CATMITTS'S PROFILE

Hey,

I was wondering if anyone here had this same experience: the first game I worked on in RPG Maker was an entirely generic, mad-lib sort of RTP game. As I kept using the editor I would basically drop games and start again from the ground up many times over, using new stuff I'd learned, but the characters, plot and general structure would kind of migrate between the different builds in swapped-around, mutant form. So the person who was a party member in A became a local guard NPC in B became a villain in C, and the end boss's name stayed the same, and the main character was now a detective, etc... It is interesting for me to think about now, because the purpose of all those new builds was to try to make something increasingly sophisticated / complicated / polished, but I was still using parts of the crude first game, and in many cases it felt like that kind of ground against the more polished elements. I don't think it was as respectable as being consistently interested in some character or idea, it was more a vague attachment to names, or the idea of a lineage, that persisted through many wholly dissimilar games...

In retrospect it feels kind of sad to me that the desire to make, like, more elaborate and polished containers for these primordial game ideas was part of what gradually ended up erasing them, but I also think it's part of the process of making things in general

Did this happen to anyone else, were there characters and names that stayed weirdly consistent from very early engine projects even as the rest of the game changed dramatically around them (maybe over years?)

Hi RMN,
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!! It's me, thecatamites!! I posted here for a while!! Did you ever wonder what had happened to me? No, me neither. But as it turns out I made all these videogames.



This is my first commercial package so I am shilling it anywhere. If you liked any of my previous games here then you may like this one. If you didn't like them then you probably won't like this either but you should purchase anyway to make fun of it and people will see you as a cool, happening fellow, just like the Game Grumps. The cost is €4. The games look like this.



except there are 47 more in a variety of different narratives and styles, all compiled into a helpful loader and with notes.

The official website is this http://harmonyzone.org/50SHORTGAMES.html and contains more info.

Well, I hope 2014, goes ok for everyone. Thank you for reading,
Sincerely,
Stephen xoxo

edit:

I'm a drudge who just makes games but I get a lot of ideas by listening to music and trying to come up with ideas that fit the mood. Mostly they never get made but sometimes these get folded into other games somehow. There's too many to list and most of them are ephemeral single songs by bands I don't know about but uh

Ted Weems - Heartaches was the original inspiration for Biggles On Mars. It seemed goofy and kind of melancholy and open all at the same time. The scene of the plane flying across the bright orange martian landscape at the beginning and end was originally meant to be soundtracked by this but I could never find a non-obtrusive way to put it in.

Alix - J'Ai Mon Amerique was going to be the soundtrack to a game called Desert Toad about a rogue arab frog fighting an occultist french foreign legion on his own terms.

Carl Perkins - Only You made me want to make a sequel to Captain Skull where he gets drunk and heartbroken and speeds across dimensions in his rocketship listening to sad country music and being followed by a deadly multidimensional horde of Every Mistake He Ever Made.

Young Marble Giants - Choci Loni was gonna be another Captain Skull soundtrack. That whole game was meant to be the start of a kind of weird series playing on old Doctor Who and scifi but I wasn't that good at it!

V. Mescherin - On The Beach is weird russian exotica stuff that was the original soundtrack for Too Many Kittens.

Loz Zafiros - Bossa Cubana made me want to make a game called "Cannibal Yacht" about a yacht of rich people (portrayed by wooden cutout doll things) who begin to hunt and eat each other to survive in a classwar-bmovie thing. I never got around to it either although I still have the dolls somewhere.

also Space Funeral was mostly based on that Les Rallizes Denudes song at the start. At first it was about an actual funeral in space.

other than that i've been inspired in graphics by old stopmotion childrens shows like Clangers and J Chastain's Monster Killers comics. In terms of writing I like a lot of people but stuff like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Bertolt Brecht's plays and also Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces were what influenced my games etc. And people like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and Theodor Adorno are who make me really want to write but lets not get pretentious gulp.
In terms of writing for the games themselves I'm most inspired by the bizarre and amazing dialogue from Links Awakening and the similarly amazing writing and style of the Krazy Kat comicstrip.

I like the Majora's Mask world a lot. It's sort of a pity the game mechanics discouraged you from exploring it too much what with the three-day-and-reset limit that made it hard to do things like unfreeze the goron place and unpollute the swamp etc. It seemed uh a lot more bizarre and imaginative than Ocarina Of Time or any generic medievalesque kingdoms generally. Huge stone mushrooms and isolated windmills surronded by undead and tropical bays and toxic swamps. Upside-down palaces and an enormous horrifying moon hovering over everything. Also the NPCs were weird and interesting and had neat quests. Even the colour scheme looked exciting where instead of generic muted greens and browns there were sudden purple splotches or whatever. It was basically all like a warped chinese bootleg copy of generic OoT fantasy world where everything is just that bit stranger and more unpleasant and I liked it a lot.

Shoutout as well to Links Awakening which was entirely insane *wanders into random cave, talks to an enormous dancing fish which teaches you a flute song that warps you to a pond where a ghost suddenly starts following you around* also sudden houses filled with bananas and crocodiles for no real reason but it lacked the.... 3D spacecharm...

also ahahah WHILE WERE ON SUBJECT OF N64 there was that amazing Pilotwings birdman level where you just float around ridiculous lowpoly replica of entire american continent which was pretty fantastic.

What else. Mario World mapscreen + mapscreens generally. Wandering around Monkey Island multiverse with goofy ska soundtrack. ahahah gameboy mario game with bizarre use of realworld locations / EASTER ISLAND POPULATED BY ENORMOUS HOPPING HEADS

also this