Over the last couple of years as an artist/gamedev I've gotten a bunch of cool ideas for projects that I'd love to work on. But for X and Y reasons some of these ideas may not be able to be executed that easily.
Maybe the core idea is fundamentally flawed. Maybe the concept is too monumental for me to actually execute. Ideas that sound cool, but that despite that, I won't be doing them in a good while.
It's only fair that maybe, if I can't give them a chance to fully execute them, maybe I'll let those concepts exist as a blog post.
Reverse detective game.
Fall of 1986. A small town in the US. You're a young woman in your late 20s at your boyfriend's house. The night couldn't be any more perfect. Or so it seemed.
The game starts with your boyfriend's corpse lying on the living room. You killed him for some unforgiveable reason. You have 5 days to get away with your crime.
I've always been fascinated with games where you have to use evidence you've found throughout a game to then connect the dots and find a solution to a question. If done right, it can be one of the most rewarding and satisfying things in the world. Another one of my fascinations is when games are aware of your previous actions, for better or worse. Combine both and you get something interesting. Imagine a game where instead of tracking down a criminal, YOU'RE the criminal and you've got to think ahead every move you make to cover up your tracks. Every action counts starting from the moment the game starts, so every move must be calculated. Each playthrough could be a different set of actions and different outcomes based on them.
The core gameplay takes into account the (quite incompetent) police force of the town, the people that live there, and worst of all, the granny that lives next door of your boyfriend that hates your guts. You could fabricate evidence that could clear you up, or convince others into thinking you were doing something else that night. And also, since at the start of the game you don't know why you did it, repeated playthroughs could help you uncover your own crime, which could serve as a long-term meta-goal.
The game's aesthetic would look like MOTHER for the Famicom, with a more refinated style and a more game-specific color palette. Imagine a cozy and nostalgic Americana town, and the contrast of it and the crime the protagonist commits at the start of the game. For some reason I feel like a lot of the art choices made for MOTHER could fit really well with this. Frankly you could probably use a plethora of styles that could fit, but I can't envision this as anything other than an NES-style game, both with the graphics and the audio.
So why haven't I made this yet?
The logistics of making a complex and fun game out of this would definitely not be easy. But really any innovative game would be complicated to do anyway. And I'd be willing to take the effort to turn this into a real thing. However, when I talked about this idea with some friends, one of 'em warned me that this type of game would probably get the wrong kind of attention and gain a problematic audience. And I hate to admit that she's probably right...
The whole point of the game is the thrill of being clever and getting away with something. The only issue is somebody might see past that and just say "ooh, getting away with murder". Otherwise if anyone wants to make this thing a reality I'd be willing to (cautiously) help.
Metro Concept Album
The inspiration
Besides being known as one of CASIOPEA's keyboardists, Minoru Mukaiya is known for being passionate about Japan's train system. He's the president and CEO of Ongakukan, which creates train simulators. On top of that, the man composed a plethora of unique jingles for more than 110 subway stations in Japan. Each of the jingles include characteristics that represent each station, which is a nice little detail. Also I can't help but imagine a Japnese office worker panicking because they heard a jingle they've never heard before, realizing he's in the wrong station and will be late to work.
I don't think I've heard this kind of concept elsewhere, though it may just be bias because the guy that did the jingles is literally CASIOPEA's most well-known keyboardist. Anyhow, in Mexico City (the place where I live for better or worse), the subway's not that interesting. It just plays a three note sequence and then "next station: ${station_name}" and maybe some other detail like if the subway station connects to any other subway routes.
About the Metro
Despite the iconic, yet unasuming "jingles" of the Mexico City subway system, there's a lot of charm to it. Starting operations since 1969 and expanding throughout the years, the Metro has been a crucial element of the city, and the quintessential form of transport for the citizens of the city, alongside those who visit from outer states daily.
Now, imagine you're building an important transport system that (at least in the late 60s) will come straight out of the future, and that will take thousands of people from one side of the city to another. And you gotta make it look cool. Fortunately, the city already had experience making stuff look "cool". In 1968, Mexico City was home to the 1968 Olympics. The branding of the event is one of the most iconic in the history of the event and in Mexico's history. From unique typography to icons were created just for this event. Oh, and a paramilitary group too but we don't talk about that.
The design was made by Lance Wyman, and soon he'd become key for the image of the Metro system that was being created during that time. A highlight of the design for the 1968 Olympics was the use of recognizable icons for each sport and activity in general. This would serve as a point of reference for the design of Metro stations.
By common sense, stations would be generally named after the location they're in. However, the icons also often contained landmarks or things of relevance related to either the station's name itself, or the location. This serves as a cool way to showcase the local culture, but most of the time it also works as an accessibility feature, since foreigners that aren't used to the city's locations can find their way around correlating the landmark of an area and the position of the subway station and its icon.
Now, the icons themselves and the locations of the stations already give them quite a lot of character, however some stations go a step further. Sometimes stations will have their own unique quirk, like Pino Suarez, where they found a small ancient Mexica construction while digging, and is now displayed at the station (and also became the icon of the station too btw).
