november 15th, 2024. exactly 3 years since ROADKILL AGORA released.
it's been a while! much, much longer than i would have liked, to be entirely honest. there have been too many WIP/abandoned/dead projects in these last 3 years, and while i'm working on a game right now, and i wish i could say it's out now, it isn't. i really really want it to release this year, but as it stands, it's been 3 years since i've released any 3d game. we'll get there.
regardless though, i figured this is a good opportunity to do a 'post-mortem' on ROADKILL AGORA. a fitting celebration for roadkill, no?
i'm not in the habit of talking about the meaning or intention of my works with anyone, and i won't do it here either - i don't want to kill any mystique that AGORA might have. but i can talk about my feelings on it, and how they've changed in the last 3 years.
ROADKILL AGORA was made during a really rough time for me. 2021 was really quite bad. of course, it was the year of the pandemic, yes, it was bad for everyone, and that certainly played into it, but there was a lot of other things going on too. covid wasn't the only reason i was shut in at home way more than usual, and at the same time, home felt like a hellish prison where things only got worse.
through all that happened in 2021, i took long walks outside, at night, and at dawn. and i made ROADKILL AGORA.
today, i replayed AGORA for the first time since... i don't know, its release? and honestly, i'm surprised at how good i feel about it.
i've had 3 years to think about my faults with the game, and trust me, i've thought about those faults a lot, but playing through it again was really refreshing.
the main thing i was aiming for with AGORA was a strong atmosphere, i think that's obvious, since there's not much else to the game, and i honestly think i delivered, at least to the extent that i aiming for. i think there's a real aura to the city, minimal and toy-like as it is.
and that is kind of how i feel about it: it feels like a "toy city". a miniature. more of an 'idea' rather than a place that's real and representative of a real city. the layout makes no sense. the streets are absurd, looking at it realistically. it feels like a child's idea of a city. and as my feelings on the game stewed, i came to think of this as a real negative, especially because that's not the only part of the game that feels like a "child's idea of X".
but playing through it again, i think all of that kind of washed away, and the vibes took over. i wasn't thinking about how silly it looks as a city, with its inconsistent roads and its high-rises that are just the same building model stacked on top of one another (yes that is how i made buildings of varying heights), because i was much more focused on the look, the ambience, and the atmosphere as a whole.
of course, nowadays i wouldn't make it this way. i would have prepared a better layout for the city. i would have baked the lighting. i wouldn't have made the pavement and all of the interior geometry with unity's Realtime CSG plugin. i would have built more stuff in blender rather than exporting everything and assembling it in unity. hell, i would have made the entire scene in blender. there's a lot that i would have done differently! and the game would have probably been better for it.
but, just like with myself in 2021, i didn't know what i was doing. i learned as i went. it was all a big mess, and yet something striking still came of it.
another thing that's really representative of 'gwen' in 2021 is the poems in the game. there are 15 poems in ROADKILL AGORA, and i'm still not sure if there's anyone out there besides me who has seen all of them. they may seem random but there is a method to the ones that are selected for you, and it's pretty simple (but i still won't say what it is, of course).
i've been writing poetry since i was, i don't know, 16 or 17? though pretty much everything i wrote before i was 18 is gone now, alas.
all of the poetry in AGORA speaks to the burgeoning gwen of that time - i was getting more into indie games and the small and "weird" indie sphere, i started reading a lot more, both theory and fiction, and i was getting properly into indie lit for the first time too. none of this is particularly unique or special, but it does heavily reflect on all of the writing in ROADKILL AGORA, not just the obvious writing with the poems and character dialogue, but also the messaging and theming of the game.
and there are meant to be themes in ROADKILL AGORA, despite how minimal it is. i do think it's easy to get the "wrong" idea of what i was going for, even if you're one of the people that i think Gets It, simply because of how minimal and messy it is. but that's not so bad. the vibes are meant to carry that theming, and the vibes are the focus.
plus, theming and "messages" are one thing that i especially avoid talking about with regards to my own works. it's not for me to tell you.
one thing that i've heard from multiple people now is that their favourite part of the game is the graffiti, which is honestly surprising to me.
while it was fun to draw a bunch of random graffiti for it at the time, looking back, i feel like the graffiti is one of the messiest aspects of the game lol. i didn't know what i was doing, so they're all SUPER low res, and very inconsistent with their resolution too, to the point that i think a lot of them clash with the buildings and environment textures a bit too much, and also with each other. i had absolutely no idea what i was doing! i learned modelling and uv unwrapping and all that shit with this game, so i didn't really think things like this through.
and while everything on the technical side of the graffiti is a mess, i think my bigger problem with them was my approach.
that is to say, while making the graffiti i was very much trying to keep them in line with a bleak, dark, and muted aesthetic to reflect the rest of the environment. this means that, while there were good a deal of more 'random' graffiti, with most of them i was trying to go for "depressing" and "angry" and "anti-establishment" graffiti, that kind of thing.
and this is fine but it also meant that there was only so much that i could do before i started repeating the same things, and it's also just very silly. it was meant to be a serious game, so we can't have any overtly silly or random graffiti that doesn't fall in line with the "aesthetic/themes"?
but that's not what graffiti is like! graffiti is really varied and full of life and colour and expression! avoiding that to stay "dark and serious" is very silly and a very childish way to approach it, i think. even more so than the "child's idea of a city" that i mentioned earlier, this might be the most representative element of my "childish approach" to a lot of ROADKILL AGORA.
maybe it's harsh to say that it's childish, but i don't really think so. i was 19 and i think it shows, in a lot of ways.
i mean, look at the hitler graffiti. with all of the anti-fascist graffiti covering it up, it has the subtlety of a hammer to the head, yes, but more importantly... why did i just use a png of hitler's face?? that doesn't look like it was graffitied! i could have painted it myself, it wouldn't have been hard! if not that, at least slap a couple of filters on it! anything to make it actually fit into the environment! good god.
if you ask me, i think the posters are cooler and more fun than the graffiti. and i really had a lot of fun making them! they're the kind of thing where i feel like it's more fitting to go all out with the "super bleak" aesthetic, and even push it to a comical extent with some of them.
still, just the fact that there are people out there that the game has resonated with, even if it isn't that many people, is wonderful to me.
there's a couple of videos on ROADKILL AGORA out there! in 2023, someone randomly messaged me on twitter because they wanted to make a fan trailer, and they did it! it's really nice to know that, for all of its many flaws, there are people who enjoyed it.
this post mortem ended up being way more positive about AGORA than i expected. i hope it doesn't come across like i'm "hyping up" my old basic game too much, that's not my intent. but i think, with this recent replay, i've come to appreciate its flaws more as well. are there things that i would do differently today? god yes, of course. i've thought many times about one day going back and remaking it, this time in godot with all of my developed skills (that is, mainly in modelling, texturing, etc. not so much in coding lol). but that's the artist's trap! you can't think that. you have to move on and make other things. let it be, and appreciate it or hate it for what it is.
ROADKILL AGORA as a whole is very representative of where i was in 2021, and all of its messy, flawed elements are perhaps the most representative of all. so maybe it's ok for it to be that way.
"Lose yourself in data waves and screen wipes
Dress yourself in power cables and black wires
Finish yourself in monochrome screens
Through a blood drip we connect
I'll meet you at the end of this dream
Don't ride suicide
I'll be at the station"