Milkmaid of the Milky Way

Milkmaid of the Milky is a 90s style point-and-click adventure, where you play as a milkmaid on a journey to save her cows. Developed by Mattis Folkestad of Machineboy (essentially a one man team), Milkmaid of the Milky Way is a labour of love. And I think it shows. It has evocative visuals, amazing music, and is written entirely in rhyming verse. Passion was poured into this game, and it’s better for it.

Milkmaid of the Milky Way is both whimsical and melancholy. A story about being alone and coming together. The protagonist, Ruth, lives alone on a small farm. Her only companions are cows, but she is devoted to them. When a spaceship shows up and abducts her bovine friends, she vows to go save them. Here is where the story takes off, and I don’t want to say anymore for fear of spoiling it, but things get much more complicated as the story twists and turns.  

The dialogue is written in rhyme, and coupled with the hand drawn backgrounds, the game has a storybook feel.

Despite the spaceships and cows, the story is about moving on, fighting loneliness, and asking when your responsibilities are infringing on your life and happiness. It’ll leave you wondering if you’ll have any regrets when you’re older, and maybe put a fear of stagnation in you.

On PC the game controls like most point-and-clicks. You move by clicking on an area of the world, and you can double click to run. This is a nice feature that keeps you from lumbering back and forth as you traverse the environments, especially when you have to do some backtracking. You also click to examine or interact with an object (including items in your inventory), and dragging items from your inventory onto an environmental object will let you use it on the object.

The cursor also helps identify interactable elements by pulsating when you hover over them.

The puzzles are straightforward and not too difficult to figure out. Whenever I was stuck, I found myself backtracking a little more than I would have liked, but the run feature went far in alleviating that minor stressor.

The components of the puzzles fit nicely into the world. When Ruth uses a wooden spoon to reach something, or her knowledge gained from farm work to solve a problem, it’s believable. The puzzles never felt abstruse or out of place.

Milkmaid of the Milky Way is a beautiful game. Its characters are all endearing, and it manages to communicate personality through visual cues and terse dialogue. It’s a tightly made package, with a strong story, evocative music, and gorgeous visuals.

I highly enjoyed it and would recommend anyone looking for a point-and-click adventure to check it out. 

Buy Milkmaid of the Milky Way on Steam for PC and Mac, or on iTunes for iOS.

You can find Mattis Folkestad on twitter, at Machineboy.com, or visit Milkmaid of the Milky Way’s official site.

I was provided with a free copy for review.

Technobabylon

Technobabylon is a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure with retro style graphics. Wadjet Eye Games, the studio behind the Blackwell series and Resonance, bring this sci-fi romp to life alongside developer Technocrat Games.

Wadjet Eye Games have been making quality point-and-click adventures for years, and it’s no secret that I’m a big fan. I always enjoy their games and Technobabylon does not disappoint.

Mandala, Latha Sesame's avatar, in the Trance.

You play as three characters in the city of Newton. Latha Sesame, an unemployed Trance addict. Charlie Regis, an old curmudgeon-y CEL agent (basically a detective). And Max Lao, Charlie’s fellow (and far more lighthearted) CEL agent. The story starts with the investigation of a string of murders. Each victim has been “mindjacked” meaning information has been brutally torn from their brains. As the story unfolds, its scope grows to encompass a larger conspiracy.

Newton exemplifies the “high tech low life” of cyberpunk. Newton’s wealthy residents live in opulent high rises and bear their wealth like a shield against the law. While the poor live in assigned housing, wear assigned blue overalls (which are recycled instead of cleaned), and eat from food machines that belch protein slop.

Then there is wetware. Wetware are nanomachines that allow individuals to mentally connect to the web, also known as the “Trance.” Wetware is not only common, but expected. Charlie is the odd man out for not having any. I don’t quite understand the specifics of wetware, but form what I can gather people use gelatinous forms of wetware to smear onto the surface of terminals and electronics. The nanomachines inside the jelly then build a connection from the terminal to the wiring inside the user’s head. This grants the user access to the connection with their mind, allowing for all sorts of hacking shenanigans. 

