Tightfloss Maiden: The Retrospective
A Commentary by Jeremy Bursey
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Well, it’s 2009. Seven years have passed since I last hyped this little known desert-based game to the community. At least five years have passed since I’ve given it a good amount of design time. And more than a year has flown by since I released an updated version for a three-day musical event (that never actually happened). So what’s been happening in that time?

Obviously, you’re not reading this to find out about how I didn’t work on the game for many years. But for the sake of everyone that joined the community after 2002, I figure I’ll shed a little light on its history.

In July 2001, DJFenix (known then as ZZFenix) held the second incarnation of the most popular contest series in this OHR community. That contest, of course, was the 48-Hour contest. And that incarnation, strangely, became the most successful contest we’ve ever had. Seventeen people submitted an entry (or it may have been nineteen—can’t remember now). Several of those games became instant hits (Scars of Glory, Grief, Harlock and Rinku’s Bill’s Never Go West, and I Made Dis were a few of the participants). Many others are now long forgotten, but for awhile they shared their moment in the sun.

Tightfloss Maiden first saw light of day within this contest. And it scored a memorable 11th place. It was the last of the games to receive any votes; everything from 12th on down was zeroed. And with the OHR “Golden Age” nearing its end, those scavenged points to put it on the last tail out of the glory days were precious.

But that’s not to say that it shared in any glory. It had its flaws, certainly. The only people to vote on it were the heroists (and I never understood why it was a hit with them and no one else—nihilism was an ongoing religion with them in those days, and I think the story had elements of that, so I’m guessing it started there), and I think they voted on it as an afterthought. It was one of the few games in the lineup that employed an actual storyline with traditional battle features. Not that that was a problem or anything, but with so many entrants breaking the mold, it was a setback. Though, not as damning as the textbox oversight that I personally think killed its first impression with players (and with me).

It released initially with the “security feature” that ZZFenix plugged into his default file to prevent cheating still active. For anyone who has no idea what I’m talking about, that feature was a semicolon drawn into an otherwise empty space, which Fenix looked for to validate the entry. The problem was that he accidentally used the default space tile, which meant everything in a text box that wasn’t a letter was in fact a semicolon. And because it was my first contest, and because I was nervous about releasing an “non-secure” file, I released the game with the semicolons attached.

And I was one of only two people to do that. Mistake Number Two.

Well, I cleaned up the semicolons that same night, implemented a few bugfixes, and re-posted the game on the community’s only game list at the time, the one on Operation: OHR. And I kept it there for about a month while I was working on the update.

This is where its future began to write itself.

I knew since Day One that I wanted to implement a few special features into the game like “Footprints in the Sand” and “Dehydration.” The current OHR release had just implemented “Each-Step” script triggers and I was eager to use it. But 48 hours has this limiting affect on me, in that there’s never enough time to really do what I want, so I didn’t get a chance to implement the footprints for the contest. And “Dehydration” was way too complicated to mess with in such a short time. So I saved those for the update.

But I wanted to hype them both early to get people excited for the game. So the minor flood of advertising began.

And that’s when it occurred to me that anyone who played the 48-Hour version during that interim would’ve been less likely to play the updated version than they would had they been deprived of the experience, so in early August I took the game off the game list.

It hasn’t been back since.

For the next few months I tinkered with the system, adding those footprints, the dehydration, lots of NPC animation and scenery interaction, spending hour upon hour turning the game into a cinematic experience. Within a couple months, Tightfloss Maiden hardly resembled its 48-Hour counterpart. It had a new look. It attracted new musical talent. And it developed a marketing niche rarely tapped in those days (and in many ways that tradition still lingers). I started calling the new version the Candy Edition. It was meant to release with all these design documents, fan art, short stories, and a crapload of special supplements. In the end, it was supposed to blow the player’s mind away.

And then the monster started getting too big. Too many features wanted to share the sun. Several of the stories I wanted to submit with the game I couldn’t bring myself to write. I started to burn out.

By February 2002, I stopped working on it. A lot had been done. But there was still much more to do. There were three maps waiting to be built (actually, six, but I only envisioned three at the time). One of them, the village map, looked daunting in my head and I really had no idea how to build it. We were still limited to one layer of tiles in those days, and between the structures, scenery bits and footprints I just didn’t see how it was possible to make it any good. And when I considered all the animating backdrops I still wanted to implement (I’d already built the first two cinematics), and how much I hated drawing cut scenes, I stalled.

That’s about when the hype stopped.

