Cruelty Squad: Pitting Game Against Player

Before I get into my point, let me just say that Cruelty Squad is amazing but not for everyone. It is disturbing on many levels. But I won’t be getting too much into that. There are going to be some screenshots throughout. A video would be better but my capture software doesn’t agree with me right now. For now, I will discuss why Cruelty Squad is more than just Deus Ex on acid.

For me, the main draw of Cruelty Squad was the art style. An art style that is otherworldly and dreamlike. It feels off. And that was before I saw it in motion. The ‘human’ characters that I stood in front of shifted before me. Not just a sideways wobble or something like that. Their whole body pulsed with an organic yet artificial feel to it. Some have called it ugly. I disagree. It takes getting used to I will admit. But this game has great reflections. This is not some solo dev who is a better programmer than artist type deal (speaking of myself there) but rather a developer who has crafted a world that in every aspect of its visual existence challenges the player to perceive it.

The world is unsettling. The bio-augments are horrifying yet enjoyable. That juxtaposition of enjoyment and queasiness is the core of the game. The first time I played it I had been sick to my stomach. This was not the fault of the game but rather my lactose intolerance. However, I easily believed it was the game but was glad to realize I was wrong.

Now, I admit my title may be a little much. The art isn’t that much of a challenge or even that off-putting. It is really enjoyable once you accept it for its merits. But that isn’t my focus for the title, I just felt I needed to get that out of the way.

The controls of Cruelty Squad are far more interesting.

To begin explaining: the game is a tactical shooter/immersive sim. There is a certain standard for shooters and immersive sims for controls. WASD for movement is nigh universal on PC save for some arrow key holdouts. That is still in Cruelty Squad, thankfully. Q and E are used to lean left and right respectively. This is rather standard for tactical shooters and immersive sims. But E is traditionally the interact key. In Deus Ex, the right mouse button is used for interact. But in Cruelty Squad R is used to interact. I have had it ingrained in me that R is reload since I started gaming on keyboard. For me, it was a slight struggle to not hit E to interact at first. But I grew used to that.

X is crouch here, I’m used to either C or CTRL but prefer LALT. But x is also used for crouch so that is a me problem. C is to switch weapons, although number keys can also be used. I prefer mouse wheel normally but again it is a me problem. F is kick which works well for me.

I’m going to pause for a moment to appreciate the kick. It is so powerful that it is just incredible. I also like kicking the ground and jumping immediately after to get a boost.

Back to controls. SHIFT is zoom, which feels wrong to me as I’m so used to that being the right mouse button. But the right mouse button does something far more important here. It initiates reloading. But to reload you have to hold the right mouse button and drag your mouse back. This adds a whole new motion to the game.

I love motion controls in games that replicate the action you are taking. It is part of why I love VR so much. This reload control does exactly that. At first it recreates the sense of fumbling with a gun to reload it which makes VR shooters stressful. It makes you take a moment off of aiming at your target. You are no longer a trained assassin with the steadiest arms ever. You are a fumbling klutz trying to be that assassin. But as you get used to it, reloading becomes more natural.

That is until you need to do it quickly while being shot at by multiple enemies. This is a large part of Cruelty Squad to me. The player actually has to learn a new movement in order to become good at the game. The controls are an added level of difficulty, but not an artificial one. It enhances the experience.

The reticule also deserves some attention. It is genuinely a glowing green orb that attaches itself to whatever your gun is pointing at. This is not true for all guns but it is cool. It is so different from anything I’m used to that it adds something to the overall experience.

If you are okay with a disturbing game, I highly recommend Cruelty Squad even though it is in early access. It is a fine example of games as art, without the conventional beauty that implies. It exemplifies the interactive nature of games, and the experiential nature. You need to reload under stress. You need to time your shot under stress.

I have barely touched upon the multitude of systems and design decisions that make up Cruelty Squad so take a look at it elsewhere.

Check out PC Gamer’s video on the game here.

For a good video on immersive sims check out this one by GMTK.

Buy it (or just read the developer’s description and trailer) on Steam here.

Switch Up

I haven’t posted in a while for a couple reasons. I fell into a depression after being burnt out by school work. I couldn’t figure out what I should be doing with this platform. I couldn’t work on a project and keep a regular schedule. I’m changing what I’m doing with this site.

