That led to me creating my first real video editing project that i eventually titled Chain Factor Chaos:

It’s a pretty rough final product execution wise, and conceptually i don’t like what I did with the first big “section” anymore (the first 3’40”), but I’m still incredibly happy with the rest of it leading to the recap transition (3’40”-9’00″ish). A part of me would love to take a second crack at it given the sort of video editing chops I have now, but a) i don’t know that I still have access to the source video anymore, and b) if it came down to it i’d rather do something new from scratch than re-hash an old project.

In any case, when I posted my blog entry that talked about the project, Frank Lantz happened to come across it and commented on it saying how much he liked it. I remember feeling very touched (and, truth be told, a little overwhelmed) that he took the time to write to me. I wrote him an email to say “you’re welcome”, and we had a brief email exchange where he gave me more nice words about it. After that exchange, that was that.

Fast forward eight years later to yesterday.

Recently, a new browser game called Universal Paperclips has made the viral rounds. It’s what some people classify as an “idler”, and it’s a game type i’ve enjoyed playing in the past, so when my brother shared it with me, I said, “sure, i’ll give it a shot.” After I finally finished the game (which ended up taking a few days), there was an end credit line that said, “(c) 2017 by Frank Lantz”.

And i was like, “i recognize that name… oh! It’s the Chain Factor guy!” It took me a moment, but even after eight years I remembered who he was, the interactions we exchanged. So i found him on twitter, and said, “hey, i just finished your new game, remember me?” and he tweeted me back and said, “Of course!”, said he still found the video amazing, and it was nice to reconnect. I told him that his game was great and that I was going to play it as part of a video game marathon for charity, and he tweeted a link to my charity page and also gave me a donation.

Such a random eight-years-apart reconnection made with a damned awesome guy. I might start using twitter more often because it definitely shouldn’t be another eight years before we interact again.

When Advanced Edition was released, i played it off and on (don’t look at me like that.  i did not become obsessed with the game again.  honest.  really.), getting myself familiar with the new Lanius race, the new abilities to hack and mind control, and some of the new weapons and drones in the game.  As i refamiliarized myself with the game from when i first played it a year ago and started to beat Normal Mode more consistently with the AE content, i thrust myself into Hard mode to see if i could beat it.

And yeah.  Hard mode is, well, hard.

The major differences between Hard Mode versus Normal mode are:

• You start off with 0 scrap vs 10 scrap and scrap rewards in general are lower.
• Enemies ships are much tougher, particularly in that there are more enemies with missile weapons and more enemies that will try to escape if their ship health reaches a critical point.
• The Rebel Flagship’s missile weapon room and laser weapon room are now connected to the main body of the ship making it next to impossible to put those weapons out of commission.

(left: Rebel Flagship on Easy/Normal mode.  right: Rebel Flagship on Hard Mode.  Picture credits to ftlwikia.com)

I experimented with a few ships that I thought would have potential to beat the game, failing pretty spectacularly most of the time but learning from all of those failures (ahem… not obsessed).  Eventually I came upon what I thought was the most likely strategy for success and started running that strategy over and over until the right circumstances from the game’s semi-randomness made me well-equipped enough to succeed.

Honestly, i was pretty surprised i was able to pull it off because I never came upon a shop that offered me a Defense II, so my only defense against missiles was Defense I – thankfully my high evasion and the occasional blast into that missile chamber helped me stay alive long enough to employ my main strategy – and also thankfully, the Flagship’s first stage hacking drone decided to hack my backup battery which had minimal impact on my ability to attack or defend.

This post documents my overall strategy and pathway to victory, particularly as it relates to taking advantage of what i feel is a little-known mind control exploit that was key for defeating the Rebel Flagship.  It’s broken into six small sections:

• Ship Selection and General Pre-Boss Battle Strategy
• Building and Upgrading the Ship
• Gameplay Strategy
• What Actually Happened in my Victory Run
• The Mind Control Exploit
• Defeating the Rebel Flagship

Let’s start with the Ship Selection and General Strategy.

The electronic music program in my undergrad at West Chester helped engrain in me a preference of electronic music as an interactive performance art versus a static “tape piece” that involves no live element. Not that i don’t think that tape pieces have value or their place in our modern music history, it can just be more challenging for a piece to resonate with me as both a composer or an audience member if conceived that way.

