Someone asked for the Iconoclasts Limited Run boxart, and I was between tasks so I didn't immediately forget, so I'll post them here too

a new iconoclasts wiki, and other such things

hey y'all! i've kept it quiet for a while, but... for the past few months, myself and a few friends have been working on a miraheze wiki! it's still in its infancy, but i'm really excited to "announce" it to y'all.

the reason for creating it is simple: the fandom wiki fucking sucks. it's riddled with misinformation, poorly organized, lacks references, and most importantly... it's moderated and primarily written by a far-right weirdo. i hesitate to sling the word "fascist" around online, but foxgloveactual (also known as agent orange in the official iconoclasts server), the administrator and largest contributor, is well-known for being closely involved with free fur all, the far right furry convention.

frankly, i got tired of butting heads with foxglove both in the server and over the fandom wiki, so i made my own. with the wiki in place and being worked on, i hope that with time we can surpass the fandom wiki and become a safer, more reliable source for information about iconoclasts' lore and development.

if you're interested in contributing or just poking around, check us out! additionally, feel free to reach out to me here on tumblr, or send me a message request on discord (@‌iconoclasts)!

iconoclasts.miraheze.org

a brief aside to this also: if anyone is interested in something like a discord server for this, let me know! i'd love to have more folks on board editing with me and if there's a way i can facilitate that for you guys please HMU

Nothing warms my heart more than to see like a fanbase that’s otherwise dead except for 1 or 2 autistics having the time of their lives digging into every crevice of whatever unpopular thing they’re into for information to enrich their brains. They are literally the backbone of the internet they do more work than god where else would we get people that care about like web graphics for a lost promotional item from a dead videogame released in 2008. Key to media preservation

Wish more people had played Iconoclasts. Black would fucking destroy tumblr lesbians. She's gay. She's exhausted. She's fucking ripped. She's got chronic migraines. She has a tragic backstory. She turns into a giant monster. She's the only normal person in the cast, somehow.

The Impact of a Video Game Story

This is a rant based both somewhat on frustration, and clarification of my taste in games, and what I’ve learned about myself working on Iconoclasts, and the motivation for this text stems from playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.

It’s not very often I am interested in a game enough to want to beat it, or even try it, these days. I’ve heard all kinds of things about being prejudiced, or bitter, or just a general “sourpuss” because I doubt a game upon its announcement and lead-up to release. The ridiculousness of those claims is not what’s being fully discussed today, though. Rather, I’ve become far more confident in my stance, and what it is I actually want to make.

I love game mechanics, level design, clever use of very limited amounts of tools and inputs, and I go nuts over fantastic “kinetics”. I love action/adventure games and platformers. This has always been my passion, and they’re reasons why I stick to a game and replay it, many times. To experience those great moments again, and learn from how they were built; the maths that work in harmony to create this interactive entertainment I call a good video game.

There was a game this year which actually had me smiling just running around because I enjoyed it so much, and that was The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Having spent all the time of my life, since early teens, making games, all I can do is dissect a game’s design as I play it, usually finding all the faults in it. But with this game it was almost all from an angle of appreciation. A relief. It also made me understand something about my own work, and in a very light-hearted way, hate my current project, for reasons that had been growing for a while now.

My game project, The Iconoclasts, has now taken me more than three years to make, and I still have a rough road ahead before it’s over. One may think this is only natural, given the scope of the project, but creating playable content has never been a slow practice for me. I made my other game Noitu Love 2: Devolution in quite a short time span. What happened with The Iconoclasts is I decided on a complex narrative, a world with characters that all need explaining. People with voiced emotions and motivations. I also chose to present these things with moving characters, not simple portraits, because I hold that the expressions of the characters on-screen give more life and personality to them. These things all create rules for my design. There will be text cutscenes, due to the complexity of the intended narrative, and it will be cutscenes with scripted characters, needing emotive animations, and to move to places and do things. It also limits the possibilities in a world. I need to code all this, I need to test all this, I need to re-read all this countless times. I create assets entirely meant for cutscenes. What I’ve realised is this: it’s most of my development time. Alongside my complicated, multi-stage bosses, cutscenes take me a long time to script, because it’s not a system of predefined mechanics that dynamically interact. A cutscene needs to move a very precise way. So, in the dark days of sitting and scripting a character walking from A to B, the character may refuse to do so accurately, or at all, and I start cursing at the bug and think to myself “why am I doing this”?

Playing all the Zelda games you would have come to notice the increase in cutscenes, downtimes and just empty travelling that happen in the games, coming to its head in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I like that game’s fighting mechanics (aside from motion control swinging, if that makes sense to you), but how much do I have to go through to get to play those moments? That game had so much excess, and introductory cutscenes, that it finally became the first console Zelda I probably can never fully replay. But still, console 3D Zeldas have been my favourite entries until now. At least for the one time I play them.

