I always find naming influences a really weird thing.
Sometimes it almost seems like the best person to list your game’s influences would be anybody but yourself. Someone holding Desert Child at arms length would probably name all these uncanny similarities between it and a heap of retro games.

Then there’s the game’s that actually influenced the game; the 2% of the game that I’ll insist was stolen from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but which everybody else attributes to my pretentiousness. I swear on the grave of my guinea pig, I was influenced by the following games while developing Desert Child:
(Also, take these as recommendation for titles I think are worth looking at.)

The Swindle (Game, 2015)

A proc-gen heist game where the player has 100 days to “earn” enough money to take on the final mission.
I really enjoyed the very slow accumulation and spending of wealth in this game, as you amount of cash is basically a dual-purpose progress bar that you actually have to wind back to upgrade your abilities. Something I totally nicked for Desert Child.
There’s some great ideas in this game that are only held back by somewhat shallow level generation. It’s still absolutely worth playing, especially if you like games like Spelunky or Gunpoint.

Xeodrifter (Game, 2014)

This little metroidvania is pretty basic, and doesn’t rock to formula (as far as I can tell. I’m not a huge fan of the genre). One thing that I couldn’t stop tinkering with, however, was the game’s gun upgrade system. Instead of rewarding exploration with just more health upgrades, Xeodrifter has dozens of gun upgrade points hidden about it’s 4 worlds.
These points can be applied to any of the 5 bullet categories on your gun. You can place all your points onto the SPEED slot for faster projectiles, or place them into the SPREAD slot to increase the, um, spread.
What I wanted to steal from this system is using one universal resource on multiple game components that all affect each other.
See, with enough points, you can increase both Spread and the curve of projectiles; tweaking their balance to create the perfect gun for your taste.
It’s a really simple, yet cool, system that I would love to experiment with in a later game, perhaps just allowing the player to customize their gun to their exact feel from the get-go? Who knows.

Watch Dogs 2 (Game, 2016)

I will only accept insults for liking this game from people who have actually played it.
Once awesome little feature (that may or may not have been in the first game?) was how the soundtrack was handled, almost in direct contrast to the Grand Theft Auto games, which it apes in so many other ways.
In Watch Dogs 2, your music selection is quite limited at the outset, and the player must hunt down and “collect” new tracks in the environment. This is done by using the in-game “Soundhound” app to tag and identify tracks that play from real sources in the environment.
I love this, as it is it’s own, very modern conceit for having a constantly shifting soundtrack in an open world game. To me, at least, It was much more identifiable than the standard “songs on the radio” mechanic most games use.
In Desert Child, I knew I wanted to have a personalized soundtrack, but I didn’t want to have the player have to take time to manually turn off songs they disliked. I also wanted to maximise the value of each track, and ensure the player was excited by the prospect of hearing new music.
The in-game record store was my attempt at this; being a kind of “reverse track listing” wherein players purchase tracks that like in order to add them to the game’s rotation.
(Also, Watch Dogs 2 has an awesome original soundtrack by Hudson Mohawk)

Doom (Game,1994)

I was at university studying architecture, and this guy found out I liked games. We started talking about games we liked with great architecture and he gushed over the level design in Doom. I was kind of surprised, having tried playing the game in a web browser years ago and not thought much of it. But he insisted it was great, and another friend of mine backed him up.
So I get home from class, buy Doom on GOG.com (shout out to Poland), and I’m blown away by it. I dont know why it didn’t click with me before, but I fell in love with it. I had to go to a family dinner that night and was genuinly grouchy that I had to stop playing.
I played Doom continually for about the first year of Desert Child’s development, and I can see a clear influence on the shooting and movemnt, even now.
The speed that Imps lob fireballs at you, the CRUNCH of the shotgun, the rhythm of strafe, shoot,strafe… It got to a point where I drafted an email to press calling the game “Doom meets F-Zero”.
Additionally, the lo-fi 3D rendering of Doom, I think, is a great look that I really wish would make a comeback, and it definitly had an instirationall effect in my settling on an graphical style for the game.

Flashback (Game, 1992)

Yeah okay, this one’s pretty obvious.

Flashback was one of my favourite game’s growing up because it has the “living world” feel of the PC games I loved, but also presented itself with so much style and personality on a character level.
The second chapter, in particular, was a huge influence on me.
The opening of the game sets the stage for a tight, stealthy cinematic platformer… but then you arrive in New Washington.
You work your way through the underbelly of the city, eventually taking an elevator up to street level, and are greeted by a strange sight: a man, just standing there. He’s not important, just an NPCs with not much to say, but as a child it blew my mind. This action-shooter game had just transformed into an adventure game, complete with an inventory system, timed puzzles, and witty dialogue. What’s going on?!?
It’s such a jarring transition, I’m sure many people put the game down at this point and never looked back, but for me it’s a moment I’ve wanted to recreate for so long.
SPOILERS
I kinda do the same thing in Desert Child.

Man, this is running a lot longer than I thought it would. I might have to do a Part 2 later.

It just occurred to me that I probably wrote a blog very similar to this a while ago…

Oh well.

Also, I apologise for the massive gaps between blogs. Desert Child is in crunch/submission mode right now, and the only reason I can write this is because someone else is working on console code as I type this.

My schedule will hopefully be more regular by the beginning of July, and I’ll also have more to write about other than bug fixing and ESRB ratings.

bye!