A Symbolic Analysis of "Banality"

To the loyal readers of my blog, this post was originally created in video form. If you want to read the script to the video, you've come to the right place.

Watch the video here, but read the script below.

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After another long while of either procrastinating, working on my latest project or doing literally anything else, I’ve finally put together a suitable analysis post for my game, Banality.

If you haven’t already, I would recommend taking a look at my previous post on Homogeny for some context on this one, though it isn’t necessarily vital. Additionally, you can download and play Banality for free, link is in the description.

The game opens with the character in their bedroom, but unlike as in Homogeny, they are not sitting on their bed. Where the bed represents the character’s comfort zone, the opening line “What now?” creates the idea that they are beginning to question things outside of their comfort zone.

The opening level bears a remarkable resemblance to my previous project, Yet Another Puzzle Game, which could be considered a prequel to the formative sequence displayed in the main trilogy. “Yet Another Puzzle Game” draws attention to the ephemeral and simplistic nature of things commonly heralded as “the standard” - the standard in this case being an incredibly simple puzzle. The same soundclip of me saying [puzzle] gets cut off and launches the character into the second level.

This is intended to symbolize the fact that after the events of Homogeny, the character can now realize that a button and a door laid side-by-side does not in fact constitute a challenging puzzle, and similarly, the things previously taken as entertaining are being outed as trivial.

The building in the second level is actually just to symbolize a social institution – perhaps a school would be fitting, as the other characters visible in the building represent two states of being. The first two are lethargically laying down as the player passes, while the last is standing up, but has their back turned to the exit and is looking down – they have no aspirations.

Pressing the “A” button to speak to any of these characters plays a short sequence of the main character on a platform being lowered into a kind of grave. They become less “alive” and more like the zombies that surround them, as shown by the greying of the character’s eyes. The sound effect – distorted noise – is designed to symbolize the total lack of meaning in anything being spoken between them.

The third level is somewhat more difficult. Even being near the other characters at this time will cause the grave sequence. This is to symbolize that as time goes on and the character moves further away from other people, becoming more stoic, they become more aware of the faults and imperfections and become even more repulsed by them.

There are three non-player characters in this level, each symbolizing three more states of being. The first one is stuck in a hole, to symbolize people who can’t – through no fault of their own – escape where they are now and achieve what they wan to achieve. The next most egregious form of bloody normie is, as detailed in the last level, those who are too lazy or unmotivated to achieve what they want to achieve.

The final character is laying prone under the ground, who has become too used to inactivity and sheer lack of creativity that they have lost the ability to achieve at all.

The word “regret” appears on the screen before the game exits. “Regret” in fact refers to the themes of the third game in the trilogy, Monotony. 

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If you have done, thanks for reading. Only time will tell whether or not the symbolic analysis of Monotony is a video or in text. Stay tuned!

The final instalment in the trilogy, "Monotony", is released!

Hooray! After about a week of work, Monotony has been released. If you're interested in avant-garde art-y games, appreciative of some good atmosphere or just want a 5-minute experience to kill time - this game is for you.

You can download it below.



If you haven't already, I highly recommend you look into Monotony's predecessors for some fairly useful context.

You can download the first in the series, Homogeny, below.



And of course, the second game in the series can be downloaded below.



If you have done, thanks for following the development cycle of these games, and I hope you enjoy! Stay tuned.

Discussing the themes of "Homogeny"

After a lot of actual game development/other writing/other things, the analysis post is here!

If you haven't already, you can download and play Homogeny for free right here.


A fairly notable focus of discussion is actually as to why I even decided to create this game. The answer is split between because I liked the art style after having created Yet Another Puzzle Game, and because I wanted to create a very art-centric game.

The latter was actually prompted by a few very "avant-garde" YouTube videos, and I got jealous of the fact that the medium of a YouTube video can be used in such a way. It was shortly afterwards that I realized I could probably do something pretty similar in a game, so I tried to do just that(minus the "horror" aspect, which was incidentally very present in the two I linked).

The themes in Homogeny are, as you may have guessed, not intended to be frivolous.

To sum it up in a single word, the game as a whole represents "realization", as I retroactively fit it into a three-part story centred around misanthropy -- but we'll come to that in a few posts' time.