Newton is filled with a diverse cast of characters of varied race, culture, sexuality, and gender.

Central is the A.I. system that runs the city, and it’s also who CEL agents take their orders from. Central sees all, and can predict—to an extent—when a crime is going to take place. Its overall purpose is to make sure the city runs smoothly, including the citizens, even if that means Central has to withhold pertinent information.

Beneath the genre dressing is a story about grief, coping, and getting out of your comfort zone. A recurring theme of the story is its willingness to challenge the characters’ coping mechanisms. As with all good stories, the people are the heart of it, not the sci-fi tech.

There are twists and turns that bring into question the loyalty of allies, or the nature of an enemy’s animosity. But what really drove me forward were the characters, and all the little details that I learned through the dialogue and action. I won’t say much else because I don’t want to spoil the story, but ultimately I found it enthralling and never felt bored. By the end, I wanted to see more of these characters and the city of Newton. 

There's lots of pointing and clicking, as you’d expect from most point-and-click adventures. Technobabylon emphasises using your environments and picking up items to solve puzzles. This entails looking around and using the right-click to examine items and learn more about them. The left-click allows you to use, pick up, or move items and objects. There’s a good amount of trial and error, but the puzzles are all logic based. Everything you need to solve them is in the surrounding area, and you’ll never get stuck if you didn’t pick up something earlier in the game.

The first puzzle involves tricking a food machine's A.I. so it'll make an unauthorized item for you.

There’s a good amount of combining items to move the puzzles forward. Sometimes the solution is obvious, and sometimes it’s not. There were a few instances where I found myself doing the tried and true combine-everything-with-everything method. The main characters never have a huge amount of items in their inventory (like in some older point-and-clicks), so your options are never overwhelming.  

If you’re ever stuck on a puzzle, you’ll know that the solution is somewhere nearby.

Latha Sesame will have to pop back and forth from meatspace to the Trance to solve puzzles. The mechanics in the Trance are the same as in the physical world. Sesame navigates the Trance with an avatar, but instead of pushing tables and opening doors you’ll be uploading programs and making connections—all of which are represented visually as either avatars or new environments (like a living room or park).

There are some especially creative uses of the Trance and how it affects the physical world.    

Generally my default opinion would be to say that a point-and-click’s real value is in its story, and that’s true here to an extent, but the puzzles were so interesting and creative—not only in their implementation but in how they also acted as worldbuilding elements—that it would be a disservice to count them separately. The story enhances the puzzles and the puzzles enhance the story.

I’d wholeheartedly recommend Technobabylon to anyone yearning for a cyberpunk romp.

You can buy Technobabylon from Wadjet Eye’s site, Steam, or GOG. 

Wadjet Eye Games has a new adventure coming out soon called Unavowed. Check it out on their website, and keep an eye open for its release. From some of the screenshots Dave Gilbert has been sharing on his twitter, it looks flipping awesome.

Game Structure and Narrative

Recently I played Rise of the Tomb Raider, which was a lot of fun, but it got me thinking about narrative and game design. Namely, the idea that they don’t fit together well. A lot of games, Tomb Raider included, are broken into two parts: gameplay and story. They’re both pretty self-explanatory, but I want to talk a bit about how they interact.

The gameplay is the part where you run around and shoot the baddies, get the points/experience/whatever. Rinse and repeat. This is usually the part where the protagonist gets shot in the head and chomps on a turkey leg to regenerate health. The gameplay is always the meat of the experience. It’s what we spend the most time doing and why we play to begin with.

If the gameplay is the meat, then what’s the story? Usually, it’s the framing (or the skeleton). The story is an excuse to bust in the tower door and decapitate the wizard. It gives us a reason and context for what is going on, why it’s going on, and how we’re going to shoot it in the face. The story is told in three to five minute cutscenes that break up the action (unless it’s MGS). Again, the gameplay is the meat so we don’t spend a lot of time in the cutscenes.*

*I know there are certain games and genres that buck this trend. I joke about Metal Gear Solid, but JRPGs are story heavy as well, though if you consider their 100hr length versus how much of that is actually story it might be a rough equivalent to the format mentioned above.

