GUTLESS - the game that set me on a gamedev journey
My friend once said, "I cannot imagine seeing something great and not wanting to do it yourself."
It's a phrase that's stayed with me ever since. Last year, I saw this tweet being shared around. Certain things always have their own audience. Some people will play any game with frogs. We all know that one dude who consumes superhero movies on day one.
Me? I like deep sea monsters.
So I clicked on it. Domino Club? Never heard of these devs! (Later, I'd find out that it's a collection of anonymous game devs). I then proceeded to stare at a loading screen for more than a minute. Turns out, that was the title screen, and I had to scroll down to find the start button. :host-stare:
You play as Kinji Kitajima, captain of a sub aptly named the Charybdis. If you know the Greek myth, you know you're in for a hell of a ride. To say anymore would be a spoiler, and I'd rather take this opportunity to say: go play the game here.
Get inside that sub. You're going down and down and down. As the game progresses, the log at the top of the screen gradually ticks onward. Each transition, each wipe, a plunge into darkness. Your crew begins to fragment. Morale disintegrates. The sub. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? You're in a sub. There's no way out. You are the sub. There's no separation anymore. The ship personnified to a literal extreme.
Of course, you--the player--think there's an alternative. Go back to the surface with all your shattered relationships, to society with bloodied hands and a permanent disfigurement from a habit that has cut you into shreds. Still, you go deeper, you embed yourself into your craft, the chase (always the chase), until--ah shit. You're in too deep. You ask if we can still decompress? I think our ballasts are broken.
Captain, please--
It's a haunting depiction of monsters we know too well: of depression, alcoholism, the sheer anxieties (did she love me for my achievements--did she love me at all?), the doubts that drag us deep into spiraling thoughts, rumination as our propellers.
As my friend said, "I cannot imagine seeing something great and not wanting to do it yourself."
He is a beautiful man down to his heart and soul, a laissez-faire attitude, a joker, a clown, and an absolute asshole (as all my closest friends are). He saw an improv show during a comedy night and decided then and there he would chase it. He now does a group show.
My other friend looks at stuff like Avatar and the concept art in The Last of Us and says that's what he wants to be: the guy whose art is stuck on the walls of the director's rooms. He's worked at Weta Workshop (a terrible, abusive place to go. he experienced firsthand it's best not to meet your idols), Netflix, and is now training with the art directors at Dreamworks and with some of the people who did Spiderverse.
And me? GUTLESS is that game. It is simple in its beauty. No sprites, no flashy intros, no openings, no tutorials, this is familiar territory, this is as close to a novel/short story as it gets. And yet, it is still fully its own self: a visual novel. The writing has a pulse. My speakers throb with the currents of the deep sea dive. I click on words and they ooze pressurized doom across my screen.
I experienced something amazing and I couldn't fathom not giving it a try.
But before I could start, a good friend @damon told me, "The happiest people I know in gamedev are those who don't actually do it as a day job."
It's a cautionary warning. It echoes a sentiment I often tell my friends: "Don't ever become a writer. I am suffering. I am killing myself. I would not wish this fate upon anyone else."
I will not glorify any of this. I refuse to. Great art is made in spite of suffering, not because of it, as many who take advantage of our labour would wish us to believe. I have cried while navigating the jungle of publishing, I have witnessed great injustice, I have had hopes and dreams built up over two whole years only for it to be dashed in an instant. Things are always out of my control.
And yet you couldn't take me away from it. You can't tell me there's an alternative, that I can still surface or breathe, because I'm too mired in my craft. I've given up too much. Turn back? Turn back? Don't you know who I am? I'm Captain Kinji--
No.
There's still kindness here if you look for it. When I make mistakes, I hear library voices instead of scorn. The structure is broken, the form is FUCKED, and we're barely functioning, but we're getting there. There's companionship even in the isolation that comes from writing. A warmth, even when I feel like I'm trapped in a sub.
I still maintain that nobody should be a writer (in the professional sense). But you won't see me changing my course.
So here we go.
THE GOOD WEAPON came from a short story that was kicking in my brain for quite a bit. I knew how I wanted the turning point of the story to be, a rough idea for an ending, and then I just jumped right into it.
