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[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks!

So MORSE has been on a bit of a world tour! I took the game out to Asia in September to showcase at Busan Indie Connect and Tokyo Game Show which was an incredibly humbling experience. Got so much positive feedback, leads and developments that I'm immensely excited to follow up on! The most proud moments were winning the experimental design awards at both conferences!



More broadly over the last 12 months I've had to be a lot more involved in the bizdev/admin side of development and with that, there's been less of an outlet for creative expression/development of the game. This really came to a head last week back during an local Indie Accellerator where I ended up in hospital from exhaustion! I just didn't give myself enough time after travelling for over a month to truly rest.

The experience of being hospitalised really knocked me for 6 and was terrifying and since then, I've restricted myself to just 2 hours a day to do admin/emails (In a local coffee shop) and the rest of the time to do creative output into the project. This dynamic shift has already been immensely efficient and fulfilling, getting me back into the groove of development and expressing myself creatively. I'm so excited (particularly after a month of exhibiting) to work on the project again and hopefully that'll manifest in more developments/updates for the project on here!

My plans and ambitions of what to focus on next is implementing the settings menu, refining the training mode to make it much more configurable and integrating it in the campaign. More broadly, I want to make the game feel a lot more satisfying to operate and tighten the controls to a point that players can speed run the experience.

That's all for now, stay tuned for more updates and thanks for your patience!

[JobLeonard]

Oh wow, take care of yourself! Your health is more important than this game (not knocking on the game here), so yeah, glad to read you're giving yourself some more rest these days.

Anyway, congratulations on the prize!

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks,

Hope you're all well! Been another hot minute since I posted, thought I'd bob a message on here.

So, the long and short of it is (If it wasn't obvious) MORSE is officially shelved. I spent 2-3 years pushing the project, I worked with a team to get a vertical slice made, toured the world, sought out publishers and worked tirelessly to try get a deal, met so many wonderful people who loved the project and won awards in experimental design, all whilst surviving a pandemic!

But as mentioned in my previous post, after my hospitalisation last year and some other personal stuff, I dialled back my involvement on the game. I took a couple of months off to heal and work on other projects and the longer I spent away from MORSE and the burden of managing a company, the more I realised that trying to build games at this scale is a really corrosive pursuit and ultimately, has no long term future without immense personal cost. I spent nearly a full year trying to seek validation from publishers and nearly all of the ones that I dealt with were manipulative, agonisingly slow and more than anything disrespectful. To give one example, one publisher who masquerades as a progressive, ethical partner after over a year of negotiation whittled my budget in half and when I wouldn't buckle any further told me not only was the deal off but they knew 3 months before they weren't going to sign the project but chose to string me along because the head of publishing "didn't want to let the game go".

The previous note of "No long term future" is a really important one, I met recently with a friend of mine who is approaching the end of a project which they received considerable funding. Despite that success, working tirelessly for years and enduring some pretty disgusting behaviour from partners, they're now back at square one, going through that same undignified process again of pitching for funding, trapped in that cycle. That isn't independence, that's dependence.

The thing is, I don't need to participate, I already have what I need to create! I can quite rapidly design and program my own games, do my own illustration, fabricate my own controllers/installations and most importantly, I recognise that I really despise the drudgery of running a business and all the bullshit that comes with that. There are so many experiences I can design and make right now without having to worry about courting sharks for money and ultimately spending time I could be putting into expression rather than bizdev.

The real penny drop moment came when I visited AMAZE festival in Berlin which was a wonderful experience that I was so grateful to get to attend. I saw so many bold, experimental projects and upon showing some of my own work, I realised that a lot of the experimental projects I'm most proud of were from 5-8 years ago. Despite my skills increasing and having a reputation within the ALT-CTRL scene as a trailblazer and an innovator, I had let that part of myself wither away in pursuit of commercial compatiblity. Ultimately, my heart belongs to experimental design and that is diametrically opposed to the market and what publishers want, despite their hollow endorsements of innovation and expression. Realising that I can just make enough money doing something else and not have to cater my art to the industry has been extremely liberating and cathartic.