That’s really a separate discussion; i bring this up because in the past half year or so my brother has started dabbling into creating flash games and i thought it would be fun to try my hand at creating the background music. The more i would discover about some of flash’s flexibility when it comes to music handling, the more my brain shifted the musical conception away from “background music” to “interactive sound experience”.

Most flash games i’ve played across the internet have a typical video game sound paradigm. There are two types of sounds: background music that will change occasionally based on a scene change or a severe game state change, and foreground effects that are more directly interactive with the character. For a lot of games, particularly certain genres of games such as 2-d scrollers, i think that paradigm works pretty well and can only be mucked about with when you have a particularly unique element to the game, but the two games that my brother have in development that i’m involved in are more puzzle like in nature and involve various evolving game states that lend itself well to having the music programmed with a much more direct relationship with what’s happening in the actual game.

It’s hard to explain without the games being complete to show examples; once those games go live i’ll probably write a post about the music and my philosophies behind its creation. But to exemplify the approach i’m taking with these games, here’s a two examples of existing games out there and how i would approach the sound experience with them. The first is a directly interactive sound experience based on gameplay elements, and the second is a more passive sound experience in which the background music evolves based on the evolution of the gameplay story.

Example One: dropsum 1.3

The “arcade game” gameplay has the most diverse gamestates that lend to sound manipulation, so i’m basing my brainstorming off of that.

The first easy thing to consider is the “required” number. The game starts off as a “9 required”. After you complete a certain amount of stages, the game changes to “11 required”, then “15 required”, then “19 required” (which no one has ever reached because it’s frickin’ impossible). This to me naturally lends itself to creating a base music layer that’s founded on time signatures: 9/8 for the 9 required, 11/8 for the 11 required, 15/8 for the 15 required, then probably 4/4 for the 19 required because for those that could ever get that far and are paying attention enough, it will throw them completely off.

The second easy thing to consider is the bubble numbers themselves. When you first start the game, you only get numbers up to 4. As you complete stages, more bubble numbers get added to increase the difficulty. I think the highest number i’ve ever gotten was 12. That lends itself to pitch classes, as in when you only have bubbles numbering up to 4, there’s only 4 pitches in the music vocabulary, when it gets to 5 you add a pitch, &c. I could see this done as either directly correlative to the base 9/8 layer material (the 9/8 layer is a rhythmic ostinato that starts off with 4 pitches and then adds more pitches to it as the numbers go up) or as a separate layer (the 9/8 base layer establishes a tonal vocabulary and a melody is put on top of that that only uses 4 pitches to start but then adds more pitches to it as the numbers go up).

The next thing to consider is color. Color in the bubbles change too quickly for the music to undergo drastic changes; you want the music to be indicative of the gameplay flow, and adding and removing completely new music elements based on the appearance and disappearance of color on the playfield would contradict the gameplay flow and feel disruptive. But the colors are also not ignorable; visually they’re right in your face and they’re key to you succeeding in the game, so for there to be *no* aural correlation to that visual element feels wrong. An easy solution is to have each color represent a timbre and just add that timbre to the existing melody line (based on the “bubble numbers are melody” idea), and maybe the presence (read: volume) of that particular timbre is directly related to how much of that color there is. For example, if the main melody is a piano single-note melody, yellow could be that same melody up the octave with a glock sound that you can only barely hear when there’s 5 or less yellows on the board, and every 5 yellows the volume increases.

Powerups are an interesting thing to this game too mainly because there’s a finite number of powerups that you can have. That’s a severe gameplay flaw, but lends itself great to creating some sort of countermelody or chordal backdrop that gets more ‘full’ the more powerups you have. The problem with that concept is that that aural aesthetic creates a sense of reward for having a full set of powerups which doesn’t quite correlate to real gameplay strategy since you need to get rid of powerups to make way for more powerful powerups if you have a lot of useless ones. That wouldn’t deter me from exploring that idea, but it may prevent me from feeling comfortable using sound in that way because of the contradicting message.

Example Two: The Company of Myself

my youtube playthrough

The music for TCoM is actually very well suited to the game and doesn’t need change. But if philosophically i were to change the music style and approach, it would go something like this:

There’s a typical background music loop that incorporates a melody of some sort. At the start of every new scene, elements of a countermelody get added. Say the countermelody is 12 notes total in a loop. At the end of scene 1, two of those notes get revealed. At the end of scene 2, two more notes get revealed. &c. That countermelody volumewise is clearly put in the background and stays there. This leads up to the scene where we first encounter Kathryn where the countermelody switches from background to foreground, fully complementing the main melody. In the scene where Kathryn “dies”, that countermelody abruptly shuts off.