My flash fiction will be going towards collections, I’ll be writing more longer fiction. Short stories and novellas. I’m at the point in my writing career that I realize that I need to create not just a sample of work but a body of it that is substantial enough that a person saying that they enjoy my work has a basis to say that.

So what am I going to do on this site? I’ve been realizing based off of what’s been going on in my writer’s craft class that I genuinely have things to teach people. I’d thought I would do that when I started this blog then thought that I was not experienced enough for it to matter, that I couldn’t offer anything unique.

I don’t know if that was true at the time but now I know that I have things that I can offer that are my own not just advice that someone else gave me that I thought was good. I’ve done enough that I have my own techniques and thoughts.

This site will become a place for me to recommend things, speak my mind, and give advice. It won’t have a regular schedule, I’ll post when I have something to say.

To all you reading this, thank you for sticking with me despite the lack of content for a while. Or if this is the first post you’ve seen, check out some of my flash fiction. Look at that sidebar there to find something.

5 Great Cyberpunk Comics

There are some excellent comics in the cyberpunk genre that often don’t as much attention. In no particular order:

Batman Year 100

Batman in a cyberpunk setting. Need I say more? This is a Frank Miller-esque Batman story set in 2039, 100 years after the debut of the character.

Spider-Man 2099

Spider-Man in a 90s cyberpunk setting.

Tokyo Ghost

Cyberpunk with art by the guy behind Punk Rock Jesus is a win.

Cyber Force

https://www.webtoons.com/en/super-hero/cyberforce/chapter-1-part-1/viewer?title_no=531&episode_no=1

One of the original Image comics by Marc Silverstri. Cyber Force has the 90s spirit, with a modern edge. The Webtoon is even free.

Futures End: Five Years Later

https://www.amazon.ca/Futures-End-Years-Later-Omnibus/dp/1401251293/g

Every DC book running was given the opportunity to have a Five Years Later issue, often cyberpunk. An ecclectic collection that is worth checking out. The swamp thing story is particularly good.

Songs to Listen to for Writing a Fight Scene

Sometimes you have a hard time getting into a mindset for a scene. Here are some song suggestions that will put you into the bloodthirsty mindset.

Fast Paced Violence

Andrew WK: Ready to Die, Party Hard

AC/DC: TNT, Shoot to Thrill

Metallica: Shoot Me Again, Disposable Heroes, Battery

Kanye West: Black Skinhead

Rage Against The Machine: Killing In The Name

Clinical Assasination

Extreme Music: Gonna Need A Grave

Run The Jewels: Legend Has It

Metallica: Enter Sandman

Motörhead: The Game

E-Book vs Print

There is a place for both e-books and print books, and I enjoy both. E-Books are often much cheaper, though not always, and not being Stephen King yet (I’m working on the body swap spell) I don’t have large amounts of money to do what I please.

With some things, e-books suffer. The Familiar (with its incredible word display) is best experienced in physical copy as are comic books because of the issue of size. For an e-reader to be practical it must be small, I use my phone. As such art loses its impact.

But with being digital art can be enhanced. So long as it was designed for digital, digital books and comics can be enhanced with animation and music (like some found on Webtoon, and Kindle in Motion). Hypertext links make choose your own adventure books much sleeker as well.

The main problem with e-books is trying to emulate physical books when they can be much more malleable. While the small screen might make reading harder if it simply a static page, panels can be zoomed into, font sizes can be increased.

But there is a feel to a physical book, so long as I don’t have to pry the spine apart to read the inner text. A spine that falls right open is inviting and satisfying.

I enjoy it, but practically e-books are better for me.

They are also easier to distribute, and there is a greater wealth of free content.

Also, for some reason, when I am tired it is easier to read off of a screen, and I am often tired. I also fear rolling over onto a physical book if I fall asleep reading it.

5 Comics that Prove it is an Adult Medium

It is hard for me to hear that comics are a kid’s medium, because there are few comics for kids. Comic Drake ranted about that once, trying to find Batman and Wonder Woman comics for kids. But comics have been a more adult medium since Stan Lee visited colleges and saw the comics were more popular with them than kids. But there is “adult” in the grim dark Garth Ennis sense, and there is adult in the cerebral sense.

So here are 5 comics that prove comics are adult, in no particular order.

5. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman

If you believe that only immature people write comics, consider Neil Gaiman, a masterful writer in novel, short story, or comic form. His most famous work is of course Sandman. It is incredibly intelligent. Buy it here!

