Rise of Magus Script Available

I've decided to make the script to The Rise of Magus available after it was requested by some French fans who want to translate the game. It's a direct transcription of text from the game editor, which means that it contains pound signs (#) to represent line breaks in a dialogue box, and bits of text will be labeled things like "textline12", which is how I refer to lines of dialogue. I've formatted things and added a table of contents to make it a little more reader-friendly though, and I even put it in .doc format even though I put it together in Open Office. See how nice I am?

You can get it here: http://silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus/RiseofMagusTranscript.doc

One more thing - the script contains spoilers (obviously), so if you want to uncover the secrets of the game on your own, don't read it.

-Silent Ellipsis

The Rise of Magus Version 1.5

Well it's been a while since I posted about the game, but The Rise of Magus is back! The new version 1.5 of the game includes a huge number of fixes and improvements, as well as unlockable content that extends the game. The truth is, this is the game that I envisioned releasing when I first started working on the project, but after almost a year of work I decided to wrap things up and release The Rise of Magus at the conclusion of the main story arc.

I included, however, a hidden item, the Hero's Medal, which when found displayed the following message: "You've found the Hero's Medal! This unlocks something the designer hasn't added yet, but will." I assumed no one would get quite into the game enough to ever find this thing. I was wrong. I got emails and saw forum discussions postulating theories about about what it was the item might unlock, and wondering when the update would be released. So I went and added "one more thing" that gets unlocked by the Hero's Medal. Then I added one more thing. Then another thing got added somehow. Before I knew it I was revamping the entire game and adding a second game on top of it. This process was disrupted for a long time by distractions from the real world, but now I've finally added all of the "one more" things I ever intended to, and I think the game is ready to be played.

I feel like I should have a brief list of changes somewhere, and my blog is as good a place as any, so here's the short version:

• The game is now built in Game Maker 8. The good news is that this means the game loads and runs much faster than before, even though there are more things to be loaded. It still takes up a fair amount of memory, though, and GM8 doesn't give me many options for reducing memory usage, aside from simply making the game smaller. The other downside with GM8 is that it broke all kinds of random things in the game, which took a while to fix. But I guess that was only a downside for me.
• Nifty icon! It was always a little sad to have the game represented by a featureless red sphere, so now it shows a statue of Magus. You can take pride in having this on your desktop.
• The menu now has music. This seems to have a bigger psychological effect than I expected.
• There is now a level cap (30), with a nice extra health boost acquired when this level is reached. This provides something against which to balance to hardest, optional parts of the game.
• Enemy behavior is improved. For instance, they are much better at walking up and down stairs and around obstacles. The new content also features whole new levels of enemy AI.
• The attack collision system has been completely redone. This has eliminated a slew of (admittedly rare) glitches involving hitting enemies. Most notably, from time to time enemies used to take damage from an attack without getting "hit" by it, meaning they wouldn't stagger and could survive at negative health. This doesn't happen anymore.
• Level layouts have been subtly altered, in particular to make jumping about more forgiving at the beginning of the game before players have any idea what they're doing.
• The save system has been updated. Now all bosses offer a "retry" option on death, circumventing the need to reload from the last save point and helping avoid the "oh crap I forgot to save" problem. The downside is that save files from the original version aren't compatible with version 1.5, but you wanted to start from the beginning anyway, right? Actually, this downside was kind of intentional, because allowing players to load the previous version's save files would produce all manner of strange glitches.
• An option to return to Bekkler's Castle has been added after the Bekkler fight, so that players have the opportunity to go back and purchase upgrades and prepare for the Epilogue battle.
• Volume controls have been added, and are controlled with Page Up and Page Down. The volumes are High, Low, and Mute (High is the default volume). I guess this makes the game easier to play surreptitiously at work...hypothetically.
• Hints have been added to a couple places where players often got confused. These hints take the form of a sparkly blue light that appears if the player passes the same room multiple times without finding the intended exit or is unable to figure out how to progress from a room for a long time. Experienced players might not ever run into them.
• Pedants will be pleased to know that the Ruby Sword is now the only sword that any knight wields that appears red-colored.
• It is no longer possible anywhere to jump out of the game through the ceiling unless the ceiling is an intended exit.
• The Hero's Medal, rather than doing nothing, now unlocks new content called "The Duel" from the Extras menu. The picture at the top of this post offers a hint as to what "The Duel" is.
• Completion of The Duel unlocks additional playable content, which in turn unlocks more, but I don't want to give away the surprise as to what this content consists of.
• Many, many changes were made to make the controls smoother, sprites and text cleaner looking, glitches unglitched, and enemies and attacks more balanced.

