making ESPER//EXILE
this is a postmortem on my recently released pico-8 shmup ESPER//EXILE, you can check it out here!
returning to pico-8
this was my first pico-8 project in a decade, after having enjoyed playing with the system around its original release. I was surprised and joyed to see it still had an active community after all these years, and really had grown into a firm cultural niche.
making a game in pico-8 was just as fun as it was a decade ago!
in terms of tools, I started making games with Game Maker 20 years ago. eventually I learned C++ and wrote a custom engine over SDL implementing a Lua VM. then, loving working with lua, I cut out the "back end" and started making games in love2d. from then on I made a habit of experimenting with different tools--RPGMaker, Ren'Py, Unity--and seeing what I could do in them. rather than keeping to a specific tool, it was part of my craft to try as many things as possible and to follow whatever inspiration found me while using each of them. I wanted to have my creativity led and shaped by the tools I was using!
when I tried pico-8 I found an intersection of everything I'd grown to like: a barebones lua environment with a full suite of tools that makes identifiably unique things. it shapes your creation in subtle ways with its limitations, marrying the processes of imagination and engineering in a way that reflects how I like to make games.
then, save for hobby projects, I quit game development for about 7 years. post-pandemic I decided to return, and with it came the question of 1) what to make and 2) what to make it in.
for about a year I tried out Godot. it worked! there were things I liked and things I disliked, but rather than loving or hating it I ultimately felt a sense of tepidity. its organization, workflow and structures did not inspire or empower me. I felt myself languishing, so early this year I chose to switch things up and play around with pico-8 again.
I didn't intend to make a game. it was more like the game happened to me. that's a feeling I really cherish, it's the feeling I had while using RPG Maker to make The Great Hero's Cat and Penelope's Gift, two of my favorite projects I've worked on. it's also how I felt making Inward Expansion, my first pico-8 release a decade ago.
I believe a lot in how we are shaped by our environment. in my daily life I put great care into surrounding myself with things and people that bring me joy. computers are physical things too, as are the software on them, and they play just as much a part in shaping our environment and therefore our headspace and emotional state.
there's a lot of small things I can point out that are nice about pico-8, but that is ultimately what makes it great for me. It's what makes RPG Maker great for me too. they're tools that themselves feel playful and expressive, inviting you to create and experiment freely. I like how I feel when I use them!
much of my concrete work is in programming, art and music, but I view myself more in the spirit of a toymaker or an oral storyteller, someone who plays while nurturing. the concrete aspects of my work are important to me, but they're part of a greater whole which is driven by the less tangible craft of narrative and meaning-making, and even higher of participating in reciprocal communal self-actualization.
so I want to craft my environment to, as much as possible, all work together to enhance that feeling. I want creation to feel like playing, exploring and cultivating, rather than the cold discipline of "work" as we tend to know it.
pico-8 does that! its editor is cute and inviting, and immediately puts me in the kind of headspace I want to be in. and when I feel good I make things I'm proud of. since I'm an experienced programmer I get a lot of space to play in pico-8's barebones environment while not feeling at all like I'm neglecting my artistic interests. it's a lot of things in all the right proportions for me.
making ESPER//EXILE
I made ESPER//EXILE in about two months. I started it mid-may and released it on june 30th. during that time I had a two-week period away from home, making it cleanly two months in total. during the early to mid phases I would work on it in about 30 minute to 2 hour sessions one to three times a week. during the last week I put in about three 6-8 hour days. in total I believe I put in about 60-70 hours on the project.
to me, this gradual pace is an important part of my process. if we're always focused on production (active work) it can leave little space for conceptualization (passive work). if I try to sit there and make ideas come out of me, I almost always won't be happy with them. instead, they come to me throughout my daily life. it works better for me to undergo a relaxed process that allows me to remain receptive to the gradual unfolding of my ideas.
an exception to this is while doing game design, which I approach as "exploratory work". this is when I'm undertaking a process where I'm at my desk putting things to paper, but I'm not trying to achieve any sort of goal. everything I'm making could get scrapped. its purpose is to facilitate the exploration of concepts and ideas, and I find it necessary in order to make a game I find fun and interesting. in terms of "prototyping", it's the same but broader--the difference is "prototyping" is something you do before entering production, but for me exploratory work can happen at any stage of production. it's another part of how I let my work "unfold" before me. it's also the stage of my work where I feel out how the different parts are forming a whole together, and freely shift around narrative elements to get a sense for how different possible directions for the project might emerge.
