couldn't give two shits about so I don't pick up. I'll catch hell from her about it later, but it's okay because she has a huge rack. You know, when you think about it, tits are probably proof that there's a God. When you've got some chick bitching you out, you've got something else to focus on so you can tune it out. Checks and balances or some shit.

It's Tuesday morning. I spend all day thinking about her. Even when I'm looking around the junkyard to find this guy for work, she's on my mind. In a flash, the morning flew by and the sky was getting that pissy sort of yellow to show it was about time for the sun to go down. When I see her coming down the sidewalk with the pissy sunlight sparkling on her bleachy hair, my heart skips a beat and I know right here and now that I can't wait until tomorrow.

I do my best to tidy my hair and I hurry out of the junkyard to intercept her. She doesn't seem to have noticed me yet, but I've noticed her. I've noticed her every day since I first saw her. Like I said, it was love at first sight. She was wearing a miniskirt at the time, and with the fall wind whipping about her, I could see plain as day that she had the most exquisite ass to ever grace this earth. That's when I knew I was in love.

She's getting closer.

She walks up to me.

She's standing only a foot away from me. I try to make eye contact.

She walks right past me.

But I'm not going to be deterred. I've been waiting forever for this moment. I'm not going to let it slip away between my fingers.

“Hey, let's go out,” I call out to her and she stops. She turns half a circle around to face me, causing her skirt to flutter but it's too long to show off that amazing ass. She gives me this weird sort of what-the-hell kind of look and says:

“You smell like shit.” She waits about half a second and then turns to leave. But I know she's just playing stubborn. I grab her shoulder to stop her.

“C'mon, let's you and me go somewhere and get to know each other.”

“You touch my shoulder one more time and my boyfriend will beat the shit out of you,” she says, pulling away roughly and leaving me frozen in place.

Ah.

Of course she has a boyfriend.

She's got the most beautiful ass to ever grace this unholy earth, of course she has a boyfriend to treat it right. No, I can't even fault her for this. It was completely my fault for making such a silly oversight.

“Your boyfriend, he must be pretty strong, huh? I don't go down so easily, unless you ask me to, hahaha…” I say. She stops again and gives me a disgusted sort of half I-hate-you look.

“He's the captain of the wrestling team. He could kick your ass so hard you'd need to get it surgically removed.”

Oh, I see. He's probably the toughest guy in town. “You like him cuz he's strong, huh?”

“Yeah, not like some dirty piece of shit like you.” She waits for a moment like she's waiting for another question and then she leaves when it don't come.

It makes perfect sense. The strongest men get their choice in asses, so the strongest man gets the best ass. And since he's the toughest guy in town, he's got laid a pretty strong stake on this girl. Heh, stake. I bet he stakes her.

But that doesn't change the fact that I just lost out on the chance of a lifetime. The girl of my dreams has already been taken by a stronger guy. Life's pretty miserable. I think I'll call it quits for the day and go to bed.

It's Wednesday afternoon. The junkyard closes at five and she still hasn't come by. Once the guys that work at the junkyard leave, I bust the lock on the gate with my lucky charm that I kept dangling from my belt loop.

Maybe she won't come anymore.

After all, it's getting pretty dark. It's the shortest day of the year and the sun's almost completely set by now. I'm about to head out, butâ€"oh shit, could it be? I see her coming down the sidewalk and she's listening to music on her headphones. She's wearing pants today. Damn shame.

Even though I call out to her, she doesn't answer or even stop. So, I follow the white cord dangling from her ears down to her ass pocket, where it connects to her phone. Probably plays music too. Since she's so concentrated on not noticing me, she definitely won't notice when I grab the phone.

But she does, probably because the phone is still attached to the cord, which is still attached to her head. She turns and what the fucks and reaches for the phone. I take a step back and then slip into the junkyard gate. She swears like a whore and runs after me.

“I'm calling the goddamned cops!” she says, making it very clear that I shouldn't give the phone back. She grabs for the phone so I punch her in the throat. She falls over, grabbing at her throat and gasping for air, so I kick her again in the sternum while she's down and that spells game over for her. She's out cold.

“What's his name?” I ask but she doesn't answer, because she's out cold. I look through her address book but there's no guy in there named Boyfriend. Oh, right. I go into her text message inbox and it's filled with messages from some guy named Roger. That's him.

“meet @ front of junkyard” I text to him and then throw the phone into one of the billion trash heaps. I sit down on a trash can and wait. I hear the phone buzzing in the shit pile but I don't give a damn. I start getting impatient and she starts coming so, so I drive my boot into her right kneecap and grab her foot.

It only takes a little tug and the bone snaps like a twig. That wakes her up, but my boot to her head is enough to put her out of her misery for a little longer.