Nearly two years passed. The game had already been forgotten. It didn’t seem like anyone cared anymore. I already had a lot of work invested into it. Specplosive already wrote the score for the initial release (minus the intro I kept asking him to make, but for some reason he never got around to doing it). Blackhat Solaire (my neighbor at the time—or in 2001, rather) had given me a bunch of battle sprites I couldn’t really use (due to major conversion problems). And several members of the community had already sent in supplemental stories for a place I wanted to build called “The Hideaway Library,” stories I dreaded the thought of transcribing into the game. And yet, nothing was happening. So I started working on it again.

It was in this season that I put together the most brooding map of my designing career (if you can call it that). The Anthill Canyon. In the 48-Hour demo, the player moved from the opening hyena attack straight to the Scorched Valley where all the dehydration madness was supposed to occur. But as time wore on I realized it came too soon. I started thinking of better ways to begin the game.

That’s when I considered my opening inventory and realized there was an item still unaccounted for.

The Anthill Canyon evolved from there. I knew I wanted a maze. The forgotten item (which I’m refusing to discuss in case you haven’t played it yet) was the perfect thing to make it work. So I built this desert labyrinth, individualized every single cactus in the map (I have about seventy global variables assigned there, so it was daunting), and gave the game a map that could possibly become one of the OHR’s best headaches. I asked Gilbert to test it, and I’m not sure if he ever found the exit. I thought: Mission Accomplished.

Then I started thinking of all the details I wanted to add to the canyon, realized how limiting the OHR circa November 2003 really was, and stalled again until the present.

So now we’re caught up on the history. The game lingered for many reasons. Some of it had to do with the cut scenes. A lot of it had to do with criticisms of the Unknown Woman’s arms being too thick (and the subsequent dread of thinning out over a hundred walkabout sets to settle a piddly gripe made it worse), and quite a bit had to do with the inability to rotate sprites (which as of this writing is still a factor, but I’ve sucked it up since then). But most of it had to do with the fact that I never really felt it was ready. No matter how much I put in there, I just didn’t think it was enough.

The story has changed in 2009 for three reasons. The first is that I wanted to do something cool for Hamsterspeak’s two-year anniversary. After some thought, I realized, I need to get this game released, so why not pull an old title out of the shadows and give the community what it’s waited seven years for? The second is because I’ve been on a design kick for the last year-and-a-half and didn’t want to waste it on not working on this game. And the final reason, of course, is because I’m never satisfied with how my day goes unless I accomplish something, and this game has gnawed at me since 2001, so I thought, well, Moogle’s got that Gameathon going, so let’s just get this over with.

The final reason, unfortunately, causes a new problem—one that may inevitably surface come release time. After all the caution I took to ensure an awesome release, I have a feeling some features will still be absent by the time this article posts (and the game subsequently releases). As of today, February 23rd, I still have to finish drawing the village, implement all of its interactions and footprints, design all the cave battles and their “auto kills,” create a new system for “cooking” items, and implement most of the sound effects. And while I’m sure I can get all those things up and running between now and the next five days, I’m not so certain about the cosmetic things I want to do.

Things like adding portraits. Things like thinning the arms in the oasis reflection. Things like coloring the sand with its appropriate “bone” color (which I have the palette for, but still have to redo a lot of tiles, cut scenes, and walkabout sprites to get looking right). Granted, a lot can happen in five days, but I have a feeling I’ll still need to release an update to address the minor things I didn’t get around to fixing. And it’s a bit unnerving.

It’s funny the circle that this game has taken. It’s remained in silence for so long because I wanted it perfect for its release. And now that I’m buckling down and setting a date for it (which I won’t change because of the reasons I’ve chosen to do it now), I still won’t get it perfect. But I suppose that’s the nature of creation. It can never be perfect.

So now that the game is coming (or already out depending on when you’re reading this), what can you expect for the future?

The Adventures of Powerstick Man: Extended Edition. Yes, I’m going back to work on that game first. It carries the same weight on my shoulders that this one had, so I have to finish that next.

But maybe in 2010 or 2011, we’ll see the next couple chapters released. And maybe by then we’ll have some of our questions answered.

For now, hang tight. And maybe play Tightfloss Maiden if it’s out and you haven’t seen it yet. And check out the supplemental materials. Several people contributed them and I’d hate for you to overlook them. Especially the poster by Gilbert. It’s cool.

Thanks for participating in this jaunt down memory lane. We’ll have to do this again sometime.