Actually, at that moment when Kathryn dies, it’d probably be better for the entire music track to shut off for the remainder of that scene. Then when the next scene comes in, there’s a slow fade-in to the main music loop, but there’s a character change to that music loop, something that clearly reflects on the plot reveal of Kathryn’s death. Maybe the Kathryn countermelody is still incorporated, but in a fragmented and dissonant way as opposed to as a complement.

I feel there could be some musical correlation to the creation and execution of “history copies”, but the easy answer of creating some sort of ‘echo’ remnant would require a lot of care in the main loop’s composition to make sure that the echo doesn’t clash with itself. A different approach could be to create a different “flavor” of the main loop for each history iteration, and to enhance that with changing some of the visual background elements upon each history creation. For example, every time that a history iteration needs to be created, create some visual decay or abstractness in the background, and have the music loop include some dissonance or semi-tones that give it a less stable character.

That might have to peak in a level like the last one where you’re creating a *lot* of multiple history copies in order to achieve completion of the level, but if you do it five times and then just leave it, that might not be so bad visually if you’re able to continue the effect aurally in some way at least for another 10 or 15 iterations. it’d be tricky but doable; it probably lends itself to maybe creating a gameplay paradigm where there’s only a finite version of history copies you are allowed to make before you have to restart (which would probably eliminate the last level from existing).

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Those are just two examples off of the top of my head that i feel approach the sound experience in the game differently than the way a lot of game music tends to be implemented. Again, not every game can use this sort of aesthetic, but for games that have that sort of interactive potential – either directly interactive like the first example, or scene/story based evolution like the second example – it feels like something that’s greatly underutilized that could greatly enhance a person’s playing experience and level of depth to the game at both a conscious and subconscious level.

We’ll see how that turns out with my brother’s games once they’re fully developed.

in its infancy, “video game” meant “arcade game”, starting (essentially) with Pong and then developing into a thriving arcade culture of individuals who plopped quarter after quarter gobbling pellets, shooting asteroids or space invaders, or jumping over barrels. And whlie my personal experience in arcades growing up didn’t match the stereotype of angsty/rebellious teenagers, society definitely bought into that impression on both sides of the fence, and as the popularity of video games started to rise so did the concern of parents that video games were a bad influence on youth. Video games are a waste of money, they make our kids not interested in reading, they make our kids violent or lose touch with the real world, &c.

It’s impossible to say where video games would be right now if the Nintendo Entertainment System hadn’t revitalized the home video game industry after the video game crash of 1983. I think it was likely a mixed blessing for arcade machine developers; on the one hand, the success of the NES console took people away from the arcades and more money into cartridges, but on the other hand, if the NES hsdn’t resurged video gaming back into popular culture, the arcade industry would have probably died on its own.

The interesting thing to note about the arcade industry versus the home industry was how those competing yet co-dependent paths slowly diverged over time both in society’s attitudes about them and the experiences they tried to create. During the third and fourth generation of home consoles from the mid-80s to late-90s, home consoles were still “behind” when it came to replicating the arcade experience. The graphics weren’t as sharp, the home joystick didn’t have the same sort of “feel” as an arcade joystick, and more importantly, home consoles couldn’t match the social aspect of arcade video gaming, particularly in the early 90s when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat brought people back to the arcades. But the home console market at that time was able to compete in a way that the prior home console market failed because they had a particular slice of video game aesthetic that wasn’t meant to replicate the arcade experience, it was supposed to stand on its own. Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, and early RPGs like the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games helped define the home market audience versus the arcade audience.

It was the next generation of video game consoles (Playstation, N64, Saturn) that started to shift the dynamics and attitudes in game development as technology and graphics for home consoles started to accelerate and create the market that still has strong influence today. The long platform/RPG and other “console specialized” sorts of games still had a strong following, but it was also around this time that consoles had advanced enough to create a truer arcade experience or create an experience that (in some views) *surpassed* the arcade experience in gaming. And when the next generation of consoles came out years after (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast), the arcade video game industry had to change its tactic to keep the arcade experience unique, which is how games with non-standard controllers rose to dominance, particularly music video games like Dance Dance Revolution and other bemani.

