About Tallowmere

Tallowmere is the result of me longing for a game that doesn't get boring. A game that is fun. A game that I've struggled to find.

To this end, I am making Tallowmere with these ideas in mind:

• Lots of randomness
• Randomly-generated levels
• Lots of enemies, bosses, traps, weapons, and items
• Random enemy health and damage attributes
• Lots of event-driven rooms with objectives (so a varying plot but without boring you to death)
• No ending (but perhaps ends of chapters or acts)
• Action-oriented
• Lots of sound effects
• Lots of particle effects (dust, elemental flames, sparkles)
• Lots of cartoon gore, blood, guts, gibs
• Have said blood, guts, and gibs be persistent, never disappearing
• Little-to-no menus (interact with NPCs instead!)
• Less time looking at quest and inventory screens, more time playing
• The ability to feel overpowered while being weak simultaneously
• Needing to know when to block attacks, and when to jump/dodge out of harm's way
• No mining or salvaging (I'd rather kill a monster than cut down a tree)
• Low amounts of health to keep you on your toes
• Theoretically be able to attain high scores without levelling up your stats (simply block when required and attack when it's safe!)
• Singleplayer
• Split-screen local co-op
• Multiplayer LAN co-op
• Permadeath, so you can just pick up and play, and try to beat your high score
• Keep the spirit of a card game: you get dealt random hands and do your best with what's in front of you
• No spreadsheets; I hate spreadsheets.
• Simplistic graphics, gritty and crude without conforming to anything in particular (less time fussing about stuff, more time creating stuff!)

My name is Chris McFarland. I've been playing games since I was 5 or so. Grew up with an NES, Game Boy, Super NES, Sega Genesis, N64. Played lots of shareware PC games (anyone remember buying games from a mail-order catalogue and having them arrive on floppy disks?). And then came more PC gaming, the Internet, the PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3.

What I find myself doing with Tallowmere is drawing from all the fun elements of games I like, and encorporating them into one.

These are the sorts of games that I have fond memories of:

• Super Mario World
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Mega Man X
• Pokémon
• Super Mario RPG
• Mario Kart 64
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• GoldenEye 64
• Super Smash Bros
• Perfect Dark
• Half-Life
• Myth: The Fallen Lords
• Myth II: Soulblighter
• The Sims
• Diablo II
• Counter-Strike
• Ogre Battle 64
• Grand Theft Auto III and higher
• Warcraft III
• Onimusha
• Halo
• World of Warcraft
• Dota 2
• Demon's Souls and Dark Souls
• Spelunky

As I've gotten older (I'm 29 now), I find my tastes in gaming narrowing. I dislike micro-management. Building things. Fussing over stats and numbers going up and down isn't fun.

I just want to spam buttons, kill things, acquire things along the way (by killing things), level up, and use on-the-spot timing and strategy to escape death and conquer victoriously. But things need to be random and unpredictable with persistent gore.

Some thoughts:

• You can beat Zelda games with only 3 hearts - I've done this, it's fun.
• In Diablo II, blood splats and corpses are persistent. In Diablo III, blood splats and corpses fade away. 12 years later, Diablo's gone backwards.
• I hate solving puzzles.
• Completely blocking attacks with your shield in the Zelda and Dark Souls games is awesome, compared to leaving it to chance like in Diablo.

I've tinkered with website development since my teens, graduated from CPIT with a Bachelor of Information & Communication Technologies, tried a career in website development (PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript programming largely), decided that wasn't for me, and have spent a few years mucking around.

But then I discovered Unity in 2011 and it sparked my interest towards game development. After 2 years of messing with umpteen gamedev experiments (a common occurance) and trying 3D modelling and stuff, Unity brought out a 2D architecture that just inspired me to make something stupidly fun, keeping in mind all of the above.

I've found that by thinking less and just doing more, you get more playable, testable results. Gone are the spreadsheets, the planning, the drawings. Just whip a few pixels up, write some behavioural code, add it to the game and see if it's fun. And it's through this process that I've gotten this far with Tallowmere. I prefer to work solo where possible, so progress can be slow, but progress is progress.

Now, I'm not a company; I'm a human being - like you! - with strengths, weaknesses, imperfections, and am bound to make mistakes, but I try my best. I've been a stay-at-home dad for the past two years, so I'm not free all day, but I do find time for Tallowmere. I've been through a lot but here I am. So please bear with me as I try my hand at making something fun, and I hope you'll join me!

Thanks for reading.

Chris
16 February 2014