Today I did something that I rarely actually do: updated a game weeks after I released it.  And then as I was trying to write a changelog, I realized that there was an option for post-mortems, so that's what I'm doing instead.

Some background information

As I write this, I am listening to music from the gameamker.nl ressource pack 2, which you can currently find here: https://web.archive.org/web/20050203014905if_/http://www.gamemaker.nl/resource.h... (This also happens to be the source of all the music from "Mapped by our ancestors". and I highly recommend you do the same while you read this, because we're in for a ride.

I have been using gamemaker for way over 20 years now, starting with gamemaker 6 shortly after it released. Back then, there were mainly 2 websites where you could play and upload games: the yoyogames sandbox and gamemakergames. I spent most of my internet time on the first one, but there were many games that I enjoyed from the second one. Among them was a game that really inspired me: Albero and the great blue emblem, by DexCG:

Multiple cute characters to play as, a very engaging storyline for the time, very good midi music. A metroidvania before the term was invented. Above all else, this was an impressive game that evoked a powerful thought in me:

"I too, can make a game like this".

I loved videogames and played big mainstream games just like anyone else. But I knew I would never make something like smash bros or legend of Zelda. Those are games made by hundreds of people, and I was only one teenage dev who barely knew how to draw. This game was different: simple pixel art, simple midi music, simple gameplay, and all made by one person. This person could be me. So I tried remaking my own (not nearly as impressive) version of this game, which I never really finished but you can find it somewhere in my archive named "alberto.gm6": https://adriendittrick.itch.io/gm8-archive

I played a few other of DexCG's games, and found that I loved most of them. Seirov, Dex, Felix Shadow, Dim. All had a somewhat shared universe of tiny creatures with different abilities, who adventure in a platform-based world. I highly recommend you also try all of those if you can find them.

Flash-forwards 20 years.

I was on the GMG discord server, where most users share a passion for old gamemaker gems. DexCG was mentioned in a conversation (although he isn't very active on discord it seems) and I remembered all the memories from playing his games. I looked for his website on autofish.net: http://www.autofish.net/video_games/creation/game_maker/profiles/dex.html and after a bit of searching I actually managed to contact him. We talked about the old days, and he was kind enough to send me a zip file containing his old games, some of them were even unreleased. I tried a few of them, and they still hold up very well today. This is how I discovered Egglings Deluxe which I immediately launched in "light mode":

According to DexCG, this was made 2 weeks after he got gamemaker. Despite being a somewhat bad game, it had some elements of gameplay that I had never seen before in any videogame: walking forwards and hitting traps in the dark until you find the way through. And by now, you must know what I thought at that moment:

"I too, can make a game like this".

I asked him for permission to remake it, he said to go for it and make to tell him when it's playable. This may also have sparked some creativity in him, because he then started working on his own remake of it. In his own words "I tried Egglings and it is terrible, but I see why you're curious to remake it.  I have so many ideas on how it could be modernized, haha.  I even spent 45 minutes and made a demo.  I may work on it more if I have some time."

The making of "Mapped by our Ancestors"

The initial plan I had was to make a game where you control a group of adventurers, where each time one of them dies it gives informations to the next ones on the trail. I quickly settled for a generational story, where your group of adventurers is in fact an entire civilization, slowly venturing into the dark during eons, one death at a time.

The initial engine was quite simple to make. After an hour or so I had some movement keys, invisible objects with image_alpha=0 that turn visible when they kill the player. You could already make a ton of levels just with that alone, and this might be what egglings Deluxe is closet to. during my testing I noticed that spamming keys to move was a bit unwieldy, so I decided to add an unlockable upgrade that makes exploration less tedious by holding down buttons. The way to get those was to grab treasure chests and bring them back to spawn. In this way the path would be noticeably easier each time, since previous deaths mapped the way with blood.

Due to my room transition code there was an unforseen bug in the level design, where the player would sometimes enter a room and step directly on a trap and proceed to die indefinitely by touching it. No good. I COULD fix the level design so that this wouldn't happen, but instead I decide to make it so that if you enter a room in such a way it simply deletes the offending tile. I realized that this could be used in some puzzles where depending on the way you enter a room you can delete specific traps which then lets you access more treasures, so I kept it in as a feature.

