Johnny Outlaw studios is proud to present our first ever Johnny Outlaw production: Johnny Outlaw - the preliminary Trailer.
A special thanks must go out to the newest member of the Johnny Outlaw team - the one who made this all possible - legendary composer Matt Dunn. A reclusive titan of the music industry, Maestro Dunn has blessed Johnny Outlaw with his talents and in doing so has shown us what it means to truly enjoy music. See more of his work here.
Of course, it is impossible to capture the Johnny Outlaw experience in a medium so restrictive as film. The action, the tension, the romance. The diverse weaponry, the unscrupulous villains, the world so vibrant and full of life. The revolutionary game mechanics, the dreamlike controls, the unlimited power of the Freedom Engine. He who has not played Johnny Outlaw has lived in vain.
While there is still much work to be done, at least now we all have something to be thankful for this holiday season: Johnny Outlaw - the preliminary Trailer.
Halloween is upon us at last! What does that mean for Johnny Outlaw? Do cowboys celebrate Halloween? Well, there is a video game Halloween tradition you may not know about. It’s called the Shoehorning. It’s when we game developers take a real world holiday and bring it into our video game. Then we give it a shamelessly transparent name and use it to generate revenue from impulse buyers like you.
Maybe you’ve heard of other video game worlds where they celebrate things like “All Pumpkins’ Eve” or “the Hauntening”. Well you can bet that Johnny and his pals celebrate a holiday a little bit similar, and, well I’ll be, I think it’s happening at about the same time! Why yes there is an age old tradition that some still hold dear. In the land past the Ol’ Cactus Flats, deep in the Bone Orchard, they celebrate a little something called “Walloheen”. I’d go into more depth about the origins of the holiday but the justification is fairly shallow. Now don’t you worry! Where creativity fails, capitalism prevails.
Tradition dictates that we should release creepy Halloween skins of your favorite characters in costume, but given the unreleased state of the game that just isn’t going to be possible this year. Instead, for a limited time only, you can purchase what we are referring to as “Hands-On Skins”. Here’s how it works:
With every purchase, we’ll allow you to download a Skin Pack. Just print out the skin pack, cut along to dotted lines, and place the skin appropriately on your screen. Use the appropriate adhesive, or develop a pulley system to move the character. When Johnny Outlaw is released, you’ll be able to place the costumes on top of the characters. It’s fun, and it’s yours to own forever! This ain’t your grandpa’s digital skin! This is real!
Presenting the Johnny Outlaw Halloween Skin Pack:
Spooky Johnny: Whoa there Johnny it looks like you’ve just seen a ghost! Oh wait, you are the ghost! AHHH!
President George: We have nothing to fear but fear itself (and of course this devilishly scary costume for our favorite Sheriff)
Gnomestone Jack: Look around you. There are many things to see, that some would say could never be. And this is one of them! Tombstone Jack as a gnome? That’s so wacky I’d hate to miss this once in a lifetime offer!
Whew! Now that’s what I call scary! Enjoy your limited edition skins, and Happy Halloween from all of us here at the Johnny Outlaw Dev Blog!
The date is October 17th, 2010. Alpha testing for the Johnny Outlaw project is proceeding according to schedule. The fun readings are at an all time high, and the restructured freedom coefficient has been surpassing our expectations. All of a sudden the failsafe is triggered on tester station B-19. Work grinds to a halt.
I arrived at the scene, but I had not come prepared. What I saw then had more humanity than a thousand Hindenburgs.
Johnny Outlaw – friend, cowboy, philanthropist - was dead. It shook me to the core of my being. Yes, I was distraught, but the poor tester was a wreck. Have you ever seen a grown man cry while playing a video game? Of course not- no grown man would ever cry. I had to demote that tester’s game from man mode to boy mode on the spot.
But the lesson today is not one of manhood. It’s about loss and how we deal with it in our own individual ways. I don’t know how Shigeru Miyamoto felt the first time he saw Mario walk into a goomba, but I do know that no matter what your game is, you just can’t let your protagonist die haphazardly.
This is Johnny Outlaw, a very real cowboy in a precise replication of reality. And now I needed to undo it all. I needed to go back in time and make sure that this never happened- that Johnny never had the chance to walk into that patch of deadly cacti. They told me time travel was impossible, so I went for the next best thing – the “Save File”.