The full script - i.e the correct answers - can be found here.

The first presentation wasn't particularly special in that the first few sentences were a little bit clunky, entirely unguided and not really intended to mean anything. The first sentence I put some thought into was "The future of this convention is concerning", which serves to set up what comes next.

I mentioned that this trilogy - and by extension, this game - is ultimately about misanthropy. This is manifested in the character's fairly inelegant suggestion to totally disband the convention -  the character is callous either to the possibility that others may take offence to this statement, or totally callous to it altogether.

The next presentation immediately starts immediately with a continuation the first presentation - a year ago in the game's universe. The lack of new material to discuss enforces the idea that the character, despite their arguably gauche attitude, is correct in what they are saying. They do not offer an apology, but instead passive-aggressively chastises the attendants for not following an instruction which he did not actually deliver.

A common trait of people living with Narcissistic Personality Disorder is to claim that they did say or do something which they did not, or vice versa. This is known as "gaslighting", and gaslighting is exactly what the character is doing here. Additionally, at no point does the character actually apologize, and in fact goes so far as to shift the blame by implying that their "intention" is something separate from themselves - but immediately claiming a much more amiable position of wanting to "inspire innovation".

The third and final presentation is fairly short. It consists of only a few sentences, in which the character does almost directly chastise the audience for not innovating, nor heeding his advice.

Though it's fairly insignificant, this is the place to mention it: In this paragraph, the character creates an excuse to scold the audience twice, by rephrasing their first sentence despite its almost identical meaning.

The character claims that they will not be attending any more conventions. The term "convention" in itself implies that it is normal or "conventional"heh to attend them. The character ends the first game with a perfect lead-in to the themes of the second game.

The penultimate thing to notice is the final sentence of each presentation - "Thank you for your time". It was intended to be perfectly carbon-copied between presentations to imply that the character does not find it easy to abide by social norms/pleasantries, but manages by way of rote memorization.

Perhaps that was a bit of a stretch. A lot of what I put into this game was never intended to be picked up on or realized, because simply put - people don't (and shouldn't) put in enough time to try to scrape this much meaning out of what is a fairly short body of text.

Either way, I hope you enjoyed reading this! If you have any alternate interpretations, even if they starkly contrast with what I've written here, I'd be interested to hear them.

If you have done, thank you for reading! Stay tuned for a similar post on "Banality" in a week or so!

It's release day for Banality!

The second game in the trilogy, Banality is the sequel to my prior game, Homogeny.

Banality is slightly more of a "walking simulator" than Homogeny, but it shares the same art style and central themes, as will my next project, named Monotony.


Banality is a very short game, with a grand total of 3 "levels".

Download it below, but more importantly, stay tuned for Monotony, the final instalment.

Banality

It's been a while(approximately 5 days) since my last one of these!

I've been continuing to work on Banality. It's going to be very slightly longer than Homogeny, and I expect the third in the series is going to be longer still.

Here's a screenshot!

To give the fine readers of my blog a small hint, this is not a screen that you want to see.

Either way, I'm slowly getting better at using GIMP to create assets, as shown by the sick-as-hell little pulley thing in the screenshot above.

I'm more happy with the way that this game is going than I was with Homogeny. Homogeny was fine for what it was, though the UI could have done with some improvement, and I think it could have been a little bit more visually interesting.

While Banality isn't much more visually interesting, it is somewhat more polished, and does not suffer from the same UI issue as its predecessor. This is because there isn't actually any UI. Sorry.

Regardless, stay tuned for more soon. The whole game should be done in about a week. It is not a large project.

In any case, if you have done, thanks for reading!

P.S. I'm in the process of writing the explanation post for Homogeny's existence. I'm not sure how long it will take me, I need to make sure this expresses why I made it as accurately as possible.

The sequel to "Homogeny"

Some of you may be aware that I recently released the game "Homogeny", which a few people seemed to enjoy. Seeing as I have an inability to not constantly have a project running, I've got a sequel in progress, named "Banality".

Unsurprisingly, this is in the same vein and art style as its predecessor. Devoid of particularly interesting mechanics, but saturated in analytical value and artistic expression.

