| Game Info | |
| Name: | Hymn of the Moles |
| Year: | 2014 |
| Made in: | Adagio/C++ |
| Download Game (Windows/Wine only) | |
"The Residents are my favorite rock band." Say that to a serious enough Residents fan and it will probably make them angry. "The Residents aren't a band," they'll say, "they're a multimedia art collective!" And it is true. The Residents have made music videos, they've made books, they've made movies, they've made weird alternate reality game web series, and... they've made a few video games as well. Back in the 90's CD-ROM era they put out some... well 90's CD-ROM era games.
An interesting part of Residents history that's always been pretty fascinating to me is the fact that while Freak Show CD-ROM was the first Residents game released, there was an official Residents game being worked on that if released would have predated Freak Show by over 10 years! In the early 1980's, an employee at Atari was working on an Atari 2600 game based on The Residents' 1981 album Mark of the Mole. I'm assuming at least party due to the Video Game Crash of 1983, this game was never fully completed outside of a few prototype builds made.
I kind of grew fascinated by this lost game and what could have been, so when Ludum Dare 29 started and its theme was "Beneath the Surface", my thoughts immediately turned to The Residents' Mark of the Mole, with its characters living in holes like subterranean moles. My submission for Ludum Dare 29 was a reimagining of the 1980's Mark of the Mole video game, titled Hymn of the Moles.
The Adagio Game Engine
Ludum Dare 29 was my first game jam and for this game I was using a custom-made 2D C++ engine I christened Adagio. The title of this engine was a reference to the popular (at least at the time...) C++ game library Allegro. The name of the engine was a plain admission that my engine was inferior to Allegro in every way but I was having fun making my own engine anyway.
Adagio was mainly duct-taped together from other smaller libraries. And while I called Adagio an engine, it was more fair to say that it was a game library instead... there was no actual builtin "engine" code in Adagio, you had to do all that stuff yourself. I used OpenGL for rendering out game sprites, FMOD for game audio, and SDL2 for various helper tasks like converting images and fonts to OpenGL textures as well as handling the actual game window interface. It was pretty sloppily put together, but I was proud of it at the time. Because it was made in C++, even if the code wasn't completely optimized, the engine didn't really have any performance problems.
If you read some of the other posts on this archive, you might notice that I have since made a newer JavaScript-based engine known as Adagio2. They're pretty different, but I think some of the core classes of Adagio2 evolved from their Adagio counterparts. So while Hymn of the Moles is the only publicly released game I've made with the original C++ based Adagio engine (Rhythm Game Funtimes Player was the only other complete project made in Adagio, but it was never publicly released), some of the engine design continues to live on in future games1.
Different Game Versions:
Ludum Dare Version (April 2014)
Hymn of the Moles was originally developed for Ludum Dare, and as such this version of the game is considered the "canonical version", I guess. Originally the game was built only in Linux just so I could get it done, with a Windows port coming out a day or so later after the jam actually ended. It was during this porting process that I really learned that there is a difference between the abstract design of a programming language and its more concrete implementations. While there were no serious C++ sins committed in the original Hymn of the Moles codebase, there were plenty of Visual Studio C++ Compiler issues that weren't present when developing the game with GCC on Linux...
Anyway, present in this version of this game are a few bugs and issues. Sound effects are lazy-loaded in so the first time you hit a note there's a slight delay before the sound plays. Also, once you get to the stages where notes come in at double speed, there's a bug where significantly more accuracy is required to hit the note. While double speed was intended to lower your reaction time, the actual note accuracy required to hit a note was intended to remain the same. I remember watching people stream the game and no one could get past the double speed sections because of this issue.
The Ludum Dare version of the game is the version that is listed below for download.
School Final Exam Version (May 2014)
While the game jam was quite fun, there was a practical reason for developing the game that pushed me to finish the game in the face of so many segfaults. I was currently taking a Game Design class in high school2 and needed a project for my final game project. I decided that Hymn of the Moles would be an excellent choice for this project. I was incredibly proud of it at the time, being a game made in C++ in a custom-made engine. It was perfect!
Except there was one issue: This Game Design class was really only focused on Game Maker and so our final game project had to be made in Game Maker as well. What was I to do?! Well... what I ended up doing was creating an intro sequence that was made in Game Maker that would then launch the external game EXE file. So I could keep my cool C++ game while technically still having the final artifact being made in Game Maker. (For the record, this worked and I got a 100% on the final project.)
The intro sequence was an over the top credits sequence set to the opening bit of Also Sprach Zarathustra. It also was made to make fun of our teacher at the time as well as some grievances I had with the way he handled teaching this class in particular.
When the song reached its peak, the screen showed just one ironic with that is very connected to edgy ironic teenage life from then:
Afterwards you're presented with the title screen to launch the game (this is actually good since the real game had no title screen). All the extra sprites on the screen were included due to final project requirements, since the intro animation alone didn't match all the guidelines. ...By the way, the "Press Shift for Swag" function would play this song and was also included to match the project requirements.
The game then launches a Windows build of Hymn of the Moles. However, this build actually fixes an issue present in the original build of the game: the extreme difficulty spike present in the original game was fixed by removing all of the "double speed" sequences. So... why is this build of the game not the "canonical" version used? Well, the antagonist of the game is replaced with an image of my teacher in this build of the game. Seriously.
Game Description:
This game is a loose reimagining of planned Mark of the Mole Atari game based on The Residents' 1981 album of the same name. You are a "Mole", working in a mine. A "Chub" has hired you. To keep morale up, you sing traditional Mohelmot songs. Squares will fly in towards squares in the center of the screen. Press the arrow key of the appropriate direction when the square aligns with the other square. If you miss, you will miss a life. Missing 4 lives will cause you to start the sequence over again.
Credits:
Original Concept by The Residents
Features chiptune versions of these songs by The Residents:
- "Happy Home"
- "Constantinople"
- "The New Hymn"
Features "Migration" by The Residents.
Images:
Links:
You can download the Windows version (it also works in Wine!) of the Ludum Dare build of the game here.
Footnotes
1 While Adagio2 is technically the "successor" to the original Adagio engine, there are many differences between the two design-wise. However, the engine developed for *** Racer was much more in line with how Adagio was originally designed. While it wasn't explicitly named at all, I think this engine could in hindsight be called "Adagio1.5"... maybe...
2 If you've read my post on Muffin Mare (2012), I mention I made that game in a Game Design class from high school... yet these games were made two years apart! What gives? Well, my high school had a few classes that you could actually retake and still get credit for, mainly creative classes like Creative Writing, Media Productions, and... well Game Design and Development. I made Hymn of the Moles when I was retaking a bunch of these kinds of classes during my final relaxed semester of Senior Year. The teacher for this class changed between my first and second time taking it, so when I retook it the class became focused on Game Maker instead of other programming technologies.