The idea
Even if they don't have this type of stuff, each station is unique from the last. And we circle back to Minoru Mukaiya's concept of unique jingles for each station. What if Mexico City's Metro had something similar? And thus I came up with an idea. Not just one concept album, but several per line, where each song would represent a station. And stations that belong to two different lines would repeat, with different iterations shared between albums.
At least to me, it's a fascinating concept. What would a highly transited station like Pantitlan sound like? Or how would a station with historic value like Bellas Artes or Popotla sound like? Heck, there are even tales of ghost stations that were never completed. How would those sound like? Or even secret stations like Expometro, which is used for training, or the rumored Transmisiones Militares, which supposedly exists exclusively for use by the military as a bunker or in case they need to be transported from a military school nearby Cuatro Caminos to then rush to the center of the city, without needing to walk to that station. How would THAT sound like or at the very least even be included?
So why haven't I made this yet?
I know for a fact that this will be an instrumental ambient soundtrack. My sources of inspiration are Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno and Music for Menus by Blank Banshee, and maybe it'll sound like Tomorrow's Harvest by Boards of Canada. However, while I already have the question of "how would it sound like?" I have NO idea how to actually respond to that properly. Maaaaaaaybe it could be an ambient album using instruments from the time each station was built? I don't know. On top of that, this is a monumental task. It would take a while to do JUST ONE album. Imagine 12. That's almost as big as The Beatles' studio discography. However this is one of my favorite projects of the list so...
Chrono Trigger MSU-1 hack
It's still mostly a mystery as to how some composers made music for Nintendo's 16-bit machine, the Super Nintendo. We have some pictures of the hardware, and maybe every now and then they'll talk about their process in a tweet or something like that. Not much is known about how Chrono Trigger's soundtrack was composed, other than Yasunori Mitsuda creating bangers so hard he had to be hospitalized. Besides that, we don't know much.
There are some nice arrangements post-release like the incredible The Brink of Time, or many other orchestral iterations. However there are a handful of arranged versions of the songs which to my knowledge were only used for promotional content that are eerily similar to what was used in the SNES game. As a reminder, the sound chip used for the SNES is limited, so technically the quality of most soundtracks made for the SNES are stuck to the console's limitations. However, for some reason there are higher quality arrangements for Chrono Trigger that accurately replicate the in-game versions. How exactly did these versions come to existance is a mystery. Were they created during development, or after? Are there more that we don't know about? I don't know, but my theory is that they were probably made during development as sketches of sorts, since these are definitely made bt Mitsuda, and he was unavailable during the end of development.
Now, unfortunately as public we've never heard these songs outside of the context they were used for. However, we can just... do it ourselves right? And that's when I started doing these covers for a potential MSU-1 hack, so that not only we had recreations, but so that they could also be experienced in-game.
So what happened?
Now, when I started this project, it was done with a lot of research, but also with the tools I had at the time. Fortunately, as time passes I keep getting better. However, comparing older arrangements to newer arrangements, the older ones sound like crap. And it's demotivating to do that all over again. It got tiresome and boring. But I still want to continue, though if I'm gonna do it, I'll do it in one go.
Red Tears (Webcomic)
Red Tears was rightfully cancelled under the wrong circumstances.
I firmly believe that stories must take full advantage of their medium. Videogames for instance, should take full advantage of the variability of pace and direction the player can bring. Films should take advantage of the fact filmmakers have full control of what the viewer sees. Sometimes some stories fit a specific medium better than others. For example, I've been bingeing Andor, and something I wondered is "how the hell would this even work as a videogame tho?". The answer would probably be: it wouldn't. It's made to take advantage of its medium and that's the end of the story. Another example is Fallout New Vegas. How would a TV show/movie about New Vegas be like? And we actually do have that. The Fallout show is basically a brand new Fallout installment but written to work as a TV show, and doesn't try to fit an existing videogame.
Red Tears wasn't cancelled because of the direction the story was taking, but it was definitely an obstacle I was facing. The story was ridiculously linear. Even though there were nice interesting choices here and there, all roads were leading to the same ending, and most of the time it was clear the story was leaning heavily on some choices over the others to the point they felt more like filler.
So womp womp. Game's dead. Though there are some cool things I would've liked to keep and "salvage" from it. For example, most of the good songs are up now on Bandcamp as an album that can be enjoyed on its own isolated from the game's original context. However, how about the story itself? A novel-type thing would probably work. The story was divided in chapters that could be easily translated into a book. However, I still feel like part of the uniqueness of the original idea of the project was the visual part. Character designs, locations, it was a very visual project.
So why haven't I made this yet?
I suck at drawing, and maybe I should let this one die and focus on other stuff instead of spiraling around this zombie idea that has lived for too long...
It's been five years already. I should let go.
Closing thoughts
So yeah, these are some things that I wish I could do but, time's short. I gotta choose my battles. Maybe someone else can execute them. Maybe someone already did. Maybe not. I shuold get back to work though. This was a nice little window into my mind.