The story will always be regulated to a second tier, and that is why is loses some of its importance, its ability to unfold and pull the player in. But, on the opposite end, I’d rather play a game with good gameplay and a bleh story than one with an amazing story but bleh gameplay. Bad gameplay is much harder to tolerate than a bad story.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a great game, with phenomenal gameplay and action sequences, but a bleh story. It’s only there to propel us on the adventure, and we never get to dig deep into the subjects presented. The game did its best to set up as much as it could, to try and communicate through subtext of conversation, but there’s only so much you can do in five minute intervals. It favoured the gameplay instead of the story. Even the cutscenes seemed eager to remind you of this. They had a tendency to end with gunfire, an explosion, or a threatening helicopter as if to say, “don’t worry, the gameplay is still here.”

No one takes notice of how messed up Lara’s become. She lights dudes on fire and stabs them in the head.

Gameplay and story have always been disconnected, and we don’t see it anymore. In gameplay mode the protagonist takes a shotgun blast to the face, ducks behind cover, and puts a band-aid on in. In story mode, a bullet to the gut means they’re dead. And we just accept it, because we all know the game wouldn’t be fun if the player died from one or two bullets. That’s why I dislike this structure. We’re used to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

The Last of Us melds the two together well, but still falls into some of the same traps. Joel’s combat sequences are more than just gameplay mechanics, they build his character. Joel isn’t a good guy, he’s a broken, selfish person, and each time he murders an enemy we get the sense that it’s affecting (or reinforcing) his mental state. The gameplay shows us what he is willing to do for self-preservation, and this is then supported by the story in the cutscenes. When it comes to the game’s final decision, we’re more likely to believe that Joel would make the selfish decision over the altruistic one. In this way the gameplay informs the narrative.

Story as a bookend is frustrating. It’s clear that it’s only there to set up some context, to be an excuse for the adventure. I like the adventure, I want to be on the thrill ride too, but I want the story to keep up. To be more than just set up for the next action sequence.

Of course, this isn’t all games and there are some that do both phenomenally (Witcher 3 comes to mind). Do you guys have any examples of games that you think intertwine story and gameplay in effective ways?

This was originally posted on Medium.

Gnomes, Big and Small

I’ve had multiple secondary worlds tumbling around inside my head. One of them is Aftania,* a world that is unashamedly inspired by things like Dungeons & Dragons and Warcraft. It features all manner of monstrous creature as well as the expected “races” like elf, human, orc, and gnome.

Absent from this world are Dwarves and Halflings. Anyone that knows me would think the absence of Dwarves was weird, fantasy dwarves are one of my favourite races (coming in close behind orcs). But I decided to condense them all into gnomes. So, gnomes, in the world of Aftania, can be small three-foot humanoids, slightly larger (halfling-size), or burly and wide shouldered with bushy beards like Dwarves. This makes gnomes more similar to humans in that they can be a whole variety of sizes and shapes as oppose to all being made out of the same mold.

It also gives me more freedom to make certain body types and features more common among certain gnomish cultures. Maybe the mountain gnomes to the north are the burly ones, while the gnomes with deep ancestral roots in urban areas are smaller. It allows for a lot more variance.

It bugs me when all of a race are the same. It doesn’t make sense that elves high in the mountains have the exact same culture as the completely disconnected elves on the other side of the continent. Same goes for physique, though I’m not sure if this is a remnant from Tolkien or the influence of video games/pen and paper RPGs.

I’m trying to keep all the things I love about this kind of high fantasy but with a few twists that make it uniquely mine.

*Aftania is actually the name of the largest territory, and is also where the majority of my current stories/characters reside. The planet is referred to as Mo’den (an orcish word), but particularly arrogant Aftanians insist on calling the planet “Aftania.”