The short, short version is that the game is more epic and more immersive, and it's hard to put into words how I feel about it now, so you should really just go download it from here:

http://silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus

-Silent Ellipsis

The Rise of Magus: Big in France

Apparently French people respond well to my game. I noticed today a visit to the site that came from a search on google.fr, and I checked it out to find that someone had created and uploaded a 10 minute gameplay video on Dailymotion.

It also included a link to a forum discussion going on about it (in French), which included a request for a translation. Now, I'm confident enough in my French to post on there and say hi, but not to try translating dialogue myself. What's more, I don't think Game Maker supports accents or most foreign characters.

That said, if someone wants to translate the game into French or any other language, I'll try to plug the translation into the game and release an alternate language version.

Rise of Magus Site Down

*Update June 25: The site is back up now at http://silentellipsis.com

Due to an issue with the server I'm using, silentellipsis.com and the main page for The Rise of Magus are temporarily down. The issue should be resolved soon, but in the meantime, the domain will redirect to my blog here. You can still play the game on YoYo Games here:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/81474

You can also download the game from any of these locations:

CNET
Softpedia
ZDNet

-Silent Ellipsis

Chrono Compendium Post (also: Jason Rohrer)

Today, when I went to check on traffic to silentellipsis.com, I noticed a sudden spike in the numbers, and subsequently that many of these new users were coming from chronocompendium.com. Sure enough, my game, The Rise of Magus, had been mentioned on the front page of the site.

As I mentioned before (and as has been reported across the internet at this point), the main project for the site got shut down by a cease and desist order from SquareEnix about a month ago (in fact, it was posted on the very same day I intended to submit The Rise of Magus to be posted on their site), so I'd expected that in the immediate aftermath my game probably wasn't going to get much mention. I appreciate the fact that my game was eventually brought up (and in a positive light). Maybe now I'll get more feedback from people on it and feel compelled to add a couple bonus features that I didn't get around to.

---

In other news, I've been playing Jason Rohrer's games lately. He's essentially a crazy independent programmer making an earnest attempt at using games as an artistic medium of expression, and for what they are, they're very good.

Primrose is a very good puzzle game, though it lacks any implicit narrative that would give it the same impact as some of his other games. The game that struck me most was Passage, and Gravitation was also a fascinating game. Between didn't impress me as much, and I'll describe why below - these games largely depend for their effect on the player not knowing what it is they're supposed to expect, so I'm going to avoid describing them as much as possible prior to my spoiler warning tag:

SPOILER WARNING (for the remainder of the post)

Ok, so now that we're past the spoiler warning, I'll spoil your ability to properly experience the games I mentioned above.

Passage is a game that presents itself as being about perception and time. The game has a set time limit, and as it progresses, your apparent position on the screen shifts (while the room moves under you as you walk around), and you are only able to clearly see that portions of the screen closest to your current appear position. This is interesting, and it's kind of touching just to see your character grow old (possibly with a partner, possibly not), but I say that this is how it "presents itself" because I think what's really interesting is the implicit subject matter: games.

Passage includes a number in the upper right that grows as you move right and as you find stars hidden in treasure chests. It also allows you to explore freely, has maze-like sections, and presents new environments as you move right. Gamers will naturally take the number in the upper-right to be your score, but it's immediately unclear that getting a high score is actually your objective. It might instead be to make as much progress right as possible, attempting to reach an unknown "destination", or it might simply be to explore the maze-like areas in the hopes of finding something interesting.

Since you only have a few minutes to play the game before your character grows old and die, you cannot do everything in one playthrough, and each time you play the game you might play it very differently. This, it seems to me, is the real point - when presented with a set of rules and a virtual environment, our nature is to find a goal and strive for it, and Passage leaves your own psychology bare as you play it.

