My Motion Picture Debut

🎥 Next week I’m going to publish Motion Picture, my new video puzzle game! Would you like to see your name in the end credits roll? Donate any amount to Equip Story, single or recurring payment, and you’ll be listed as a Supporter. Everyone who supports my indie games and this newsletter has my deepest appreciation. 🫶

Becky and Frank arrive at our house on a Friday evening for what is supposed to be a typical VHS night. What they don’t know is that it’s the secret launch event for my new game.

What I don’t know is that it will not go smoothly.

On my lunch break earlier in the day, I made a Windows build of Motion Picture in Unity and playtested all four levels, including two new ones I added pretty last minute. Everything worked as expected! This surprised me. A month or so earlier, on a day when Becky and Frank were coming over, I intended to show them Motion Picture, but the build was insanely buggy. The worst bug was that the game didn’t always recognize when the player solved the puzzle correctly. Honestly, I forget why that was the case. Maybe I blocked it out?

After a bit of catching up in the kitchen, we were ready to watch some tapes. I said I had a surprise for them. Intrigued, we made our way to the living room. I have a gamer PC that Frank custom built for me during the pandemic, which is plugged into our living room TV. They see I have a window open on screen and I click on the file “Motion Picture.” Becky asks what that is, but I stay silent. Soon, they’ll play it for themselves!

Or not. The file won’t open.

A security alert dialogue box appears saying the file might contain a virus and that I need to tick some boxes in Settings to approve it. I literally opened and played the game flawlessly a few hours ago. Why did my PC decide to sabotage a moment I’d been working toward for months? I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Clippy.

In theory, I know what to do. I tick the boxes I think I need to tick, but the situation is ticking me off. I got flustered. Frank coached me through a long couple of minutes in the security settings. Finally, the file opens. Let’s all go to the movies!

The title screen for Motion Picture opens. The title screen was just a curtain, a logo, and a play button. They still have no idea what’s going on. I hand my keyboard and mouse to Becky and tell her to use the mouse to click and drag, and rotate with “V” and “H.” They look at me cautiously and with good reason. I’m being silly, but I’m excited for the moment when they realize what I’ve made.

She clicks on “play.” The curtains open to a familiar sight. A set of rectangular pieces scattered across a game board, each containing a section of a moving image, only this was video as opposed to 8-bit. To borrow a phrase I heard a lot in my copywriting days, they were “surprised and delighted.”

Frank asked me if I learned Unity to remake Monitor Puzzle Kineko. I said “yes,” because it was essentially true. My first Unity game was mechanically very primitive by comparison. He complimented the game, saying the fluid and intuitive mouse and button control scheme in Motion Picture was an instant and significant improvement over the original. They really liked the 1960s film clips I chose, which I paired with catchy royalty free jazz loops. I explained the challenge in finding clips where there’s kinetic movement throughout the frame, so there was something happening in all the pieces. A musical with dancing turned out to be a good fit. As they finished level two, which featured a newlywed couple dancing in their new living room, I said that adding new videos to the game would be very easy, so we’ll always have new video puzzles to play. Becky, a TV animator, said she’d send me some clips of her own to add to Motion Picture. I think that was the nicest compliment of all.

Becky said they wanted to experience some of the game with her sister Carol Ann, who couldn’t join us that evening. So we paused after they finished level two. We couldn’t have moved forward anyway, because there was a game breaking bug on level three. I forgot to add code to clear the array that says “all the pieces are in the correct spots” between levels, so after winning level two, the win screen text popped up instantly on level three, blocking most of the pieces. I have no idea why it worked flawlessly earlier in the day, but that’s making video games for you. There’s so much variability, something is bound to go wrong unexpectedly.

I popped in a VHS tape of Big Rock Candy Mountains, a mind-numbing direct-to-video children’s musical nightmare fuel, which Amanda and I discovered at Whammy in LA. After watching, we looked it up and discovered it was part of the phenomenally successful Wee Sing series. There are lots of these videos of hammy actors wearing stuffed animal costumes dancing around. Honestly, they’d be pretty sick video puzzles for Motion Picture!

🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever had a “rocky” debut for something you worked on? Is it painful to think about or can you look back and laugh? What’s the longest amount of time you spent working on a personal project that you eventually finished? I’d love to hear from you! Reply directly to this email or hit the orange button below to leave a comment the whole world can read.