Dry Fee Race, Hip Hop, Pirates: A cheeky, eclectic game of Australian studio nonsense machines

For most of his game-making career, Australian developer Dweedes predicts the image of a cheeky, punk rebellion. His website Wet Gamin has accumulated a mountain of experimental games over the past decade. This is a short story by various freeware developers that illustrate the DIY spirit. Currently creating and selling games on Steam under a studio nonsense machine, Dweedes finds himself in a position to strengthen his commercial and craft ambitions while still remaining true to his anti-school roots.

“I put out the game for free because it lightens the load from my head,” he told me as we chatted on Discord. “I don’t need to sell it, I don’t need to invest time in it. I just want to put up an idea and people can play it. There’s no quality target.

This light mode matches well with Dweedes in Yorkness, whose creative strength is quirky and in everything. In “Silly Little Ideas,” he has been launched for many years. Justin Bieber Karaoke Sim. A maze of public toilets for strategic bladder relief. And – my personal favorite – features a true Western romance, a strange mix of poetry and Wild West exploration, and a cheerful, meaningless conversation with the old potatoes face to face with cactus. In Braid 2, the indie game First Masterpiece™ is a rigged sequel, with players riding skateboards that mow monsters with bullets, very The loose cover of Eminem’s Lose Yourself Plays – perhaps one suspect is improvised by Dweedes himself.

At Racing Life Sim Dryft City Kyngs, Dweedes has still worked on his most commercial projects. With the help of local arts fundraising agencies Screen Australia and Vicscreen, two newly translated artists and story designers, the game is set in Greater Dry Feet City, a fluoro-colored version near Melbourne. The location is roughly based on real locations, including Melbourne’s many time zone arcades and the tourist attraction Philip Island, where penguins were inhabited. (It is generally agreed among Vicscreen applicants that a touch of fair dinkum’s local flavour is a reliable way to attract the attention of grant makers.) The written dialogue of the game is old school Aussie slang, and at least for this fellow compatriot, you can see at least the conventional phrase.

First, Dryft City Kyngs’ sprites and top-down sandboxes remind us of the Grand Theft Auto game of the 90s. In contrast to the neoliberal hell scene of Rockstar, Greater Dry Feet City is a true utopia. The police cannot see. Residents are happy to give their numbers on the first g’day. And democracy reaches such radical levels, and the council will repaint the path to the eye-catching hue you want within a day. Have you gotten a “waste”? There’s no need to worry. Medical expenses can be placed in an infinite tab. (The welfare state is in a relatively decent Nick here in Australia. But Jay Walkers, I have to warn you – this is an exaggeration.) You quit their stable job and play in the romantic starry sky that is clocked with boring but intimate internships to maintain true passions. Drying.

The main character is completely different from the hopeful entrepreneurial game development figure. Since the rise of “indie” as a marketing term, the image of game production has continued. The transition from small, free production to commercial production is an inevitable, necessary rite of passage. Amateurs (so the story goes) can move around on the scale of enthusiasts, perfecting their craft and increasing their ambitions step by step, everything finally becomes a belt, and risking every sweat and tears in danger of “real game,” that is, anything that changes profits.

But while Dweedes calls Dryft City Kyngs “the right game,” the use of phrases does not imply the value judgment it often conveys. “For free games, I do whatever I want without restrictions or deadlines. It’s all fun. You can improvise when you’re making it, and you don’t need to super organize either,” he says. “Nonsense mechanical stuff – that’s what we’re trying to do a good job and do business. It’s really falling hard. But on the contrary, even with just two extra people, the city’s Kin doesn’t look like it alone.

Another collaborative effort from Nonsense Machine’s collaboration, the Too Too Birds game came when Dweedes was approached by a local Rapper RealName with an idea.

I met RealName for a chat at the Inner North bar in Melbourne and intercepted him in one of his solo gigs at the final moments. I ask him about his appeal to video games. “Every frame is, in a way, some rare acrylic, another world. The worst game in the world is naturally good looking, even if they’re yanki.”

True to this sentiment, the soul of the Too Birds game asks the player to smooth out the artwork forearms that are so intense that it explodes using the forearms of green kitchen gloves. With Too Birds music playing, we climb multiple floors of the building, travelling through carpet offices, indoor fields of corn and marijuana, and discover blow-up doll aliens that have finally arrived from a pod sitting on the top balcony. Its crude 3D model and flashy, repetitive textures make me somewhat reminiscent of the underground FPS hitting a cruel team. It goes without saying that spirit, the spirit of opaque irony.

“From the first day we met, we took the process of making shit semi-energy. “But when it comes to being delivered – we’re so ironic to each other, we’re trying to convey our music to the internet and the world, just like we’re trying to pull each other’s bugger bunnies.