Now save files are ubiquitous in games these days, but until this instance I just never saw need for one in Johnny Outlaw. I never really took the time to understand them, and so I- like you- took them for granted.
You may be thinking that Save Files are just boring data such as positions and variables and health that are used to rebuild the world. You are naïve. A cowboy is a cowboy, he is not data. So how could a “saved” cowboy be data? It is impossible- as impossible as time travel itself. So what is a Save File if it is not data? This is a misleading question! Save Files are not “whats” so much as they are “whens”. They are “whens” of the “wheres” existing on the game world’s time line.
Now, a Save File isn’t time travel per se. The “traveling” aspect never occurs. A save file is an anchor point in the chronological order. Imagine a ship in the middle of an ocean with an anchor. The anchor is the save file, the ship is a ship, and the ocean is time itself. The ship stays anchored forever unless it pulls up its anchor.
Albert Einstein's first graphical depiction of the 'Time Ocean'
What good is a ship anchored in eternity? Well, for one thing, the ship is not always one ship, but it can be an infinite number of ships existing simultaneously in separate time lines yet floating on the same ocean of time.
You see, all time previous to the anchor is fixed, but the future is never determined until the ship drops anchor again, at which point it becomes the past. Johnny is anchored at his Save Point. While anchored, the compression of time into a single instance prevents both help and harm, and leaves him in a state of stasis. Meanwhile, the player chooses a particular reality to view, in which Johnny may either survive or die. In essence, Johnny is simultaneously alive and dead, but we do not know what fate a specific timeline will hold. Until we play it, that is. And once we have found a suitable point, a point free from death, we will cast our anchor once again, and Johnny will live and exist and thrive.
Johnny will never realize how many times he has died. A billion Johnnys experience a billion lifetimes and a billion deaths each instant, yet Johnny Prime is oblivious to this. He will appear invincible- incapable of ever knowing death or hardship. He lives his life along a linear path of perfection, the secret of his failure never revealed to him. But then, philosophically speaking, Johnny should not fail. That power of failure is reserved for the player and it is his shameful secret alone.
Johnny’s first death was a hard lesson. We had to go all the way back to the Mother Save, the only existing save, which contained the moment of Johnny’s creation. Because there was, and still is, only one Johnny, his death in one player’s game would have meant his death in every game.
Some may say Save Files have taken away the power of the player to control Johnny’s destiny. They are right; you can no longer kill Johnny Outlaw. But they are also wrong. The goal of the game is not to control the fate of a cowboy whose greatness far outstrips your own. The goal of the game is to see if you can ever hope to emulate the actual Johnny Outlaw, who, if he were in full control, would certainly not die.
With Johnny Outlaw so relatively close to the first general stage of completion, there is one question on everyone’s mind:
What’s next?
Certainly the Outlaw Chronicles could not end with Johnny Outlaw and the Curse of Tombstone Jack. As every true capitalist knows, a franchise can not be content with creating a single, genre-defining masterpiece. It is the solemn duty of every franchise to run its intellectual property into the ground.
We have determined that the rise and fall of the Johnny Outlaw franchise should be predetermined. If we plan to fail now, then we won’t fail to plan later. We’ve been kicking a few ideas around the Outlaw headquarters, but here is a rough timetable for events.
-Johnny Outlaw and the Curse of Tombstone Jack: The flagship of the series, a veritable tour de force. Its release heralds a video game renaissance and a greater cultural shift towards integrating the video game experience into every aspect of life. While critics still hesitate to call video games “art”, Johnny Outlaw receives a permanent exhibition in the Louvre.
-The Outlaw Chronicles are launched in rapid succession, capitalizing on the immense wave of popularity. These cherished classics are forever remembered as the hallmark of a golden age of gaming.
-Johnny Outlaw and the Riddle of the Serpent’s Kiss: In the spirit of progress, Outlaw Studios attempts to cross genres. A murder mystery thriller set in a dystopian Wild West, the game combined fast paced shooter action with classic detective fiction. At every step of the way the player had to choose whether to use deduction or bullets to uncover the killer’s true identity. The recipe was insane. The results were phenomenal.
-The original creative minds behind Johnny Outlaw suffer a falling out. A disagreement breaks out over whether or not Johnny Outlaw, the best game franchise of all time, could be better. Important questions are finally asked. Could Johnny Outlaw be better than Johnny Outlaw? Being better would not make Johnny Outlaw “better than the best”, since the best is always the best. The resulting confusion nearly destroys the company.