Here's what it took for me to get to a working prototype:
1 hour of brainstorming/testing the idea
3 hours of workshopping the script with a friend
12 hours of writing (to get to a usable first draft)
And then, the completely unexpected thing I had to do: programming. You're probably laughing, but I literally didn't even think about this aspect.
All my friends are artists and writers. None of them are programmers/coders. There was literally nobody I could turn to for help. I was stuck. I went to bed multiple days in a row just lying there, absolutely paralyzed at this prospect.
I was broken. I didn't (and still don't) understand code. Did I spend four hours bashing my head against a wall because I forgot a space? What does this line even mean at ALL?
Oh god.
- 9 hours of twine
No. No, no, no, this program doesn't do what I want it to do. The text has to advance slowly, why is it flashing out in an instant? Why can't I insert art? I don't understand this documentation. This other problem has NO DOCUMENTATION. I also need this asset to dissolve in, I want the text to be formatted this way, and some sound effects need to play in between this transition and that--
I'm sure more capable people have managed to wrestle that program into submission, but I have literally zero programming knowledge. I don't know anything other than 'hello world' memes. I don't actually understand how to use github.
I look at any Twine game with effects and non-basic functionality in awe now.
- 3 hours of INK (and then Calico)
I could barely get it to BOOT. It feels like it was written for someone who has rudimentary knowledge on gamedev, because after three hours, I couldn't even get words to appear on the screen. I don't understand where I went wrong because I don't even think I'm at the starting line. I'm still at home trying to learn how to tie my fucking shoes!
"Using gathers", "Nested gathers", Parser classes, "Tags added to the Tags class will apply before or after a line has been assembled"--I am the dumbest person in the world. I definitely didn't attend parser class because I certainly don't parse this jargon. And even if I did, I looked ahead to see what I wanted to accomplish, and I realized that there were no guides. There are so many beautiful INK games where they do amazing things like having the art follow your mouse cursor, but I couldn't find a tutorial for that. I could not find how to insert sound.
So I gave up on it. It seemed like I needed to be able to do CSS crimes or whatever.
That leaves me Ren'py.
- 22 hours of Ren'py
My god. A tutorial. An actual, functioning tutorial with examples. Some old documentation and forum threads (that are now defunct). I am trying. Words are slowly appearing on the screen. The formatting is all wrong. I am still trying. I don't know how to fix the resolution, I don't understand gui, and TO THIS DAY my script.rpy in Visual Studio Code is wonky and has resolution issues (google tells me this is a windows problem but I've tried six solutions and nothing has fixed it. I simply code with the resolution and window constantly changing and blurring).:eggbug-sob:
I am struggling. But I am getting somewhere.
There are some absolutely beautiful games made in Ren'py. Shoutout to Amarantus which is a labour of love. You can't fully appreciate the beauty of Amarantus until you try to make something in Ren'py yourself. The transitions. The animations. The characters blink. The text boxes. The art assets. The way it all comes together as a coherent whole.
Amarantus is beautiful. You should check it out.
Meanwhile, I am copy and pasting and hoping things work, because nobody explains their code. I don't understand anything. Questions I ask get met with comments like, "It's so easy, just figure it out." I spent three hours googling a problem I made myself because I manually coded in every mouse click which caused certain text advances to double up.
22 hours of Ren'py later, I have my first prototype. It crashes ten times. It takes twenty fixes before it runs from beginning to end. I haven't properly edited the script yet.
My friend reminds me that "It's going to be shit, and that's okay."
And he's right. It's my first game. I won't know what makes a good game until I make more of them.
And when I'm tearing my hair out and looking at code, I think about GUTLESS a lot. I think about how pure it is in its presentation, and how it effectively leverages the medium and all its strengths to tell a story.
I remember how beautiful it is and how it makes me want to create my own.
I still don't know who GUTLESS is made by, but I hope they're doing well. I can't click on the words HAGFISH CONSORTIUM and SENSORY LEAKAGE on the itchio page. I can only assume that is the whole point of Domino Club--to make games and be true in its pursuit and nothing more.
When I think about that, it doesn't feel like I'm sinking anymore.
It's nice to swim.
EDIT: I do know who GUTLESS is made by now btw! They're incredibly kind people that I've gotten to spoken to and I love them dearly!