I’m Annie Mok, writer-artist, musician, and burgeoning indie dev, and this is my Substack subscription-based blog World of Annie Mok. For $5/mo. or $50/year, you can get posts like this and more in your inbox at least a couple times a month!
Run cycle animation for the playable protagonist of my long-in-progress game Terry & Sally, Terry Yang, to be voiced in cutscenes by Lii Xu.
When I started my journey in game development, I started solo with the information from dev Zoë Quinn’s somewhat outdated but still wonderful tool Sortingh.at.
I began with a couple of games that I created in Twine. Twine is a tool to make simple choose-your-own-adventure style games in HTML, a basic coding languages in which webpages are made. I also tried a class for QBasic to learn simple video game coding back then, but I didn’t understand it (none of the interfaces were graphical back then, all were DOS), so I got bored and didn’t return to the class. I learned HTML when I was a little kid to make an Earthworm Jim fan site on 50megs.com, a Geocities alternative, so I was able to understand the code. Twine comes with a graphical interface so it’s very simple to connect the story points to “gamify” a written narrative with branching pathways and player choice.
My 2017 The Haunted Nintendo, is free to play on my itch.io page. I figured back then that if I was going to make a game from scratch, it might be fun to base the story off of games that exist. Artistic constraints damn near always help me through the process of artmaking. So, in the game, your father finds you an NES at a garage sale, but it was oddly cheap for such a hot product back then in the early 90s. You find that the games they came with, all official Nintendo titles, are a little… off.
I’d have sworn on my equivalent of the Bible that I made The Haunted Nintendo before Cicadas (screenshot above), but my files don’t lie: I created Cicadas in 2016, based off my comic for Rookie Mag of the same name, with the visual novel software Ren’py.
The game is no longer available, along with a number of my other early efforts over the next several years, most of which because in retrospect I wasn’t super happy with them as games.
What I wanted to make was a larger, more graphical-intensive, somewhat more traditional game. But I struggled over an idea. As I was attempting to do online sex work in 2019 (I consider that a failed venture for me because I was doing well engagement-wise but the stiffs really were stiffs and almost never paid), I dreamed up a sci-fi RPG about a camgirl on a spacecraft. I wrote the scenario for a game called Twilight Valley, about a non-binary ratboy named Finnegan, but I ended up adapting into an (abandoned) comic series, of which I did one issue.
That brings us to 2019-2020, when I started playing around with different prototypes and game making engines. First I thought I’d make a top-down 16-bit style RPG, like old Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest games, but without combat. I played around with the engine RPG Maker MV, and I learned how to make pixel art in Aseprite. After buying and perusing an expensive book about RPG Maker (oops) and toying with the engine, I decided it was far too restrictive for what I wanted to do—not that I knew what I wanted to make yet. But, back to artistic constraints, it’s often as important to know what you don’t want to make as much as it is what you desire. At first, I developed the idea for Sally & Terry RPG, with a title taking off from Super Mario RPG.
In making the above initial pixel art run cycle animation test for Terry Yang, once I started developing the story and structure for what would become a 2D platformer version of Terry & Sally, no longer an RPG and with Terry in the lead instead of their girlfriend Sally Silverhaze (also the protagonist of my comic Orgasm Addict, collected in my PDF Pink Juice).
As I worked hard on the pixel art for Terry’s run cycle, I realized I longed to draw loosely, traditionally but with digital tools. I spoke to my friend Eric J. Schuster, another cartoonist, about it, and he essentially said Yeah, don’t fight with your medium. So I switched to digital pencils to animate the character.
Terry Yang jumping… or skanking?
I quickly fell in love with the aesthetic and the feel of drawing by hand again, though it’s on a small Wacom digital drawing tablet. I got an old felt tip for the Wacom pen, so I’m able to retain the slight bit of tactile resistance from the surface that I loved so much when I drew on paper. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to make the entire aesthetic of Terry & Sally be hand-drawn in digital pencils with black & white & pink.
The story so far:
Terry & Sally is an exploration-based 2D platformer love story.
Terry Yang plans to type up their old love letters between them and their partner to publish as a book, but when they open the window to get high, the letters all blow out the window and over town. Terry then has to run and jump and explore some of Chicagoland's different neighborhoods to find his lost love letters.
I’ve been looking a lot at the Game Boy Super Mario Land games, as well as the NES Super Mario Bros., because the level geometry is super simple but fun to run through.
Vaporwave Mario—a Game Boy game with a pink color filter over it.
This past month, I learned Game Maker Studio 2 a bit, enough to make a playable build of Terry running around and jumping on blocks. This quickly overwhelmed me after I made this simple little demo, because helped me recognize what an enormous task it’ll be to make even a small game of 1-3 hours in gameplay and selling for $6-$9 or so on Steam. The dream, of course, is to port to consoles as well like Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and XBox One. Switch would be an excellent target because they have a wonderful focus on indie titles, but they’re also still a somewhat family-friendly company of course and there’s quite a bit of drug use and adult content within the game’s narrative. So we’ll see.
Right now, after putting out an open call to see who might be interested, I’m speaking to a few different potential game development partners who would help out on the coding and level design end.
I’m trying not to drown in my own expectations and unhealthy work-life relationship! I’ve been pretty much working non-stop on this project recently, which had been taking a toll on my mental health, spiking up the symptoms of my mental illnesses as including complex-PTSD. Time to take a break, as much as I can force myself to. Thanks for reading. Until next time, friends.