for ESPER//EXILE, I started with a mechanic idea and a design sketch, many months before I ever thought to make it. usually I get an idea like this every week or so, I have a sketch folder that has 50+ concepts in it that I've built up since I returned to game development a year and a half ago. I don't have a systematic process for deciding what to turn into a game sketch or what to produce, I just pick whatever excites me in that moment to try, and so I chose this!
in my original design sketch it was called "Esper Gambit", and the idea was to create a "grazing matters" shmup. when you shoot your "heat" built up through grazing would discharge, and the point of the game would be to balance your heat level thoughtfully: your score and attack power would suffer if you overheated. defeating enemies would make all their bullets become destroyed, encouraging you to let enemies stick around and surround yourself with as many bullets giri-giri until the last moment. this would link into a system where bosses were part-based, so you would make decisions around when you wanted to destroy their parts--reducing their firepower, but also your heat generation.
conceptually, there were natural themes that appealed to me here: riding the line between danger and safety, being fearless, allowing danger so as to control it. bullet hells and shoot em ups in general have a natural tendency towards Zen and Tao-esque themes, of reflecting on the self, the other, inevitability and one's lack of control, and of what exists in the negative (in this case, the literal importance of negative space).
the first parts of the design stayed while the others were trimmed away. after enjoying Solar Striker so much during the early phases of development, I decided to create a more simple and traditional shmup inspired by it. this helped with scope but also introduced new design challenges: I'd never tried to make a game that felt like another before, so I wound up doing a lot of close work analyzing Solar Striker and how it ticked. this was challenging but rewarding work, and it got me to reflect on the bare fundamentals of shmups as Solar Striker itself was a great example of.
a big difference from my initial design was that it had much more unconventional patterns of play. it was a more cerebral kind of experience, rather than the impulsive fun of something like Solar Striker. while my initial design was interesting, I didn't find it fun in the conventional sense. it was a differential equation in the presentation of a videogame. I think that's actually really cool, and in a way you can reduce a lot of games to that, but crucially it isn't what was calling to me. that was something I saw in Solar Striker that I yearned for, to make something with that kind of simple fun.
so I wound up undertaking the challenge of trying to marry a very cerebral concept with more "blasty" simple fun. it felt surprisingly hard, especially at first, to synthesize those aspects into harmony. when designing games, it's easy to think in broad strokes of entire systems to create specific experiences, but in this case it came down to careful work in adjusting parameters and doing subtle system adjustments until the resultant play dynamic felt right--something where the heat mechanic added tension but wasn't oppressive, where it could sometimes fade into the background while you enjoyed blasting.
after the parameters, a lot of this came down to the enemy design. there were two aspects of focus here: first was making enemies where you had to think a bit about aiming at them, or else you might waste your shots. your heat drains slowly, so the tension here gets to be gradual yet firm, a nice balance. the second was making enemies whose shot patterns naturally invited you into a position where you could graze their bullets and then retaliate smoothly. this gives the possibility of a rhythm where you might never have to fall back and "reload" with enough thoughtful play, and I found that to be a nice subtle balance between my initially opposing design goals. Solar Striker's bullet direction snapping wound up playing nicely into this, as it makes you extra thoughtful about where enemy bullets might go, interacting well with grazing. in the end, I am very happy with how the game plays.
with the play evolving into something less austere, I felt the themes shifting in that direction too. the game began to feel more aspirational and rebellious, there's this triumphant sense of making the enemy's power your own. from there, the story began to emerge to me, where I sort of took the premise of ESP Ra.De and other "hunted psychic" media I've enjoyed and spun my own story off that archetype--what if you're not just in space, but you've left the earth intentionally?
it all began to come together from thoughts like that. grazing is sort of the opposite of "running away", and it began to evolve into a subtle story about refusing to run away and how someone's power can become another's. I got the idea that the aliens just wanted to help humans and were being instrumentalized by the military in the same ways the psychics were. by then combining with an alien later on, I wanted to show seemingly opposed groups uniting together. this made me happy too, since I didn't want to depict aliens as simply "bad guys" again with no other layers of nuance. it felt cathartic to depict them with a sense of innocence, and thought it might resonate well with the protagonist's own arc. also, who makes a better villain than a US-coded military?