Here too, there is a link with the habit of RealName’s Scabrous game. “I played more GTAs online in my life than I probably did. I go there and troll. I’ll be the most toxic person. I stopped doing it because I need to find a healthier way to express my anger.” The tone of RealName takes on hints of regret, but he can’t disguise exhilaration. “I found a glitch. You can basically knock rip to a certain area and kill anyone. I turn on this game and make people’s nights worse. Spread negativity for hours.

When I first heard bird music live a few years ago – at Miss Kelania, Melbourne’s beloved, strange music venue, I was struck by the complementary flow of those two MCs. RealName’s features Goading Energy, Nasally Twang, which in short jumps between tightly connected connections with energetic caplets. In contrast, his partner, Teether, comes back from the beat and sits with a deep, drowsy delivery that gives the impression of global fatigue. The track of the same name is also a bird poem, with Tether drawing a blurred picture of life with a virtual being.

“Sloshed Kant has reverted the caveman
I’m talking on the page
If Tony Hawk saw our wasteland
He skated it like it was wooden
I saw the glow, I was delighted
It tasted like sugar
I put my hand up and I feel like Rayman
Jump over the skewers.”

I’ve heard that fellow fans have compared the group’s sound multiple times with the influential noise-lap group DeathGrip, but it’s marked by producer Mr. Society’s oddball digital effects and offensive production. In the soul of the Too Too Birds game, this harshness finds the mirrors against the mirrors in the artwork scattered throughout the environment. Made by RealName on an outdated phone app in a fried, de-drop style, these range from gloss-out photos of spilled food to surreal mysteries to horrifying abuse, from self-reference memes.

“The appearance is very simulated,” RealName observes. “The meaningless images and sounds are very accurate depictions of the world we live in. In a strange way. Reality is weird. If we have to take responsibility for someone who hasn’t yet done it, it will break their brains.”

Ramshackle Pirate Adventure Cape Diseous is the latest release of Nonsense Machine Label, and is the work of Fleet Foot stylist and experimental freeware veteran Jake Clover. You’re playing as a pirate in a red dress and bold eyeliner, sucking three pipes as you move around the gut burning through the ship deck, windy mast, and simple arrow key controls.

After playing the play-in version of the game towards the end of development, Dweedes suggested clovering the idea of ​​selling it, offering original sound and music. (As a jump point in his game, Clover often uses short tracks before finding them a few years ago when uploaded Newgrounds.

Clover initially thought of something terrifying to follow the same pulse as his Dino Hanta. Over time, it transformed into something different. “In the beginning I wanted to create a simple comedy game by adding speech bubbles, so I started paying more attention to animation and design,” explains Clover. “I immediately decided to take the project a little more seriously. This is the longest project I’ve ever worked on.”

The aesthetics of the game have a mark of change in this direction and are a real wonder. It’s even more beautiful because it’s not in the obvious way. A stupid, impossible vision gag – a pirate eating a glass bottle cheerfully, and a large flag folded small enough to fit in the palm of his hand – mixed with a serious, modest, mysterious notebook. Some animations are comically low, but others such as the captain’s graceful movements are impressively guaranteed. The art details packed with ideas freed by lack of concern over style consistency look like a bathroom floor with broken tiles, from a rustic, low squirrel background to a background of wood and swirling clouds.

Clover chooses to dig holes in singular details, trusting that the player will notice and appreciate it. For example, consider the visual dedication to expressing the effects of strong winds during the must-climbing section of Cape Desers. At one miniature moment, the captain plows the feathers stuck in the tree between his fingers and flies them. The inner workings and miscellaneous inhabitants of the ship follow their own strange and occult logic, including magical tonics, spirit bindings of sea creatures, and wordless communication depicted as short reverse shot POV inserts that give the impression of telepathic exchange.

I ask Clover about his tendency to withhold information from players. “The sense of mystery is important to me because I want to create a sense of a big world through very small projects, so I want to feel like I’m looking through a window into my game to a small part of another world,” he writes. “The other idea is that we want to feel foreign and unfamiliar to the world, as if the game exists for reasons other than someone else plays it, as if it was made for an audience that doesn’t exist.”

Clover mentions the influence of famous Western Australian artist Sean Tan on his paintings and storytelling. After reading his book The Bird King and other sketches, I was impressed by how Tan’s explanation of his purpose suited Clover himself.

“Images are not preconceived, they are imagined when they are drawn and drawn. In fact, drawing is a form of thought, and just as the bird’s throat “thinks” within the bird’s throat, one of the joys of drawing is that meaning can be constantly postponed. “Message,” but rather a strangely clear question. ”

In the slate of nonsense machines, Dweedes holds a horrifying cape with a special respect. But when Clover reaches out for something “artistic”, it works with the attitude that the stable shares. It is a determination to refuse to be tightened up by an ambitious Spa Lego and grow without any rules other than yourself.