I recently watched an XOXO talk by designer Frank Chimero which echoed this sentiment in his talk discussing the tension between creative expression and capitalism:

"There's one important benefit that I don't often hear mentioned very often; if your income isn't tied to your capacity or ability to make a certain kind of work, it means you don't have to take any shit from anybody, it means you can just make whatever you want to make, and what's more independant than that?"





The last 6 months have been spent in the wilds making weird experimental shit, catering experiences to audiences incompatible with capitalism and rediscovering my ALT CTRL roots. It has been deeply engrossing and exciting, and it's made me question why I've been trying to conform myself to be just another generic games company, rather than trimming away all the bizdev fat and playing to my strengths as an artist and just making my primary income outside of games. Alternative Controllers are a vast, unexplored frontier primarily because of their commercial incompatibility with the industry and because of that, it's possible to make something ground-breaking and novel with miniscule budgets and days of work, compared to considerable commercial budgets with many strings attached, years of labour and narrow ranges of acceptable expression, most titles barely having any room to move the needle of innovation.

When I lectured previously, I was asked to do a PHD to secure further work with the University. This would have taken 7-8 years part time to complete, and at the time I asked myself "How many games could I realistically build in that time instead of doing some box-ticking research that I don't care about?" The number turned out to be 8, but now, I ask the same question about commercial development - How many experimental, boundary pushing art projects, enriching interdisciplinary collaborations and ALT CTRL installations can I put out in the time of funding, developing and supporting one commercial title that doesn't even have a guarantee of success or creative autonomy?

Whilst working on MORSE, a good friend, previous collaborator and talented illustrator Alex Borovski reached out with some absolutely breath-taking illustrations and asked if we could work together to make an interactive project. At the time, I dismissed her since I was too busy with MORSE, but this month, I took another look and mocked up the framework for her proposed project in just two days and now we have this wonderful collaborative art to explore together that aligns with my values and easily fits in with my schedule of other work.

So what does this mean for MORSE? It's a good question. I think more than anything, the game just needs to rest for a while. Despite my ability to make my own stuff, a commercially polished release of MORSE is out of my individual range and may be impossible to realise without creative concession and handing over my pound of flesh to industry vultures. That may change in the next few years as my skills improve (currently learning to code), but ultimately, if I do come back to it, it'll be of a limited scope and a short, sweet experience true to it's original vision. It's also worth acknowledging that those publishers really ruined my passion for the project, there's only so many times you can hear someone say they care about your work and staff then scalp your budgets to breaking point and drag the process out for literally years. In a weird way though, I'm thankful to them for helping me realise I don't want to (or have to) participate in that abusive dynamic anymore.

Just wanted to thank you all for following the project, I'm incredibly proud of what I achieved with the game, appreciative of all of the patient and generous people in my life who helped me take MORSE as far as I did and ultimately I'm grateful to finally break free of the toxic indie-publisher cycle and so excited to see where these strange new paths lead.

.-.. .- - . .-.

.-

[JobLeonard]

All I can say is bravo!

Well, I can say some more actually. I can really relate to what you said. I studied art and then didn't pursue a career in it for basically the same reason: I want my creative expression to come from a place of freedom, not from depending on it to make a living. So I'm obviously very biased, but I think you made the absolutely right call.

I hope this game will see the light of day some time in the future, but even if not I'm looking forward to what else you'll create!

Speaking of which: will you post devlogs about your other experiments at least?