God, what is taking so long?

Oh, there he is!

About an hour later, I see a guy on the other side of the gate looking around, all sort of confused-like. It's now nighttime and it ain't that bright out, so maybe he thinks he got stood up or maybe it was a prank.

“Roger?” a hoarse voice calls. It's her. I forgot about her for a minute. Roger turns in surprise and pushes past the gates, charging like a bull in a school uniform toward us.

“What the fuck?” he demands, noticing me sitting there calm as can be and her lying on the ground with her leg twisted in a funny way. She tells him that I'm crazy and that he should kill me so he pulls out a switch blade.

Well, this sucks. He's going to kill me no problem, since he's the toughest guy in town. He comes up with the knife and starts talking shit so I pull out my lucky charm and I swing it right into the side of his head. He doesn't even get to finish talking about my mom. Wow, he's out like a light.

Actually, I'm pretty sure he's dead.

Well, that's disappointing. I thought he was the toughest guy in town. So it's probably part of his act to catch me off-guard. So I grab my lucky spike hammer and I hit him seven more times in the chest. I went for eight but the piece of shit hammer falls apart and the head falls off somewhere in the cavity I made in his chest cavity.

So I decide I'll just keep beating him with the handle. Each strike causes a juicy splashing noise and sprays bright red on my nice clothes.

“Man, he ain't nearly as tough as you said,” I remark. I just now notice that she's been crying the whole time and trying to scream but her voice is too hoarse and trying to run but she has a gimped leg. “I thought I was going to need surgery but wow-ee, take a look at him, he's gunna need a lot of stitches to put his guts back in.”

Haha.

I grab the bloody handle and I hit him again. More juice comes out. Haha, it's so funny. The toughest guy in town can't even take a single hit to the head. I guess they don't make tough guys like they used to, do they? One little smack and down he went.

Wow! And this guy's the toughest guy in town, huh? I just turned my clothes into a Jackson Pollock with his guts, so what does that say about me? Doesn't that make me the new tough guy?

Come on, don't you have any more fight left in you? I ask him with my boot, but the only answer I get is a squishing sound. It's so funny but I'm seriously disappointed. The fun about winning isn't the prize, it's the fact that you kicked everyone else's ass. It's that even when they're trying their damndest to beat you, you still turned them into an insignificant shitstain on the bottom of the bracket.

“He really looks like a piece of shit now, huh?” I laugh but she doesn't think it's as funny. I thought the irony was kind of poetic. I guess she doesn't like poetry.

“So does that mean you love me now?” I wonder and she doesn't answer (except by screaming) so I decide to seal the contract of our new relationship by kissing her. When I pull back, I notice that she's now got some adorable red stains around her lips from where the blood on me smeared. I guess that means I just made her suck down her old boyfriend's blood.

Even though her one leg's broken, she still tries to crawl away. She's crying because she loves me so much. She probably wants to go home to brag about me to her parents but our first date just got started. So, I grab my hammer and a spike and I hammer the spike through her good ankle.

Except the hammer doesn't have a head anymore, so it only kind of pushes the end into her skin an inch or so. It takes a few more tries to get it to go in further and I have to use my boot to ram it in all the way. The first part was the hardest, so now that I've gotten into the groove I decide to hone my skills and I nail down her wrists too.

“Hey doll, I just remembered something. I didn't even catch your name.” But she doesn't tell me her name. She must still be in shock, so I kiss her again.

Oh, she's dead.

Well, that sucks. We were just playing around on our first date and she went and died. I guess she wasn't very strong either. You knew, it kind of seems like people around here aren't very tough. Since I'm the toughest, that means it all belongs to me, right?

Well, there's no fun playing with broken toys, so I decide to leave the junkyard. I'm walking across the bridge on the way home when I see her ahead of me. She's so beautiful I think I'm in love.

post=111781
It was patched this year.

post=111778
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but if you have time, would you mind checking out Vacant Sky? It's a short game and I put a lot of effort into the atmosphere and storytelling. Even if it doesn't catch your eye for voting, I'd like to hear some critique.

Please do not toot your horn. This isn't the topic for that.

Sorry. :x I'll shut up. Didn't mean to cause trouble.

post=111791

post=111778
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but if you have time, would you mind checking out Vacant Sky? It's a short game and I put a lot of effort into the atmosphere and storytelling. Even if it doesn't catch your eye for voting, I'd like to hear some critique.

Not to smash your horn or anything, but Vacant Sky's story isn't really all that good. In fact I'd say it's rather cliche and a bit full of itself.

Still a good game though, just saying! :rolleyes:

No offense taken. I'm not so conceited as to think my work's flawless. I appreciate your having checked it out.