Hmm.

I was going to continue this post with an explanation of Homogeny's themes, maybe detailing some of my influences, maybe even an early screenshot of Banality.

I'll leave that for another day.

This post is now about my view on artistic expression in video games.

"Artistic Expression" in Video Games

Followers of my work might have realized by now that I am one of the strongest subscribers to the idea that video games are art, perhaps to a fault. 

I say "to a fault" because the games I have produced so far have been primarily walking simulators - not very marketable to most. Of course, games like Proteus or even Dear Esther have been successful, and to varying degrees have earned their successes. 

The games I have and will continue to create are saturated in cryptic interpretations and messages, some more obscure than others, as anyone who has played Homogeny or Yet Another Puzzle Game can attest to.

The question most worthy of debate, "How much of this avant-garde bullshit artistic saturation is too much?"

First, let's explore the term "artistic saturation" and what I mean by this. I am referring specifically to the kind of avant-garde bullshit cryptic messages and implications that are placed in certain video games.

A fairly popular example is that of Bloodborne, which is highly inspired by H.P Lovecraft's work, and unsurprisingly shares the theme of demonization of humanity. 

In Bloodborne, this is conveyed by the ways the beasthood curse is explored -- exact examples of this are left as an exercise to the reader, in part because I don't want to spend half of this post talking about Bloodborne and in part because I believe the game is best interpreted by the individual on a very personal basis.

The most interesting part of the question are the words "too much".

What exactly defines "too much" artistic saturation? Is it when the mechanics of the game are compromised for the art's sake?

Surely, the reverse situation is just as unacceptable - this leads us into a terrible paradox, where neither can coexist. 

Maybe it's not about compromise of other components of the game. Maybe it's instead about its accessibility to the players?

This comes down to the game's purpose. If the game is designed to be mass-marketable and should be accessible to its players, then this becomes a consideration. However, if the game is made by a small hobby indie team, it has no obligation to be mass-marketable, assuming they are not financially dependant on it. 

Ultimately, it seems that there is no such thing as "too much". What a pleasant result, given that the way I develop games is nearly Souls-like in the way it tells a story or narrative while rarely directly divulging information. It requires analytical thought and some imagination to create a story that can be truly enjoyed.

I suppose that what I'm trying to say is quite simply that I'm developing the Dark Souls of walking simulators.

^this is sarcastic

In any case, if you have done, thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more avant-garde bullshit interesting content.

"Homogeny" came a little early!

Remember two days ago when I said "end of February"?

Turns out I'm awful at predicting my own work flow. It's not a massive game, but it's decidedly larger than "Yet Another Puzzle Game".

Click to download "Homogeny"!

As usual, let me know what you think of it. I plan to make more games in this universe/style.

Enjoy! If you have done, thanks for reading(and playing!)

What's going on with Spiderman in the Rhineland?

Over the past few weeks, I've felt compelled to discuss received a few hundreds concerned emails from my fans as to where "Spiderman in the Rhineland" falls between my other side projects.

Seeing as I want to shill my new project fans are excitedly clamouring for new information, I've decided that I'm going to state fairly "officially" that the game is currently on the backburner.

The reason for this is that I've had some ideas for new mechanics, narratives, ARGs, trying new art styles and techniques but most importantly I want to make something on my own accord.

I want to be the creator of my own crazy art pieces games, rather than have them be written by someone else.

That being said, I expect I'll resume work on it either if I run out of ideas of other things to create and have some time on my hands(ha) or come the month of June this year, when production of the next Track should be set to go forward.

Now with the preamble out of the way, a screenshot from my new project:

This style may look familiar for the many few one of you who follows me and my work. This is the same art style as was shown off in "Yet Another Puzzle Game". I liked it so much that I have decided I'm going to make a marginally larger project out of it. I can't say with much certainty how long it will take, but it should be finished before the end of February.

The central mechanic is that the player character is forced to deliver a presentation they haven't prepared for. The player must select the most appropriate out of three sentences before a given number of seconds has elapsed. Fairly simple conceptually, but I like it.

Besides, the mechanic is merely the canvas on which a greater artistic expression can be painted...