Gravitation is very similar, this time in platformer format. You begin in a room which you can only see a small portion of, and when you "warm up" you can leap straight out of the room and up to untold heights. Eventually, however, you will start to feel "cold" again and feel your power drain out of you (and sight limit itself) - you can gain boosts of warmth by collecting stars, but you'll soon find that you get cold faster and faster afterwards until you cannot progress. At this point, you can wait forself to slowly heat up, or head back down to the beginning to stand by the fire. If you go down, you will find blocks of ice that have appeared, and you can score "points" and warm up faster by pushing them into the fire. Once you're warm, you can continue exploring above yourself.

Here's the interesting part. I started realizing as I played that collecting stars wasn't actually increasing my score, and at some point I realized that the stars, which fell after being collected, were actually becoming the blocks of ice at the bottom of the level. That is, these items that we are used to associating with bonus points (or temporary invincibility) are being subverted, and now both help and hinder my progress. For that matter, it's not clear that I am making progress, because nothing ever indicated to me that I'm supposed to be climbing up - it just seems like the correct course of action.

The experience of having your own assumptions about what it means to be playing a game brought into question was really quite exceptional. So I decided to ask my friend to play the next game in the list, Between, with me (it's mandatory multiplayer). This game presents you with the ability to spawn blocks of three colors, and the ability to travel to different "worlds" by either going to sleep (the S key) or waking up (the W key), which circle around. There's a tower that can apparently be constructed out of your blocks in each world, but after minor progress you will see that the tower requires colors you cannot make. Then, when waking one day, you find these blocks you could not have made yourself, that allow you to continue building, and they are signs of another, who you cannot see.

This is the intended concept of the game, clearly, but it simply didn't work for me. The reasons for this are fairly simple. Firstly, it didn't work because I knew that thre was another person involved...the game is multiplayer by fiat! As such the "revelation" that there was someone else affecting my game was instead a sense of "is there any other way we can interact?" followed by a resounding "no." Secondly, the objective is too clear. Now, this is possibly the only game that I will ever accuse of having an objective that's "too clear", but it's true in this case. As I mentioned, what was interesting about the last two games was the fact that the objective was obscured, and you were never sure what counted as progress. Now, I have a very clear objective before me, but the consequence is the sheer amount of work needed to complete it is also clear, and I spent most of that time recognizing that I probably would get nothing for the effort in the end - and I was right. I completed the tower and nothing happened.

I'm not sure what exactly could have been done to make Between work better. I think it is an interesting idea, but ultimately one that probably cannot be properly made into a game. If nothing else, in a game this simple it's impossible to convince me that blocks appearing is proof of "another" because the game could simply be producing the blocks for me - in a world whose rules I don't already fully know, I cannot possibly know that those rules are being broken.

In any case, that's enough for now, I recommend trying the games out if you don't already feel spoiled (and you should, there was a reason I put that warning up there!).

-Silent Ellipsis

Offline Browsers

My game, The Rise of Magus, is now available on cnet (aka download.com), and has subsequently appeared on every other site that duplicates its content.

That aside, something has occurred to me as seeming obsolete, even though I use it every day – MS Office, and in particular, MS Word. Now I’m actually using the 2003 edition of this stuff right now, so it’s possible I’m naming a few things that are anachronistic, but from my experience with Word 2007, it’s not significantly different – they’ve just made the words “File, Edit, etc.” at the top of the app into icons instead (wow).

What I’m talking about is the fact that Office applications are little standalone apps on your computer that aren’t connected to the web. It seems archaic that when I see a hyperlink in a word document, I not only have to ctrl+click, but that it opens another application to display the content for me. It seems that given just how online our computer experience is overall, I should default, when I want to write text, to a tab in my browser.

Now Google docs theoretically could serve the function I’m talking about, but for some reason I’m just not a consistent user of the service. I guess it’s because I really do need to have documents available offline, and because Google docs emphasizes collaboration so much (so that’s what I use it for).