[Alain]

I'm sorry to hear you made such bad experiences with publishers. I agree, these talks can take a long time and often lead nowhere. But I would like to step in for some publishers. It sounds like you encountered particularly bad representatives and being asked to cut your budget is weird in deed. There are bad ones for sure, but in my experience there definitely are those out there who are professional and passionate for games. Nevertheless, your decision is very understandable. The games you want to make may not line up with commercial interest, which is totally fine and it would be terrible if you'd bend yourself to a breaking point. I am sure you will continue making wonderful stuff and there is no need to commercialize the work you love. I am glad you found back your spark and passion! Keep us posted!

[AlexVsCoding]

Thanks for your thoughts, I know that there are obviously people in these organisations that want to sign games and support developers (I’ve met these people, many of whom are friends) and that there’s a tension between them and those with the purse strings, but this seems to be the argument for “a few bad apples”… I’ve been in the scene for over a decade now and the number of developers signed to ethical publishers is utterly dwarfed by horror stories from folks who got burned after being signed, swathes given false hope and strung on years till they broke (or were ghosted) and the clear trend that publisher terms are getting worse with every year that passes. At the same time these same publishers will talk about honesty, transparency and professionalism then drop the mask when NDA’s are signed, so figuring out which ones are awful relies on whisper networks. I’ve heard of developers having to go to therapy because of how badly they were treated… it’s just nasty.

Thing is, I recognise that is the world of business and that a lot of Indie projects don’t make their returns, but I don’t think the majority of people who try to make independent work are actually equipped for the fight or even realise this is the fight they’re in for. I’ve recently started asking prospective Indies considering the publisher/self funded route: “do you like business?” and often the response I’ll get back is “I like money” and the thing is, that isn’t the same thing. If you like money, do something else (likely more stable and maybe even more lucrative) and make games on the side, don’t step into an ever shrinking cage. I know this is possibly a privileged position to take but if you don’t intrinsically care about making money from your games, cut out the literal middle man and just make art whilst sustaining yourself.

An example I tend to come back to, a friend of mine who trained as a games designer and became a graphics designer decided one day “I’m sitting in a box looking at a box, fuck this” and decided to maintain the rivers of Sheffield and become a farmer, he’s a lot happier and can choose to engage with the medium he enjoys if he wants without the stakes of financial ruin.

Hope that makes sense, good luck out there!

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks,

Hope you're all doing well! Been a while since I've updated MORSE. It's been an interesting time since I posted.

To give a brief summary, around a year ago I hit the peak of the project: I toured MORSE around Asia, winning awards in experimental design and exploring Japan and Korea. It was a thrilling time and I was genuinely so proud for it to soar to such heights. But a week after returning to the UK during a business accelerator, I realised I wasn't able to breathe and I was hospitalised with a suspected pulmonary embolism. After numerous tests, they concluded it was thankfully just exhaustion and ordered a week of bedrest. Due to this health scare and a number of compounding life reasons, I had to shelve the project last year. I'd been pushing it for 2 years and despite the positive reception, publishers just weren't willing to commit (despite them dragging out conversations for literally years).

You can read a longer post about this experience further up the thread, but in short, I've taken the last year away from the game to do experimental design, stop trying to conform to the industry and actually explore the stuff I'm interested in. I've toured my work in Berlin, Manchester and New York, I've leant into controller fabrication and designing short, ground breaking experiences meant for physical exhibition instead of bloated, commercial projects that outstay their welcome to hit an arbitrary 2 hour mark.





My spirit for the project was truly poisoned by the awful behaviour of publishers, so it's only in the last few months I've felt any kind of motivation to work on MORSE again. But that enthusiasm has returned. Having said that, that experimental , minimal mindset has informed this latest iteration.

What was previously proposed is unsustainable to deliver, I can't financially or physically do it, my previous hospitalisation was proof of that. But, I'm in the privileged position to have the ability to make my own experiences without having to hire programmers, the main catch is it's not using conventional tools like Unity.

This is to say, you will at some point get MORSE as an experience, but it'll be made in Stencyl, it's going to be a lot more minimalist and as players you'll need to accept that there'll be constraints of the tool and possibly not features that most conventional launches have.