4. Marshal Law

Marshal Law is my favorite deconstruction of the superhero genre. It features a “hero killer” who has yet to find a hero. It is the 2000AD style version of The Boys by Garth Ennis. It is reverent and clever. It is however not subtle. Very not subtle, but it is a great satire of super heroism. Buy it here.

3. X-Men

Back to positive portrayals of superheroes, the X-Men are all about prejudice. They used to be metaphors for black civil rights, with Magneto being Malcolm X and Xavier being Martin Luther King Jr. Now they are often used to address issues the homosexual community faces. One of the most powerful of these stories is God Loves, Man Kills. If you are okay with teenagers New Mutants is great aswell.

2. Judas

Judas is a criticism of Christianity, specifically related to the villainous role of Judas. A respectful critique that just makes a Christian reader ponder the questions it proposes. I highly recommend it to any Christian. Buy it here.

1. Five Ghosts

Literary characters make up the power set of the main character of this pulp adventure. It is an interesting fusion of classic literature and Indiana Jones. Buy it here.

Top 5 Mythos Creatures

The Cthulu Mythos is full of deities that people constantly have in the back of their minds. Dagon, Cthulu (who is technically not a god, but a high priest), Azazoth and so on. But there are many normal (well, more so than the deities) species. And they are also terrifying. 

5. Mi-Go (Fungi From Yuggoth)

“They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be…. As it was, nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of their back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying—launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon.” 

HP Lovecraft 
(“The Whisperer in Darkness”)

Their familiarity with brain surgery is to the point that they remove brains, and put them into cylinders that allow the person to sense things still, and be transported to an alien world. This sounds absolutely terrifying to me, and also weirdly like an episode of TMNT.

4. Night Gaunt

“Shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.” 

HP Lovecraft
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)

Night Gaunts are actually under the command of Nodens, a fairly benevolent Elder God. The most terrifying thing about them is their method of killing. They tickle people to death… A common trait in slavic folklore.

3. Deep One

“I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.” 

HP Lovecraft 
(“The Shadow over Innsmouth”)

Anyone you know could be a deep one as the hybrids appear human and as they age they become, more fishy. On the other hand there is a cool factor to immortal fish people.

2. Shoggoth

“We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.” 

HP Lovecraft 
(At the Mountains of Madness, 1931)

Essentially amoeba on a macro scale these shapeless beings were created to be slaves, rebelled and failed. They are an interesting truly alien alien that is familiar, showing the vast diversity of life on earth.

1. The Great Race of Yith

“They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.” 

HP Lovecraft
(“The Shadow out of Time”)

The most sci fi concept in the mythos, the Great Race can swap minds with any being. Imagine, swapping minds with one, you are now in an alien library of knowledge, in an alien body.

My Writing Process: Brainstorming

The beginning of my writing process is coming up with a genre. Normally I’ve just read, played, or watched something in the genre. Right now I’ve just started the remastered version of Bulletstorm, a satirical brutal sci fi military game. Here’s some gameplay. That makes me want to write some military sci fi. My first step is research.

I consume as much of the genre as I can, so that I can find the elements I enjoy and combine those into an original world. With this genre I’m currently reading Starship Troopers and Deus Ex: Icarus Effect. Also I am planning to watch Tom Cruise movies and Ghost in the Shell, and play COD: Infinite Warfare and Mass Effect.

The differences between them lead me to the components I enjoy. For example I have a constant struggle when writing sci fi as to whether or not other planets have been colonized, and how far away humanity has reached. The existence of aliens is another problem to solve.

The other part of my brainstorming is coming up with the magic or tech. This includes ludicrous amounts of research for tech, and less so for magic, though that will include a lot of research still. In this case I can just look for interesting news stories about tech, and save them for later.

Bionics are always likely to be a focus for my sci fi stories.

Then my main characters are the next part for me to work on. This normally follows a simple progression.

What magic/tech would be cool for them to have?

What role would that magic/tech be useful in?

How did they come to be in that position?

Characterization comes about when I write the story.

While my process is not the most efficient, it works if your mind tends to jump all over the place, like mine. The most important part is to make sure you either remember or write down what you’ve brainstormed. Writing it down is smarter.

Why I Don’t Fast Draft

NaNoWriMo is afoot and I was planning on taking part. As two days passed of November and I hadn’t written a single word I began to wonder if I should try to catch up. I had been reluctant to join NaNoWriMo in the first place. I am not a plotter. I can’t see the story or world until I start writing it. Characters and plot points also just come naturally while I’m writing.