No, I’m imagining something a little different. When I hit ctrl+t to open a new tab in my browser, I want the url bar to be there for me to use, sure, but what about the page itself? Google’s Chrome uses this to display a list of your favorite sites, but that seems kind of redundant to me, because as soon as I start typing in a url, Firefox will tell me what I’m likely looking for about 3 characters in. What I would really like is to hit ctrl+t and in addition to the ability to type in a url, have a couple of options right there, like a word processor, a file explorer, maybe even games. By and large, I feel like my browser is the center of my computer experience anyway, so why can’t some of my offline content live there, too?

I suppose what I’m really suggesting is that we get more OS-like browsers (or maybe a browser-like OS), because it feels like the distinctions between my online and offline content are relics of a bygone era when going online was something special, not the default state. I don’t know if anyone’s already working on something like this, but I’d like to see it.

The Rise of Magus on yoyogames

The Rise of Magus can be played on the Game Maker site now at:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/81474

There are several nice things about this. For one, it means the game is available even when my site is down (which it apparently was an hour ago). It also means that it's possible for users to play the game without having to download the .exe file (if they install the yoyogames plugin, they can play it off the site), which will hopefully make people less scared of trying it (and I wonder if that works on macs - I should test at some point).

Also, the site keeps track of how many people are playing it and what score they gave it, so that makes it a useful source of feedback for me.

-Silent Ellipsis

The Rise of Magus

Alright, it's time for a post that's both exciting and a little anxious. The exciting part first: I have officially put up version 1.0 of a game that I've been working on for 10 months in my free time. It's called the Rise of Magus, and is a platformer based on the character Magus from Chrono Trigger, a classic Japanese RPG.

The official site for the game is here: www.silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus

If you go to silentellipsis.com, you'll also find a nifty link to this blog (henceforth the official blog of silentellipsis.com). Now, a necessary awesome looking title screen:



Now if the page on the other side of that link looks suspiciously like this one, it's possibly because I just ripped off the style sheet for this blogger page and made a couple changes.

The game was a lot of fun to make - I created it in Game Maker 7 using, among other resources, sprites from Chrono Trigger. That's where we get to the anxious part...

One of the sites on which I found some useful resources was the Chrono Compendium, and I decided that after I finished, I would submit the game to the webmaster and see if they wanted to put up a link to my game.

Today, having just finished my game the night before, I visited the Chrono Compendium to see an announcement that they'd received a cease and desist order from Square Enix over the weekend in reference to some of the other fan projects on the site. Obviously, this did not sound like it boded well for me.

However, when I looked at the cease and desist order more closely, I realized I might be ok afterall. The document (which they link to on their front page) is specifically concered with ROM-hacking, and a quick look through other projects that had previously been linked to showed that the ones to receive cdo's were either:

1) ROM-hacks

or

2) Recreations of the original game

While I'm sympathetic to the webmasters on the Compendium when they say that they disagree with Square's argument, Square has much more justification for ordering stops on these kinds of projects than they would have with one like mine. ROM-hacking, as a practice, enables game piracy, and recreations of the game compete with their own product (and at an advantage, since they're free). Whether or not these projects will actually result in a loss of revenue for Square Enix (I seriously doubt they actually would), the practices have the potential to hinder Square's business.

My game, on the other hand, is not a ROM-hack, mod, or remake of Chrono Trigger. It's an independent game that uses sprites from Chrono Trigger. The fact that the game is a different genre from the game that inspired it does a lot to support the argument that it doesn't directly compete with the original game, and since I didn't do anything with Square's software, I haven't violated any user agreement or tried to circumvent their copy protection.

That's enough for me to go through with putting the game up and posting about it on a couple sites. The folks at Square Enix aren't stupid, and they have no reason to pursue litigation against people who aren't actually threatening their business. What's more, the cdo against the Chrono Compendium shows that they looked into the situation in decent detail, so I doubt they'll be sending me an email just because they're in a litigate-y mood. Of course, they can prove me wrong at any time.

So I don't think I have anything to worry about, and for now will just enjoy the fact that I actually completed this project (of course, if I get enough positive feedback, I'll probably come back and add a little more to it). Seriously, check it out, I think it turned out pretty well.