Through these decades of video game history, the overwhelming majority of consoles and systems were still aimed at the everchanging youth. Video games that were smash hits in the 8-bit era were abandoned as a home market aesthetic in favor of games that emphasized graphic superiority and/or a greater sense of epicism. and as that philosophy of “better graphics! more dazzle! who cares about gameplay? just blow things up!” gained momentem and became a standard to uphold in entertainment in general (don’t even get me started on the Michael Bay’s Transformers), it created a separation between the older and newer generation of gamers, leaving older gamers in the dust.

Until a new video game aesthetic started to creep into the mainstream which in its infancy was pretty invisible to the likes of me but is now impossible to ignore: the online casual flash game.

I’m not sure when casual flash games rose to such popularity, but it’s evident how much it has a strong foothold in the new video gaming culture not just because of the popularity of sites like kongregate, yahoo games, the casual game apps that exist on facebook &c, but also how much prominence casual games have in the current gen. consoles. The PS3 and XBox 360 certainly still have the genre of hardcore gamers that are looking for games that make full use of their power to give them that Next Dazzling first person shooter/racing game/sports game, but there’s an entire online paradigm for both of these consoles that is dedicated to the downloading and buying of casual games not unlike what is possible to do on the internet. In fact, some of the games that are available through those consoles’ online services are ones that were found on the internet first and developed as an enhanced version, such as N+ and Flow.

In addition to this, you have the Wii. Nintendo’s whole marketing strategy for the Wii other than its innovative controls is that it’s the video game console for the whole family, and with launches such as Wii Sports, Wii Play, and the like, it’s clear that part of the new controller design is optimized to help enhance the casual game experience with the unique Wii interface.

When i think about how and why casual games have risen to such prominence, a few key factors come into play. First off, i feel that the online casual flash game was the first video game genre that was targeted towards older people, particularly corporate office workers. Even small businesses have integrated high-speed internet as a part of their infrastructure, and when people need a break and are tired of reading news or looking at pictures or whatever, more people find a casual flash game to occupy their time. it’s the new version of the newspaper crossword puzzle or word scramble, and it succeeds at grabbing that new audience because a) the games are generally simpler in concept and execution than typical video games (compare point and click or finding words as opposed to executing a haryuken), and b) the games are generally short to finish, an instant gratification/momentary distraction sort of thing rather than a long involved mission that involves more walking and random encounters than people want to have even in real life.

Secondly, there’s the ease in which any random joe can program and develop a quality casual game. As opposed to console games which require a team of programmers and artists and what have you to put together, flash is relatively easy enough to learn that basic games can be a one-man show, and with sites like kongregate, they can gain free and instant exposure to tens of thousands of people. It’s even hit a point where those that can’t comprehend Flash can go to sites like simcarnival where a special application exists to make that process even easier, requiring practically no programming experience whatsoever.

Third, and in my opinion the most significant, some of the casual games that have come out of this have risen to true brilliance, and this is where i feel the video game trend has come full circle. Because surely there are current more standard video games that have their own sense of brilliance and success such as WoW or the Final Fantasy series or GTA or Mortal Kombat, but it’s been a long time since there has been a video game in which the brilliance matches the sensibility of how Pac Man and Tetris and Centipede and Asteroids were brilliant, or how Legend of Zelda and the original Super Mario Brothers were brilliant: that despite its seeming simplicity in concept, gameplay, and graphics, they never get tiresome or old.

And because of all of this, i have a suspicion that the Big 3 console companies are on their last legs in the market of video games unless the momentum can be rebuilt up because of the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Otherwise, i strongly suspect that people will soon be more likely to buy a $5 texas hold ’em application on their smartphone or pull up a game of chain factor or their favorite kongregate game than spend $50+ on a console video game.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.

You know, Loiosh, if anybody had told me yesterday that thirty hours later I would have rescued Morrolan and Aliera, nearly killed the Demon Goddess, and found myself trapped in a prison the size of the world, unable to decide if I was hoping to be saved or hoping not to be saved, I’d have said, “Yeah, sounds about right.”

You probably would have, Boss.

I think this says something about my life choices.

Uh huh.

in other randomness, my brother pointed me to this silly but clever little game called Rom Check Fail. pretty neat, although i wish that the switches weren’t so regular.