On the other hand, I am far more adept with this tool and am confident that this gameplay wise is already a far superior project. I'm excited to share updates on the new version and what's changed since I last posted. I recently showed the latest version of the game at EGX in London which went down incredibly well and since then I've introduced a slew of updates and systems, of which I'll share soon.

For those of you that have Wishlisted and followed the project, thank you for your patience.

Stay tuned!

.-

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks, here’s 10 minutes of fierce and frantic footage of the new build, I’ll follow up soon with a proper write up!

[Dimitar86]

Great idea!
A game for a real amateur radio operator

[AlexVsCoding]

Hello folks,

Hope you're all well! Thanks for your patience, here's an update on where MORSE is at.

So the game footage linked in the previous post will likely look very different to what you've seen previously. It's definitely a drop in production quality, but that is an intentional choice. Over the previous 2 years of pushing the project, there was an emphasis and pressure to increase the scope, upgrade the game to 3D, aim for a multi-hour experience to make it commercially viable for publishers to consider. Whilst I am genuinely glad I had the opportunity to lead a team of devs, tour the game around the world, delve into the richness of history involved with telegraphists and learn Unity as an engine, the truth is that bloating of the original scope and having to draft up and revise these huge budgets (not least from having to budget the hire of a programmer full time) distracted me from the fact that the game can be explored sufficiently and satisfyingly in a short, polished, minimalist 2D experience.

This isn't exclusive to MORSE. To be blunt, the games industry is rife with this kind of bloat, it's common practice for publishers to outright reject games below certain budget sizes so devs enflate their rates to match, then inevitably things go to pot when the developers can't deliver at that scale or the publishers don't see the returns on their gargantuan investment (So the developers never see a penny). It's unsustainable (as the scale of industry layoffs/closures show) and I'm genuinely really glad to have returned to a tool and scale I can deliver the project within.

So with that ramble in mind, here's the primary adjustments in bringing the scope down:

+ 3D -> 2D: I've changed engines from Unity back to Stencyl. Primarily because I can work incredibly fast and independantly in Stencyl, by contrast working in Unity was requiring an immense amount of faff and as mentioned above, would have required hiring a programmer to deliver the final game. I don't feel a massive amount (other than porting capabilities) is lost by shifting back, the game is much snappier, I can iterate faster and because of being able to program myself, that brings the dev cost down significantly.



+ Campaign based -> Wave based: This is easily the hardest change to make to the project, shelving the majority of narrative work that was done to create a rich period setting to ground the game in. The greatest loss of ditching Unity was Ink, the narrative tool developed by Inkle which allowed really sophisticated narrative structures for storytelling, that does not exist for Stencyl and to build an equivalent system for the tool is currently out of scope of what I intend to deliver. Compared to the previous iteration which was more oriented around a series of scripted dioramas interwoven with narrative segments, this latest iteration will be a tightly scoped, mechanics driven, procedurally generated wave defense game at heart. You fight off a wave, upgrade your arsenal, place defences then face the next attack on a new randomly generated map. Rinse and repeat.



+ Land, Air and Sea -> Purely Naval Combat: In the interest of keeping scope constrained, for now I'll be focusing purely on delivering naval combat. It's the simplest to deliver out of the three battlefield types and most thematically cohesive with it's closest neighbour, Battleships. Other perks are it doesn't feel unintuitive for units to be travelling in straight lines from left to right (unlike trench warfare which requires vertical depth and cover), defences can be focused around sea-mine placement and there's some really lovely, period ship designs to pull from.

What is nice about this approach is the above features aren't gone forever: They can be re-introduced if there's an appetite for MORSE and the game does well, but for now I can just focus on designing this tightly scoped and deliverable experience.