NaNoWriMo 2016 was a Bust

National Novel Writing Month did not go well this year. I only wrote a pitiful 15k words, far below the goal of 50k. But I did draft three short stories in those words, so there’s something that I can work with and hopefully refine/rewrite into something decent. 

A few things threw me off balance this November, one of which being the election. Even though I’m not American, it still managed to occupy a lot of my time and thoughts. Another hurdle was my own disapproving brain meats. I’ve gotten to the point where nothing I put out into the world seems to stick, being it self-pubbed works, submitted stories, or even this blog. There’s been some serious soul-searching as to whether I should continue to pursue writing. Ultimately, I think I’ve decided to throw in the towel and focus on other things. I’ll still write and post short stories here (and maybe on Wattpad), but the idea of writing as a profession is probably going out the window. 

I hope you all had a better NaNoWriMo, and let me know your word count totals!

Techno Babble and Starkiller Base: How much do we need to know?

I have a love/hate relationship with techno babble. Sometimes, I love it. It can make a story feel smarter and more rooted in reality. Like all that information you’re being bombarded with is saying “this is how it could happen in real life.” But, on the other hand, it can feel cumbersome and dull. The temporal capaci-what is going to do the thingamajig now? Great, let’s get to the pew pew.

I recently rewatched Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and started to think about Starkiller Base and some of the questions that surrounded it. A lot of wondering how it got made, how it’ll move once the star is dead, and also how can it even suck up a star? Did it use warp technology? Also, the way warp speed works in Star Wars seems…

Does it matter? That depends on the story and the world. In the case of SW:TFA, I don’t think it does. Starkiller Base is the big bad, we know what it’s going to do, when it’s going to do it, and—to a degree—how it’ll do it. The point of Starkiller Base is that something is going to get exploded if it’s not stopped. We have all the necessary information. Technological details have never been the point of Star Wars, at least as far as I can tell. If this was Star Trek, that’d be a different matter.

This is a hard line to tow. How much information does the audience need? I don’t want to overburden them with a dump of information, but I also don’t want them to be lost and unable to follow along. There is also a certain level of believability, not realism, but in-world consistency that gives the audience cues as to how the world works.

Dragons, a staple of fantasy, shouldn’t be able to fly (at least not the typical image of a dragon). At best, they should be clumsy gliders. But when a dragon soars through the sky, we all buy it. It doesn’t matter how it flies, just that it’s a dragon and it can fly.

Now, if you had a dragon that could fly because it exuded fart clouds, okay a little weird but whatever, then you’d have established a rule in your world. So, if say, you had a another giant winged beast show up and start flying around, but it didn’t use fart clouds to fly despite its huge size, that’d create an inconsistency in your world. Once it’s established that big bulky things have to adhere to some rules if they want to fly, it becomes a glaring mistake when your own rules are broken. It messes with the world’s consistency.

Ultimately, how many of your world’s rules you have to communicate to the reader/viewer depends on the context. In the case of Starkiller Base, all we need to know is what it does and when it’s going to do it. The same tends to apply to most doomsday machines. There are a lot of other times when we do need to know how The Thing works. Especially in stories that are set in modern times or hard science fiction, but also if it’s just you breaking one of your established rules. If you’re going to break one of your world’s rules, the audience has to understand why or it’ll mess with the story’s consistency.

What do you think, is there such a thing as too much techno babble or not enough of it?   

Worldbuilding Part 4: Show it all but keep it lean (featuring Mad Max and Judge Dredd)

I recently rewatched two of my favourite movies, Dredd (2012) and Mad Max: Fury Road.  They got me thinking about lean storytelling. 

Both are extremely action oriented movies, but they communicate their worlds and characters through the action in a way that doesn’t feel shoehorned. A lot of it is done with body language, concise dialogue, and an extremely brief spattering of flashbacks. The stories are lean, all the fat stripped away. I take a lot of inspiration from both Mad Max: Fury Road and Dredd (2012), and try to implement some lessons from them into my writing. 

