Ludum Dare 46, Illusion of Gaia, anxiety, narratives in the SNES era

Well, let's see...

We made a game for Ludum Dare 46!  Was stressful but fun.  We still need to make some improvements to the menu and such, and I'm working on the mobile port (just got done debugging a really annoying issue -- apparently CPUParticles crash the app on iOS unless you have a default environment!).  You can check it out here if you'd like in the meantime, or just wait for the improved version. (and yes I'm fully aware that most of you are reading the copy-pasted version of this that won't even have the inline link)

Been continuing to do alttpr seeds -- the latest one I had terrible luck on, and last-locationed an item that I skipped early on.  Bleh.  It happens, I guess.

My birthday came and went.  Of course, I was waist deep in the middle of LD when it happened, so I had no time at all to really think about it, but you know, that's how it goes -- far from the first time this has happened, actually.  It was nice hearing from a bunch of people, even if I didn't really process any of it until afterwards.

The stress of Ludum Dare along with some other stuff resulted in me getting a sort of anxiety attack on Saturday night, which was not very fun at all.  I don't really get these, at least not like this where I wake up in the middle of the night with a bad feeling in my chest and have trouble sleeping again.  I've definitely felt that sensation of stress and/or anxiety in my chest before, but very rare for it to just prop up so suddenly in the middle of sleeping.  Thankfully, that seemed to have been an isolated incident, though for those couple of nights after LD I was still sort of cooling down from it all.  I imagine I should probably find some time to do Tai Chi again as a sort of catch-all physical/mental integrated feel-good practice.

I started up my playthrough of Illusion of Gaia.  No SNES-era game is without its faults (well, perhaps no game ever, really), and Illusion of Gaia, like most other games of the time, doesn't really have the best or most well-put together story.  But what the games of this time lack in narrative and plot they really make up for in charm and atmosphere.  There is so much that can be carried by a game's look, feel, and sound...see Secret of Mana for a perfect example of this.

Illusion of Gaia is a pretty significant step up from Soul Blazer in that the dungeons (at least from what I remember) are quite a lot more interesting to go through, and combat and movement in general is just more smooth, more active, and less tedious.  The environments are a charm to explore and move to as well, with multi-level buildings...just the simple act of running around (you can =run=!) feels great.  And of course the music is great too -- the Itory Village music really sticks out as a really really good "peaceful town" theme and I'm actually still sampling the pan flute instrument from the soundtrack in my tracks today.

It really took a looooong time for video game narrative and writing to catch up.....and even then, the stories that are actually poignant and well-told (looking at you, Journey, Undertale, and omg One Shot) are so few and far between.  To be fair, I have yet to go through both Terranigma and Mother 3, so there's that.  But it's really hard to think of games that tell a good story, even thinking about all of the games in this entire period of time.  Maybe FF6?  FF6 certainly has a LOT going on, but I don't know if I've ever really felt the narratives of final fantasy games really compel me.  When I think about compelling narratives I think of really well put-together environments, I think of well-done moments, I think of storytelling that shows instead of tells.  There is a scene in the water in Cave Story, for example, which does this really poignantly.  And even the "story" (if it could even be called that) of Yume Nikki, really makes you think about things a bit.  But I don't think any games from the beloved SNES era really capture any of those feelings.  Our art form really needed a lot of time to mature, and perhaps beyond that, it really needed the influence of indie games, which simply did not exist back then.  You see all of these one-person and small-team games like Yume Nikki, Undertale, OneShot, Night in the Woods and others, really take risks in their storytelling, because the creator really has a story to tell, and because that story doesn't have to be diluted.  These creators can go out on a limb and tell a story that perhaps won't have the mass-market appeal of a shounen hero fantasy, but will really connect with people when it matters.  I know because we've tried too, and dare I say succeeded.  And it's a wonderful thing, to connect with your audience in that way.