Now I've discussed the reduction in scope, lets talk about the improvements that have since blossomed now that my focus has shifted back to development instead of bizdev:

+ Fog of war: In the previous version of MORSE, there was some fog of war that hid enemies approaching off the edge of the screen, but with the latest iteration it's taken to a new form. All units are hidden until they're revealed by artillery, either permanently revealed by a direct hit or temporarily flashing from a nearby explosion, think of it as a muzzle flash effect at night illuminating nearby objects. Gameplay now requires more spatial awareness of ships and trying to predict where units will be in advance through reconnaissance, players often launching shells into the dark to illuminate hidden targets.



+ Locational Damage: Depending on where you strike on ships, you'll do more damage, it's possible to kill some ships with one direct hit, rewarding players for precise strikes.

+ Upgrade system: This is a pretty substantial addition, at the end of each wave, you get the opportunity to pick between two upgrade types by entering either a dot or a dash. There are two main groups of upgrades, Shell upgrades (discussed in the next bulletpoint) and general upgrades. General upgrades adjust things like the radius of illumination of your shots, the durability of mines, how far ahead you can see in the stack of queued artillery shells and the range at the rate of restocking ammo.



+ New Shell Variants: There's one new type of shell and alterations of the previous ones - I've added the suppressive shot, a shell that slowly strikes the same location multiple times, a handy tool when hitting larger ships. For the shells, they now need to be unlocked and upgraded over time, so every 3 waves the player has the choice to pick between unlocking a shell or upgrading an existing one. An example of upgrading an existing shell would be adding an extra row to the horizontal artillery shot, eventually getting 4 or 5 horizontal artillery shots in a row, a devastating salvo for any units caught in their path.

+ Defence construction phase: As mentioned earlier, as part of the flow of gameplay, you fight off a wave of units, a new word is generated, you choose an upgrade and then you get the opportunity to plant several mines on the map. These mines can be upgraded to have a wider blast radius and can be used near the frontline to reveal enemy ships or lining the backline to catch any stragglers that slip past your bombardment. For now there's just mines as part of this defensive phase, but I've created a framework that could spawn for example other allied units or defences for placement.

+ More enemy unit types: Compared to the previous build, there's already double the number of units as last time and straightforward tools to add more. I've adjusted the ships to look more familiar to the era, working from pictures of German classes of vessels at the time. My favourite by far is the Dreadnought, a slow moving, colossal, heavily armoured ship that launches massive explosive shells that cut through any defences. It's a genuine point of panic when it shows up in later waves!



+ Lifebar: The lose state for the game is now if your health bar is depleted to zero, which occurs if units successfully break past your defences. Small gunships take 1 segment whilst dreadnoughts will cleave 4 of 5. This means when you're being overrun, you have to consider damage control over what units you can feasibly let through.

+ Minimalist Input: The game is now baked down to just 2 keys: Launch and fire. It was already broadly the case to some extent in the Unity version but I've decided to fully commit to the scope of just 2 buttons. This means the upgrade screen is navigated with a dot or dash and confirmed with launch, gameplay is controlled with just two inputs and defences are placed using the same aiming/launching mechanism. What's a lovely addition too is I've added sliders to adjust the threshold to determine the difference between a dot and a dash (how long it needs to be held to change from one to the other) and the cooldown threshold for Morse Code input (how long after you've entered your Morse Code input will it take to convert your sequence of dots and dashes into a letter). What's lovely about this setup is it functions as an accessibility tool for those with reduced dexterity but also functions as a means of dialling up to 11 for Ham Radio enthusiasts who want to speed up their input!



+ Stats screen: After each game, you get the opportunity to see how you did, seeing the accuracy of your shots, number of mines placed, total shells fired and the final wave reached. In particular interest to me is the timer showing the gameplay duration. My average play time is between 50-70 minutes before I'm beaten, which is really promising given that the rough length of the 3D Unity vertical slice of MORSE was around 2 hours overall!

That's it for now, I'll talk in a later post about the things I want to add to this build. Again I want to thank again for your patience, I'm now only working on MORSE on the side so whilst the scope makes development faster, the intervals at which I work on the game are more infrequent. Stay tuned for more and feel free to ask me any questions below!