To write 50,000 words in a month you really need to plan to have it be okay story wise, or be a full time writer.

Then you need to rewrite 99% of the words, according to NaNoWriMo themselves. I don’t like rewriting. I like doing it right the first time. This makes me a slow writer, but I don’t need much in the way of editing. Fast drafting means I have to spend more time editing.

I feel that the value of fast drafting is getting everything down on page so you can see it all. I personally see things better in my head. I have a whole five worlds in my head at any given time, as well as series plans. I work well in my head. Some may do better with a draft to look over.

Overall fast drafting is good for working quickly, but not so much for producing quality. You can edit it to quality, but I want to do it right the first time, because I’d rather do it slow once. Not to say I don’t edit, I do. But I do less editing.

To put it in another way, I do the inks right away after some brief mental layouts. Some may call it crazy, but for me it works.

All Hallows Write – Halloween Writing Tag

I saw this great writer’s tag on Jenna Moreci’s channel. It was created by Sam Kassé, whom I must thank for creating this excellent tag. I may be quite late, but I don’t really care.

So, a brief summary of my book. The Modern Healing Mage is a series about Anton Kivi, the professor of healing magic at The School. He constantly gets caught up in trouble of the magical kind. In the first book, it is street magic users, who are essentially arsonists, who become more aggressive to the point of murder.

Now, the part you are here for, and I’m excited about.

1. It’s Halloween night! What is your protagonist dressed up as?

Anton would likely dress up as a ghoul or fae, having picked up nicknames related to both. He would buy something or other at a discount shop and try to come up with a “costume” based on that. Luckily the physical appearance is easy for him to do convincingly. He could simply use healing magic to change anything about his form. Long limbs are essential as he often lengthens his limbs, and turns them to blades. If he discovered Dead Space, he would go as a necromorph slasher. He would even do the transformation at the party.

2. Who in your cast refuses to dress up and shows up at the Halloween party without a costume?

Scott Helm, an exorcist, doesn’t like disguising himself to hide from the spirits. He’s going to face them head-on. He may just show up shirtless, however. But that is to bear the cross tattoo on his chest fully.

3. Which character wears the most outrageous costume, and what would it be?

Rune Thorn, an enchanter, would show up in full Viking garb with a shield, sword, axe, horn-less helmet, and fur garb. He’d enchant each piece of the costume with the ability to summon a raiding party of magical energy Vikings.

4. On Halloween, werewolves, vampires, and zombies are on the prowl. Which of your characters gets caught in their clutches, and which creature do they subsequently turn into?

Anita or Diane are likely to be targets for vampires due to just how kind they are, but Diane would fight off the creature. Dougal Macbeth, a vampire, has eyes for Anita, and wants to take the blood of a beautiful young maiden, liking to stick to classic vampire legend. Anita as a vampire would be fun as well as she has no magical aptitude. Maybe I’ll do that.

5. Who wins the contest for best costume?

Frona Knight, though it would be through pure manipulation. She uses control magic, and would include mental implantation runes in her costume. She would also wear as little as possible. Bayonetta is a likely costume for her, or possibly Cat-Woman. The whip would fit better for her control magic.

6. Who hands out toothbrushes to the trick and treaters?

Anita might hand out toothbrushes in addition to candy, being a doctor. But

7. Which two of your characters decide to pair up and do an angel/devil costume together?

I don’t think anyone really would, not of the characters in the first book. But a couple of Anton’s squad members might. Kristoff Mägi (Mountain) and Maria Rebane (Fox) just might. Maria would be the angel. Kristoff would enjoy dressing as a demon, being a large man.

8. Someone is too scared to even attend the Halloween party. Who is it?

Anita probably would be scared to go a mage’s Halloween party, and I don’t blame her. You’ve heard some of the things these people would do. Anton would drag her to it though.

9. Who overdoses on Halloween candy and ends up sick?

Anton just might do that, as he overdoes it on everything, smoking, drinking, eating. He uses healing magic as an excuse as he can just heal away all the effects.

10. Which character is most likely to place a curse/hex on someone and who would they curse?
Nathaniel Keefe would probably curse Anton. He would put a curse to make his magic backfire, being jealous of his power.

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If any of these characters intrigue you feel free to go and read The School.