I've cast my votes; it didn't take much deliberation this year. Hopefully Vacant Sky pulls through this year. Act I was released just a couple weeks too late for last year's awards.

I'm out of the country at the moment to attend the Montreal International Game Summit, which is a game industry conference going on today and tomorrow. Since most people on this forum are aspiring game developers, I thought I'd post my experience and thoughts here. The talks were all given by people in the industry and they all had interesting things to say.

Day 1

The Morning
I woke up to a pounding on the door at the ungodly hour of 7 AM. After quickly getting dressed, we were off to the conference. The conference was held in the Hilton Bonadventure Hotel, a venue so oozing with class that I'm sure I'd never be able to afford staying in.

Everything was very professional. We were directed to elevators, where there were attendants waiting on us that sent us up to the conference, where registration took place. Because the first keynote was to be delivered in Japanese, we each had to pick up a translator and headset.

With about 10 minutes to spare, we all decided we wanted coffee and scoured the hotel for a Starbucks or at least some place selling coffee. Andrew, Chris, and I decided to give up on the pursuit of caffeiney goodness in order to make the first keynote on time.

Keynote: Fostering Cultural Diversity in Game Development (Yoichi Wada, CEO of Square-Enix)
After an introduction delivered in Canadian moonspeak, Yoichi Wada took the stage and discussed Square-Enix's business plan with regard to game development worldwide and the challenges posed by being a global developer.

One of the points he touched upon was how Square-Enix now holds offices across the world, which all work on different titles. He spoke about how they must balance simultaneously broadening their market while not losing sight of their target audience. Games made in America tend to appeal to an American audience, and Japanese games tend to appeal to a Japanese audience.

"There is no such thing as the 'global' community; there's no place in the world called 'Global.'"

Having little experience or knowledge about the corporate end of game development, I didn't find his talk as interesting as I had hoped. It was interesting to hear his take on the future of the gaming industry, especially as game development companies begin to spread out and distribute development across the world.

After a quick question/answer session, the keynote ended. Our group split up to go to different sessions, as multiple were going on simultaneously. Andrew and I went together to a seminar on the importance of marketing in game development.

Why You can Make the Best Game Ever and It Won't Even Matter (Jesse Divnich, EEDAR)
This conference set the mood for the rest of the day. It presented stark facts on the status of the game industry that woke me up from my having-only-gotten-2-hours-of-sleep daze and made me look at the state of the industry in a new way.

The speaker works for a company called Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR), which has reportedly played every video game in the past 10 years and catalogs all relevant data on it--marketing budget, total sales in a given country, main character's gender, main character's hair color, et cetera. EEDAR collates this data and licenses it out to studios that pay (a lot) for it, for use in collecting marketing data.

His point was simple and backed up by his company's data: the quality of a game doesn't even hold a candle to the amount of money that goes into its marketing budget.

Jesse touched on several case studies, including why Transformers 2 was a commercial success in spite of being one of the worst-rated movies of the decade (indeed, it's apparently the worst-rated movies in the list of top-selling movies of all time).

Most striking (and depressing) was the fact that on average, the amount of money spent on advertising had three times as much of an impact upon a game's sales than its review scores.

There were a couple anomalies in his data, for example the case of Rock Band versus Guitar Hero. In spite of having spent the same amount of money on advertising, Guitar Hero continues to outsell Rock Band more than 2 to 1, which he attributes to how Guitar Hero's ads all target a general audience (including the family), whereas Rock band's advertisements target the hardcore gamer only.

In addition, he attributed the PS3's initial failure to launch not with its high cost, but with the subpar marketing it received. He showed us the traumatizing baby commercials that aired when the PS3 first launched, videos I had long since purged from my memory...
(Note: If you haven't seen these commercials before, don't look them up. Seriously. Not even just to see how bad they are. They're terrifying.)

In the following question/answer session, I asked him what advice he has for aspiring game developers now that we know that the amount of effort we put into making a game good is nearly irrelevant when compared to the size of the game's marketing budget. His response was to connect with the community, to get to know the players, the target audience, and other developers. It might have a small impact on sales, and you might help it spread by word of mouth.

It wasn't the answer I was hoping for. I left feeling rather bummed out, but it was a reality check that I suppose was coming eventually. He was a friendly guy and gave out his business card, inviting indie designers to email him if they needed help with anything. I just may in the near future.

(I'll finish up day 1 asap!)

***

So that this isn't just a topic about me rambling on about my experiences, I'll start with a discussion topic: How does it make you feel as a game developer knowing that, in the grand scheme of things, the quality of a game means almost nothing when it comes to how successful it will be?

I would appreciate it if you could check out my game, Vacant Sky, and maybe leave a review.
http://rpgmaker.net/games/1046/