All the best and hope you all get some rest over the holidays,

Alex

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks,

Just a quick nudge to say that development on MORSE is still progressing, been integrating the tutorial for the project and re-organising a lot of the code.

+ Tutorial: Long overdue, but I've got a basic tutorial system in. It wasn't too much work given that I already had a lot of the framework for the tutorial from the previous version of MORSE. It's 90% of the way there, the game starts you off with entering the letters of LEARN (N = Dash Dot) and then blowing up 5 target ships as practice. It's short and sweet and I've been able to feed through the notifications system, I'll test it with folks soon and hopefully it'll be enough to get people started.
+ Refined Code: I did some lessons in coding before Christmas and I've been going back through the project and trying to imbue the game's logic with what I learned. Still haven't finished yet but making it easier to follow and if there's another break from the project easier to pick back up!
+ Mouse controls: As an alternative control method for the game, given it's just two inputs you can use left and right mouse click now to operate the game! Feels quite nice and I like that you can invert the direction of the mouse and press it like it's a telegraph key.


Hopefully will be showing it at events this year! Stay tuned for more soon.

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks! Just a quick addition to the above post:

Whilst I don't really have an interest in commercial games development full time anymore (Given my previously explained statement and even more so from the dramatic industry downturn), I do still genuinely want to get MORSE released in this form this year, which I believe is possible given how much progress has been made on the project and the refined scope. The main next step is getting sufficient playtesting in to gauge how far off release I am.

Speaking of, tonight I'm going to be taking it to the local Wireless and Radio Society tonight to see what they think and if the tutorial is sufficient to onboard those players! I'm generally really interested in trying to engage the ham radio scene, really build them a project that takes into account the nuances of the input. There's a lot of "Rallies" that happen throughout the year so hoping to try get along to one of those, hopefully tonight should be enlightening in figuring out where to start.

It might seem a very niche audience to target but there's over 60,000 ham radio operators in the UK and 2 million in the US, so it'd be great to engage them with the project!

As an additional shout out! 1920: Beats of War looks absolutely lush and is a neighbour exploring the realm of telegraphy. Definitely worth a look and give it a wishlist!

More updates soon.

[mecholdem]

hey folk I'm not a folk
and I skipped reading the post
and watching videos too

[AlexVsCoding]

hey folk I'm not a folk
and I skipped reading the post
and watching videos too

May I kindly suggest you folk off then : )

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks! Just a small post to say that I got interviewed by EDGE about my career which was exciting and as part of those conversations about my current projects, MORSE came up as a topic and specifically, the build I made for Playdate.

After the interview, I revisited the project and after 6 months of doing C++ programming I'm actually a lot more savvy at writing games in Lua!

As a result, I'm picking MORSE back up as a project for Playdate. It's been really satisfying getting all the systems working and I'm confident in a relatively short period I'll have the core experience functional.

The main bit I'm excited for is the crank integration, which I have a unique control scheme for!

Stay tuned for more soon,

.-

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks!

Writing with some exciting news! I found a way to subvert the already subversive playdate... by TURNING the crank handle into a spring loaded Morse Code controller! 

I'm proper chuffed with the finish and how elegant it feels to operate, it's particularly fitting as it's 10 years to the day since I took my first alternative controller to EGX. I'm going to keep beavering on with the Playdate version, it'd be a really nice home for the game to end up and also the possibility of getting to distribute peripherals for the Playdate would be wonderful! Stay tuned for more soon.

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks! Another quick update: MORSE's playdate adaption has blown up on Twitter, got over 3k likes, over half a million views and a retweet from Playdate! Dead chuffed with the response and definitely gives me a lot to think about. This really cements my interest in prioritising releasing on Playdate over conventional platforms, the prospect of getting to distribute custom peripherals for the Playdate is incredibly exciting.