To give the player a sense of skill requirement, I tried implementing a lot of movement patterns in the game, where if the player figures out the pattern of a room by hitting a few traps, they can then move in the dark without making any mistakes. So then I tried making simple symmetrical areas with such patterns, which are now the woodlands and the primordial forest. I also tried adding a generic pattern to the entire game, which is a generic divergent sequence: 

1
1+2
1+2+3
1+2+3+4
1+2+3+4+5
1+2+3+4+5+6
1+2+3+4+5+6+7
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10

You may have noticed it after some time in those adventures, most notably if there are several different paths to choose from they are usually numbered in the order of that sequence. The first area has 1 room and 1 treasure. The second area has 2 rooms and 2 treasures, and so on until HEAVEN, which has all the remaining treasures to round up nicely to 45 in total. 

This represented a lot of backtracking, and it became apparent that bringing back treasures several times could become more of a hassle, so I needed a way to simply warp the player back to spawn. What could be the answer? Death. Limited lives, but with infinite continues. I set the lives number to 99, which is a reasonable amount for exploration and also if ever you need to warp back to your village you can just hit the same trap 99 times which will be faster than walking the entire way back. In this way, limited lives become a tool that actually help the player instead of how they are usually a hindrance in most retro games. It also set a nice organic way of breaking gameplay sequences by rewarding the player with an upgrade, since they keep all accumulated treasures even on death.

I actually got this idea from Barbuta:

In this game (which I highly recommend you play, it's on UFO50) you only get 6 lives (eggs? just like in egglings wow) and if you lose them all you must restart the entire game with only your knowledge of previous runs remaining. A daunting prospect for most players who are used to savestates, but my experience with this lives system is that they really were a ressource that I could spend to try out new things and perfect my routes. More often than not in Barbuta I found myself low on eggs and instead of going through the long-winded path back to spawn I just wasted lives jumping into spikes and trying weird enemy interactions. This sometimes even led me to discover more hidden paths that I would not have dared to try without the lives system. Also, resetting was in fact quite easy and took nearly no time, just like a classic "die and retry" masocore game but with more than 1 life.

I implemented this system in my own game because it was very memorable to me, and I wanted players to have a similar experience with mine, while not blindly stumbling into the dark in fear of consequences. I wanted to give players the will to continue despite impossible-seeming odds. And really, no matter your skill level, if you persevere, you will eventually win Mapped by Our Ancestors. It might take a lot of time, and be very frustrating (especially in the HELL AREA) but anyone can complete it.

So in my mind the player is necessarely someone who never gives up, who continues even when it seems that the game as ended. This is when I decided on the inner-god subplot where the players are never satisfied with what they get and keep going further and further despite the creator giving them a clear (desireable) ending to reach. But if you're reading this, it probably means that you are not a player who is just satisfied with what they get. You want to see more, you want to learn all there is about this mysterious software. Despite having finished my game, you are reading this text because you hope to find out more about it, to uncover more secrets. (sorry if you were expecting to find any here btw, I'm not really an ARG-type dev I think.) Hence, you end up of your own volition in HELL. You want more.

Have you played Final Fantasy Legend? AKA Makai Toushi SaGa. It's a very good (but janky) gameboy RPG where you control a group of adventurers who are ascend a tower with hundreds of floors in search of heaven. Well here are some spoilers for a 36 year old game: you actually reach heaven on floor 4. It's quite easy to reach, and there are a bunch of NPCs there who tell you they're having the greatest time. They're happy there. The quest is over. You've won. But it doesn't FEEL right to you, as a player. There is still a staircase that goes upwards in the tower. There is more to see. And once you take those stairs you end up in HELL. Or maybe it's just an area full of demons and fire and brimstone, depending on how you interpret the gameboy graphics. It gets a bit more obvious when you play the remake for wonderSwan, with its very colorful pixel-art (this is probably the best way to play the game btw, lots of quality of life improvements). 

The first time I played Final Fantasy Legend, this was baffling to me. What do you mean I just completed my quest? I spent so much time grinding for human upgrades and feeding my party's monsters the weirdest possible meats just to get past floor 1 and this is what I get? After that, the game is more of a blur to me. The whole heaven/hell sequence is stuck in my memory (also that giant bird in a post-apocalyptic area later in the game, I really need to reproduce that concept in a game some day).

