Most games are designed for thousands or millions of players. I decided to make my next game for a target player base of four humans: my wife, our friends Frank and Becky, and Becky’s sister Carol Ann.
I thought the game would take a month or two to develop, even around the busyness of a full-time job. Well, it’s been over five months since I officially started. As of this writing, development continues. I unexpectedly bit off way more than I could chew, but I’m happy with how the game is turning out. And it will come out. Any week now!
Becky, Frank, Carol Ann, Amanda and I have a (mostly) monthly VHS oddities night. For years, we went to Becky and Frank’s house to watch wrestling pay-per-views, as part of a gang of pro wrestling fans in the comics and animation industry called Muscle Temple. We were part of a Muscle Temple comics anthology and went to two Wrestlemanias with the group. (We don’t watch WWE anymore. We switched our allegiance to their indie-friendly rival AEW on TBS.) Frank and Becky are a very talented writer / artist team. They’re funny, generous, and good-hearted folks. We’re happy to call them and their sister friends.
Two years ago, Becky and Frank went to visit Becky’s family in Virginia, where she stumbled upon a treasure trove of unusual VHS tapes in her father’s attic. Her father was a marketing lead for the theme park Busch Gardens. The tapes had nondescript names, but she suspected there was gold on them there magnetic tapes. So she texted me, because she knew we had a working VCR. Becky brought home a large plastic tub full of ambiguously-labelled video slabs. The tapes were an amazing snapshot of Busch Gardens from an insider perspective. There was a rare 3D animated promo for a rollercoaster opening, a PR interview with Dana Carvey at the height of Wayne’s World mania, and an entire 4D movie that was thought to be lost media. I digitized the collection and it ran on Museum of Home Video, a pirate streaming show for media rarities and a weekly watch for Amanda and I.
Ever since then, VHS nights have been a regular occurrence in our house. Becky and Frank have a collection of bad animated movies, like Ratatoing and The Littlest Cars. Amanda and I pick-up weird kids shows and promo tapes from Whammy, my favorite store in LA. They sell used video tapes for a few bucks a pop.
On a fateful VHS night earlier this year, Frank noticed we had a new toy under our TV. I brought home an original Famicom from our trip to Japan, along with the Disk System add-on. The red and beige Famicom console would later be imported and localized to the US market as the Nintendo Entertainment System, but there are a lot of Japanese games that were never released in America. So a side quest on our trip to Japan became finding rare and interesting Famicom games at used game shops in Tokyo and Osaka. (I recommend Retro Game Camp in Akihabara and Super Potato in Osaka. I had little to no luck at any of the much hyped Hard-Off or Hobby-Off stores we went to.)
At one shop, Amanda found a Disk System game called Monitor Puzzle Kineko: Kinetic Connection, which was cheap and had a cool 80s Trapper Keeper pattern on the cover. There wasn’t much written about the game online, other than it being a puzzle game, so I thought I’d take a chance and pick it up. I’m so glad Amanda found that game. When I played it for the first time, I was immediately enchanted. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle, but all the pieces are exactly the same shape. Instead of trying to solve a static image, you’re trying to put together a short animation. The pieces may be flipped or rotated at the start, so each piece contains a small piece of an animation that might be playing backwards or upside down. You have to rotate the pieces and move them into the correct spots to solve the puzzle, which might be an airplane flying through the sky or a parade of cute 8-bit animals.
When Frank asked if I could show him a game on the Famicom, my mind went straight to Monitor Puzzle Kineko. I had a new stack of VHS oddities I was going to show them that night. Instead, we all got hooked on this game. We solved puzzle after puzzle, playfully shouting instructions to each other, getting up to point at the screen, and laughing in disbelief when we finally cracked a puzzle. The next VHS night, as soon as we sat down in the living room together, Becky requested Monitor Puzzle Kineko. The game had a magical hold on us!
Three problems with Monitor Puzzle Kineko came to mind as we played the second night. One was the limited amount of content. Eventually we would run out of puzzles. I bet each of those large-scale pixel art animations ate up quite a bit of the Disk Card’s anemic (by today’s standards) 112KB of space. Another problem was the flickering of the piece when it was being moved, which was unpleasant. Finally, most importantly, the game was very awkward to control with an NES gamepad. This game was begging for a mouse with all the clicking and dragging.
And that’s when it occurred to me. High off my game jam victory at work, I had the idea to remake Monitor Puzzle Kineko in Unity. It seemed like a small scope project. I already figured out how to display video clips in Unity. How hard could it be to break up a video into pieces and move them around? If we had an engine for the gameplay, we could put our own animations into the game and play endlessly!
Frank and Becky have been great friends to us over the years. I decided to make this game as a tribute to that friendship, so we’d have many more nights of monitor puzzling ahead of us.
But I was naive about how long it would take me to make this game a reality. It turned out breaking up the video was the easy part. The dragging would end up driving me crazy.
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever made art as a gift for friends or family? What’s a gift you’ve made that you’re proud of? Do you play puzzle games? What’s a puzzle game you’d recommend? (I’m enjoying Mind Over Magnet, a charming puzzle platformer.) I’d love to hear from you! Reply directly to this email or tell the whole world your thoughts by hitting the orange button below to leave a comment.
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