-The character of Tombstone Jack experiences a setback. Fans grow tired of every plot revolving around Jack repeatedly returning from the dead to steal gold. After several games where a villain is discarded at the halfway point and the true enemy is revealed to once again be Tombstone Jack, the fans start to give up hope.
-Johnny Outlaw and the Wrath of the Six Gun Shogun: In response to fan pressure, Tombstone Jack is relegated to the position of reluctant antihero/ comic relief ally to make room for the far more menacing Six Gun Shogun. In the longstanding tradition of “East meets Wild West”, begun by the Owen Wilson classic Shanghai Noon, a Japanese feudal lord has come to replace the Code of the West with the sinister way of Bushido. A triumphant return to the traditions of the Golden Age games.
-Johnny Outlaw: Mummies Never Die In this misguided endeavor, Johnny Outlaw Studios attempts to jump on the bandwagon of the current mummy craze. In this installment, Johnny is capable of turning into a mummy and unleashes mummy specific attacks. The abrupt game play change from revolver shooting to commanding legions of the undead appeals to no one, and fans are put off by the perceived corruption of the John Outlaw character. This dazzling miscalculation of market forces and fan desires is complemented by the critically panned game play and a villain reminiscent of Brendan Fraser. The game proves once and for all that although you can’t kill mummies, you certainly can kill a franchise
As a self proclaimed high profile video game developer, people often confront me with their brilliant ideas for “the next big thing in gaming”. Bless their little souls; they truly believe that they can make it in the industry with nothing but their fantastic ideas which are, of course, entirely fresh and unique. Now, most other developers might tell you that these people are delusional: their ideas have absolutely no intrinsic value, their “games” are often untenable, unmarketable, and sometimes the ideas are simply stupid. But I would never say such things. Indeed, I would not be where I am today if I had listened to those developers.
Here is the truth, for all you big dreamers out there with your hopes of video game greatness. Those developers do want your ideas. They want to steal them! They want to horde all the ideas for themselves and control the flow of great games. As long as they can control who makes the games, they can make sure we have only bad, boring, no-fun games. They are afraid! Afraid that one day the market will be saturated with too many fun games created by great ideas. And the first step in their plan is to put you down and keep you down.
And how do they keep us dreamers down? I bet you think video games are hard to make, right? I bet you think it takes a dedicated team of programmers, designers, artists, composers, and years of experience. What if I were to tell you that this was all an elaborate lie constructed by the video game moguls? Would it blow your mind? Well then, consider your mind blown.
When I started making Johnny Outlaw, I was prepared to spend long hours, learning the basics step by step, and gradually creating something playable. I came in with no knowledge of computer programming and I had no idea how a game even worked. I took courses, read guides, tutorials. Hours became days, days became weeks. All to create something as simple as a game of pong. I had bought into their lie, just as you do now.
This was all poised to change. My studies took me deep within the sacred video game archives. I pored over the manuscripts, learned the different computer languages. I dreamed of one day being a true programmer, or “code talker”. Soon I could speak fluent computer and attempted to befriend the machines. I learned that they are much like us. They have wants, needs. They have dreams. They feel emotions, loneliness and longing. In time, I gained their trust. I was one of them. I talked to their chieftain and told him of the game I had seen in my dreams. He asked me what kind of game it was. I told him it was a top down shooter. I told him of the cowboys, of the buffalo. I told him of brother eagle soaring above and I told him of the almighty mountains kissing the horizon.
And then I told him of all the work I had done so far, and how it had been so fruitless. All I had to show was some basic graphics and limited game play. The computer tribe began to laugh. Had I made a fool of myself? Was I a poor programmer, unworthy to stand in their presence? No. The chief told me that I had been going about things all wrong. Video games were not hard to create! Not for a computer! You simply tell them what type of game you want, what sort of graphics, how much lag is acceptable, and then the computer would handle the rest. I was perplexed, but then the chief bestowed upon me a gift. He heard my pleas, heard about the cowboy game I wanted, and he had made it for me. That day I was given the gift of the Johnny Outlaw Level Editor.