Minor spoiler warning for both movies.

Mad Max sets up its world with some impactful visuals. There’s only a brief bit of dialogue to set up the tone, and then we are launched into the story. We learn everything we need to know from the imagery. The derelict cars being worked on, the starving masses clamouring for water. We even see Immortan Joe running through a lush garden, which isn’t addressed again until the end of the movie. It doesn’t need to be, that one shot gives us all the information we need to know about how Immortan is hoarding resources. 

Dredd does something similar. A bit of dialogue to set things up, and then we’re thrown in the deep end mid-chase. We see the over populated city, a few civilians apathetic to the crime taking place, and Judge Dredd’s near monotone* way of acknowledging a civilian’s death and the subsequent death of the perps. It all paints a picture of a city where crime is the norm. 

*Is it possible to have an angry monotone? That seems to describe Dredd better.

That’s just the first few scenes of each movie, they’re packed with this kind of imagery throughout. Telling us more and expanding on their worlds without resorting to infodumps or large chunks of expository dialogue. (There is some expository dialogue, but it’s kept brief and concise.) 

How can this translate to books? The general principle has already been around for a long time: Show, don’t tell. 

I try to infuse the worldbuilding into my stories in a way that doesn’t rely on infodumps.* I think one of the negative instincts some folks have (myself included) is to try and explain everything. After all, you did make that beefy worldbuilding doc, and by the old gods and the new you’re going to work those political machinations into your book! And you should, but the key is weaving them into the narrative in a way that has the reader doing the work for you. 

That might sound weird, you, we, are the writers. We create. We do the work. Yeah, but part of that is relying on the reader to put the pieces together. Just like how Mad Max and Dredd rely on the viewer to put the visual cues together to create the grander image. We set up the land marks, so when the reader reaches that first toppled waystone, they can see Stonehenge from across the field. They know where to go, we just planted the guide posts. 

*I know sometimes infodumps are necessary and might be the most efficient way to communicate certain information. I still feel that, in most cases, other alternatives should be explored. 

A lot can be communicated by a character’s movements, as well as how others react to that character. The way they walk, fight, and speak all add up to define them. Ma-Ma from Dredd is a good example of this. Everyone is tense and quiet around her, listening intently and scared to shit of pissing her off. But when the corrupt Judges are standing right in front of Ma-Ma, she’s the one that speaks in a clipped, controlled manner out of fear of pissing the Judges off. This is something where movies have the edge. I find it a bit more difficult to do in a book. Particularly since I like to keep my dialogue clean and concise. I can’t think of any good examples of movement in books really adding to the character (but maybe you can leave some suggestions in the comments!).

I’d take a guess and say about 15-20% of your worldbuilding will actually make it into the story, at least explicitly. The rest is hidden in the subtext. It makes up the bedrock of your story. Likely most won’t even notice it’s there. And that’s probably how it should be. 

Postscript

This worldbuilding series isn’t planned out. I have a few ideas and general concepts for future posts, but in general I’m sort of making it up as I go along. Hopefully I haven’t gotten to the point where I’m repeating myself yet. I’m not sure when my interest in secondary worlds started, maybe with Warcraft or Redwall,* but either way it has become something I really do find interesting and enjoy talking about. I plan to keep yammering on about it as long as I have ideas, and I hope you keep popping in to read and share your own thoughts. 

Check out Worldbuilding Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I’d also recommend Chuck Wendig’s post on Mad Max: Fury Road.  

*Now that I think about it, maybe it started with Final Fantasy 6.

Edit (February 25, 2019): This series is about the things that I've learned, or am learning, about worldbuilding. It's me trying to level up my craft, and documenting the process. These posts represent my personal approach to worldbuilding, and the way I do it might not be right for you. I'm not an authority on writing, and so everything in these posts should be taken with not only a grain of salt, but a heaping bucket of saline.