I enjoyed telling this kind of story, because it in large part it relies on the presence and interactions of on-screen bodies to do the heavy lifting. then, by the time I'm presenting the sparse dialogue of the game, it's only serving the purpose of lifting subtext into text, tying things together, and enhancing dramatic moments.
that let me build these nice dramatic and thematic moments into the play itself, like the Stage 4 boss where you're blasting their wave beams back at them (their simple attack pattern also being a metaphor for their worldview: crude and shallow), or the Stage 2 boss who is an implied military figure who leads his assault on you with a bunch of other psychics as human shields.
I'm proud of the way the subtle mode of presentation and its layers of simple metaphors let me tell a story like this with dark, serious and real-world subject matter in a way that lands softer and is able to gradually evolve into a hopeful, empowering and cathartic narrative.
looking back, this process of synthesis was the heart of the project, of playing with seeming contradictions and exploring the space around and above them. in the end it made a game that I'm very proud of in both narrative and play, and now my big challenge is getting people to play it.
my big challenge
outside of my personal circles, very few people have yet played the game. as far as I can tell, everyone who has played it loves it. but we are in an environment where our attention is clamored for at every moment and it's hard for anyone to tell what is going to be worth their time or not: this is the issue of marketing, or maybe just "communication".
there's one thing I think I could have already done better, which would have been to "juice" up the game a bit before release. I think it's a beautiful game and I value its relative minimalism, but unfortunately there is an existing visual language towards what things turn heads and imbue a work at a glance with seeming value. while I don't want to sacrifice my style and artistic priorities, I believe that's another contradiction I could have embraced navigating with subtle intention.
another is that I no longer have any substantial social media following like I used to a decade ago. I could have spent more time talking about my game on social media during development to help build up into a "release moment", but now I'm doing everything in post where there's less of a natural sense of anticipation.
I'm glad I made a small, short and freeware project, because I get to experience these failures in a much safer scale. all things considered, I think over my 20 years I've become very good at making games and telling stories with them. now I need to think more about outreach and marketing. communication is a fundamental challenge in the world we live in, and it makes sense to plan around it thoughtfully and deliberately, especially if I hope to make this my living once again.
how this has informed my process
luckily, I'd already planned to spin up a youtube channel and start streaming, and I'm hopeful these efforts alongside more consistent promotion will help me fare better in the future.
figuring out some token saving and data compression strategies has already put me a decent way towards being able to make a more "presentable" game as my next pico-8 project. one thing I want to stand by is making "full" games in pico-8, which is something that limited the presentational extent I could reach in ESPER//EXILE. now, I'm hoping to achieve a more uncompromising balance in the action RPG I've begun making. and I'm going to try talking about it more and showing things off as I go!
in the meanwhile, I've begun learning Rust and I'm continuing to explore more tools and learning to make music. my hope is that if I keep expanding myself I'll eventually be able to make something that sticks. rapid firing sketches and pico-8 games is helping me know that whenever I choose a longer project to commit to, I'll be able to do so with confidence in its potential.
honestly... it's really hard. I wouldn't wish this kind of difficulty on anyone. but making my games full-time is what I want and what I care about, so I'm going to keep trying for as long as it's feasible, while also working on opening other avenues for myself. I like to say "many eggs, many baskets" as my mantra these days!
I'm very pleased with how ESPER//EXILE came out. in many ways, it's the most personally important game I've ever made. it's the most cohesive, complete thing I've made to date, and I produced it with very thoughtful scope and well-calibrated priorities. it feels like the culmination of all the work I've done on myself and my craft, and a practical proof of the theoretical framework I've been developing for myself. through making and releasing this little game, I've had the opportunity to see my strengths and shortcomings for what they are, and I have great appreciation for both the flattering and humbling it has brought me. I'm looking forward to taking what I've learned and building upon it!