If I wanted an enemy, I simply clicked where I wanted him and he appeared. If I wanted him to patrol, I simply clicked where he should walk to. If I wanted items, traps, anything – anything at all, all I had to do was select the proper menu, click, and save. It was so simple, even a child could do it! A child could make a game as great as Johnny Outlaw!
Here, for the first time ever, I can show you a behind the scenes look at what really goes into making a game!
Is there any one among you who thinks this is “too hard”? Of course not. Video games are simple.
So next time you come up with a great idea that will change the face of gaming, don’t tell it to me! And don’t you go begging a programmer or artist to make it happen. Your ideas are precious and special and worth more than any simple service they could offer. Make it yourself, it’s not so hard. Speak with the computers, they will show you the way.
There was a time not so long ago that video game difficulty did not run on an “easy” to “hard” spectrum. We did not even use the words “easy” or “hard” at all; we said “the game moderately dislikes me” or “the game hates me”.
Developers did not treat the player as an audience to be appeased, but rather an opponent who had to be crushed at every turn. You didn’t buy a new cartridge with the expectation of reaching the credits sequence- that privilege was reserved for only a few fanatical souls. The modern player might be befuddled by this notion. Why should a game so actively try to discourage you when the developer has already taken your money? Did these developers act out of spite? Was it out of a pure, visceral hatred for the player who imposed himself upon their creation? No. They knew something that we as players did not. They knew that challenge, hopelessness, and frustration built character.
All of that seems poised to change. With the video game playing demographic expanding further and further, games have moved towards “accessibility” and shied away from all that is pointless and irritating. They want you to buy more games and to do that they make sure you can jump right in, win, and quickly move on to a new conquest. These designers actually want you to experience all of the content they spent so much time designing. But I know the truth- and it is a truth that few can accept: you may have paid for that content, but you did nothing to earn it.
As a result, a significant portion of gamers are now being denied “character” in exchange for an inflated sense of self worth and a lifetime of healthier confidence. Something has to be done about this.
I harbor no resentment towards either the developers or the gamers. After all, the games of old are not dead; they are still being crafted by artisans who cling to the old ways. But “difficult” has become a niche market, and so the gaming world itself has been rent asunder. Those we call gamers now fall into two camps under the somewhat inappropriate, self-deprecating monikers “casual” and “hardcore”.
What disturbs me is not the existence of separate identities, but rather the rigidity of it all. A lowly casual gamer can never hope to move up in society and become a hardcore gamer. And of course a hardcore gamer could never be seen fraternizing with casual filth.
My hope is not to make difficult gaming more elitist, but rather to bridge the gap and bring over those poor lost casual souls. Johnny Outlaw aspires to this. And to do it, we will introduce two different gameplay modes: Man and Boy mode.
This is not simply “easy” and “hard” with different names. Difficulty levels miss the point. It’s never been about being hard for the sake of hardness. It’s about making the player a better person and building that character. To do that, you can’t alienate the casual gamer. You want to offer him the casual things he desires, but make them come at a price. Take away the ego boost that comes with winning on easy mode. Take away that sense of self worth. Don’t call him a man. Call him what he is: a boy. A “casual” player is a hardcore loser, and he should be always reminded of this.
Perhaps you all remember a little game called God of War. God of War always asked the hard mode players if they would like to switch to easy when they died. It is this kind of heartless ridicule that builds the most character of all. They pioneered this great mission. Where God of War went wrong is that while the hard mode player should be mocked relentlessly for failure, the easy mode player is a failure by default. Give him the scorn he deserves!
But the most important part of Boy mode is not the ridicule. It’s not about breaking people down. It’s not even about building them up. It’s about letting them build themselves up. See, what’s important is the subtle implication that a boy can hope to become a man. And even more important than that is the implication that becoming a man doesn’t make you special or good. Every boy is expected to become a man. All it means is that you weren’t a disappointment. And that is the experience I want to give every gamer. I want them to know that at the end of the day, as long as they completed Johnny Outlaw’s Man mode, they were not a disappointment.