But then comes The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. For the first time, in a long while, it foregoes big tutorials. The intro is a very short dream sequence, and then you’re playing. The game even asks you if you want to hear some of the key backstory at all. Then the gameplay mechanics are actually great! The game even moves faster than its SNES equivalent, and improves on issues I have with that game. I love the feel of playing it, and the game doesn’t make me stop experiencing its great design (it will literally suggest it though, damn birds) in order to make me herd goats to establish my life as a hunky farm boy who looks at the heavens with an air-headed grin during his breaks. I love this game a lot. It’s the type of genre and design I love. I’m not solely making a case for me loving anything without plot, here, I’m still picky when it’s not there.

But then that leaves me with my game. The game I’m making all on my own, all decisions on me. I made the decision to make a game with all the cutscenes and establishing shots. I know why, it’s because I like stories. Who doesn’t? A story comes to your mind easier than a gameplay mechanic. The latter is almost always so hard to imagine you’ll need to actually make it before you know if it works, unless you decide to perfectly copy something that already worked, which many do. But my passion lies in trying to at least take mechanics I’ve loved and tweak them. I like obsessing over the duration of an ember particle, if I should make an animation frame freeze for an extra frame for subliminal effect, how much a menu marker twitches when it highlights a new option. It all creates “feel”. Everything key to action games. Basically, Zelda reminds me that I made a very bad, time-devouring decision, and it reminded me of what it is I love in the video game medium, and what I want to master making.

I do love it when a great game has a great story, sure, that’s why I decided to try for myself. But the entire point is, I shouldn’t be making those games. I don’t enjoy myself most of the time. Don’t worry, this is a game I will finish, because I do have passion in the story I’m telling, and I’m doing my best to make every cutscene have its purpose and further the narrative and characters. But I’m not doing this again. I don’t think I’d want to from even the perspective of a team, because I can only imagine all those big game cutscenes or scripted setpieces - which is so much what those games market themselves on - increase the effort needed 1000-fold, and it means pushing developers to realise mine or our “cinematic vision”, rather than, as a team, come up with fun gameplay setpieces. Basically in the way I like to imagine Nintendo teams coming up with a level in Super Mario 3D World, for example. That’s creativity within the medium. It’s not a script - a written medium serving a moving picture medium pasted on an interactive medium - that defines this medium for me.

Conan O'Brien has a skit show online called Clueless Gamer. It’s about exactly that: Conan not being a gamer, playing new releases. I learn from his observations there - having lost his mindset myself since I was probably four -  and one of my favourites of his observations is questioning why he’s “watching a movie” every time before the game even lets him play. It makes me feel like people who don’t even play games have more of an equal desire from games to mine, to the designers who have decided that the future lies in however well a game can strip as many mechanics as possible to make a plot have all the room, and remain unobstructed and seen.

So having gone on this halfway-tangent, I still feel it remains clear I wish games were far more about its systems than its potential for tangible emotions. And I’m more convinced than ever that, moving forward, those are the games I’ll make. I’ve thought so earlier, but the new Zelda helped cement that idea, because I finally had a reminder of why I fell in love with the medium in the first place, after so many years of other people’s ambitions differing from that, making me forget. In a cloud of games like Bioshock Infinite -basically pasting a non-threatening FPS gameplay model onto its far more sparkly story - or The Last of Us - which has countless articles on describing everything about its supposedly media-validating plot rather than its 15 hours of monotonous brick-throwing, instant deaths and cover sitting - I start to doubt my motivations as anything that isn’t just plain foolish.

Lots of you love stories in games, I just felt I needed to rant about my own opinions and preferences. As I said, I also love a good story (but I merit them across all media, not “good for a game”), and hope I can give you one in The Iconoclasts. I wouldn’t cheapen it, given my new ambitions, because it still remains my goal to make it my big achievement, as a lone developer. A game that is 100% me, in gameplay and in complex character portrayal. I just might save the latter for a different medium in the future. :)

My plot may be complete trash, after it being what’s taken me the most time to make.

I have ranted.

PS. You can skip the cutscenes in my game!

I love myself a tragic villain. Like a really tragic antagonist. I love "thing so far beyond any semblance of help that all it knows is violence." I love giving the audience the entire flash-backstory of some horrific and pitiful thing right before it's head gets bashed in with a rock by the protagonists.

commission for @bombcollar ! we've been yelling about iconoclasts and they wanted a drawing of royal playing the piano :)

Sensitive white boy on a quest for truth