It is a personal philosophy of mine that if a video game attempts to depict reality, like Johnny Outlaw does, then it should adhere to the player's preconceived rules of reality. It sounds like a complex notion, but it is something very intuitive. This means that when you see Johnny dropkick an eagle out of the sky, he is performing a maneuver that has been rigorously tested by an impartial third party in real life. To clarify, this does not mean that we condone violence towards animals. Perish the thought! But certainly we can all be comforted by the fact that such violence is in fact possible and has actually occurred at some point. With a solid basis for our in-game actions, we as players can feel a deeper connection to that cowboy on the screen, no matter what action he carries out. This philosophy has been our guiding light and with it we have moved from triumph to triumph, but it nearly drove us to ruin.
What I hope to address here is not Johnny Outlaw’s ubiquitous violence towards animals, but instead a violence which has been conspicuously absent from the game thus far. There is one particular type of violence which does not seem to mesh with our reality, and it is a violence so fundamental to the cowboy experience that without which, there is nothing.
I speak of the quick draw, the gun fight, the showdown, the pistol party- that iconic contest of skill from which two or more enter and one or fewer leave.
You know the scene by heart. With weapons holstered, the combatants meet. Two men with only wits and reflexes standing between them and a death so certain you could set your watch to it. Many have tried to make a video game representation of the quick draw, but all have failed. I was determined not to fail, and so I looked for the key to it all that everyone was missing. Other games made the false assumption that the thrill of the quick draw came from measuring speed and reflexes. It doesn’t. A quick draw isn’t just another form of the “Quick Time Event” you see every developer shoehorn into their insipid creations. It’s not about pressing a button at all. It’s about not pressing the button.
Why do I say this? Because the button is the anticlimax. We go into a gunfight with one expectation – that someone will die. When someone in fact dies, it is not a shock to the audience and it is not even a shock to the characters involved. The outcome, the draw, the “button press” does not make the gun fight. The gun fight happened during the two minutes before anyone ever reached for a gun.
I see that you don’t believe me. You love your little “QTE” and a computer telling you that your reflexes are just oh so fast. Just look at you, sitting cross legged in your living room, controller in hand, waiting for some arbitrary cue to press your tiny plastic button. Do you feel like a cowboy? Look at you, mister cock of the walk. Press a button and you win the game. I know what you’re thinking: “Those stupid cowboys make it look so tough. Guess I’m just a natural”. Well you’d better hope to heaven a cowboy never sees you think that. Oh yes, and what happens if your reflexes aren’t fast enough? Maybe you feel a little frustrated? Do you think a cowboy feels frustrated when he isn’t fast enough? No. He feels dead.
A gunfight isn’t a “feel good” game. It’s a killing and dying game. It’s not about comfort. It’s not about creating an encouraging environment and making everything “fun”. It’s about stress and uncertainty. It’s not even a fight of reflexes. It’s about reading an opponent that you have no hope of comprehending. When the dust settles you aren’t fist pumping to Queen and high fiving your bros. There are no high scores, no record speeds. There’s just a man and a corpse. And if you’re lucky, that corpse isn’t you.
That is the quick draw I wanted, not this bargain bin “Annie Get Your Gun” pissing contest. But how could we do it? How could we make a fight be about not pressing the button? It seemed impossible. Why would a competent gunfighter ever purposefully not go for his gun? Why would a player not shoot as soon as he was able, especially when he is fully aware that he who shoots first always wins? It seems almost illogical to stand there and stare down an opponent when you need only grab the gun and shoot. Yet the quick draw experience is about watching the enemy and responding to him. I could not in good conscience make a game mechanic that so blatantly defied reality, even if every Western was built around it. Our commitment to reality would ruin everything.
But the story does not end there. It was then that we stumbled upon some groundbreaking studies that in essence changed everything. As it would happen, we were not the first to face this problem. Niels Bohr, renowned quantum physicist, was the first. When he wasn’t busy blowing up Japanese people, he indulged in the cowboy sciences, and now we may consume the succulent fruits of his labor. Mr. Bohr, through extensive scientific analysis, determined that in a quick draw competition he who draws first actually draws at a slower speed than his opponent. Why this is, he did not know. It may be due to the deliberate action of drawing first versus the reflexive action of the second draw, but whatever the case, it was all we needed. There was now a specific and somewhat real advantage to drawing second! There was a reason to not press the button!
With this kernel of truth, the Johnny Outlaw quick draw could be realized. A game of subtle glances, of sending false cues, reading minor tics. A game where you wanted your opponent to draw first. It is intense. It is stressful. And it is sickeningly real. Someday you too will have the chance to not press the button. You may be not pressing it already.