I wanted to give players the same feeling I had when I played this game, and I hope I succeeded. In most of my projects, I thrive to give players feelings of sorts. The mechanics have meaning, and I try to explain this meaning as if I was having a conversation with the player (Sylvie if you're reading this, I love your work and it is very inspiring to me. I should probably write more Post Mortems after I spent so much time reading the ones you write.)

The "back to nothing" mythos.

In my own games the conversation is usually brought up by the game's characters in a meta kind of way. There is usually an inner god of the universe you're playing, who is aware that you are an outer god, a player that is experiencing this universe. They have varied ways of interacting with you, but usually it's somewhere on the spectrum of fear from your powers (you can turn the world on and off as you please) and disgust towards your actions (most likely you've reached the ending by disrespecting the rules of the game that the inner god adheres to.).

The god from "Mapped by our ancestors" is a more loving deity than  often portrayed in my games, trying its best to give the inhabitants something to thrive for and somewhere they can be happy. There is a lot of death and suffering in this world of course, but it is optional. Always a conscious choice. If you remain still, if you enjoy your place, you will be happy. And you are never stuck there. You are free to venture further, and if you do get past all the world's perils, you may find another, even better place to be happy.

But you know how things are with us mortals, never happy with the hand we're dealt, prisoners of the whims of our ever-rising hedonic line. We make our own hells. There is one provided in the game of course, a hellish area that is very hard to escape. You will either reach it if you make the choice of leaving HEAVEN, or if you're a smart-ass who enters random passwords on the password screen without ever having been given passwords. I made sure that the password to hell is the easiest one to enter accidentally, for the ease of access of smartasses. And I am very happy to report that so far it has worked on at least 3 people I know of who played (and finished) the game in ultra hard mode with none of the upgrades the game had to offer. One player even commented that they had to download external overlay software to memorize the path. This would actually be very close to the original Egglings experience I was inspired by.

There are 3 endings to experience in this game, all linked to an area password. The HEAVEN ending is fairly straightforward, and probably the first one that players will encounter. The HELL ending is for smartasses. And then, there is the third, endless void ending. You get this one by observing the patterns in the 10th area and entering them in the password room. You are given a final choice to end the game on good terms with the inner god, and if you refuse it you just get what you wanted: the game will never end. The remaining levels are procedurally generated (although you will always have the same random seed on each numbered room) and some players have been up to void 1000. Speaking of void, you should really play Void Stranger if you haven't already. 

There is also a hidden non-numbered ending that you will find if you decide you've had enough after reaching heaven. Simply press ESCAPE, and the usual game-exit screen will appear but with a slight change to its message:

It is now the right time to quit.

Nothing you've done will be saved,
But it does not matter.
Because YOU will never forget.
HEAVEN will remain in your memories.

Y: yes
N: no

This is probably the fate of every videogame you'll ever play. Those universes are alive for a few hours, sometimes a few days, if they're well designed they could take years of your time. But eventually, you stop playing them. You do not open the game again, the universe just stays where you've left it and never goes forward (and that is assuming the games have a save system, most of my games don't). The characters in those universes will essentially stop existing. Some of them may be canonically immortal, with infinite respawns, but this here is their death. The player stops playing, the universe is shut down and becomes void of energy. The ADVERSARY has come and caused the END OF TIMES. That is, you, the player, have caused the end of times by closing the game. For those of you who have been a fan of my works for years, maybe this is more clear to you now.

You're the ADVERSARY. You cause the END OF TIMES.

The inner god in "Mapped by our ancestors" is quite content with the situation. As the creator and manager of this world, they are happy that you've enjoyed it to the fullest, and that you've figured out how to reach the ending that they believe to be best. You have won, and now the inner god will rest in peace.

Conclusion

Thank you for playing, I hope that this experience will remain in your memories. I hope to make more like those for as long as I'm alive. Being an adult with responsibilities and less free time than before makes this much harder, and even someone I admire like DexCG has barely any time to gamedev now because of family life, a full-time job, and other hobbies. Making games takes time, it takes passion, and you might lose some of this as you grow up and it might seem very sad. If you are a gamedev yourself and you've read this far, you might be struggling with the same issues. I need you to keep up the good work. I need you to remember the times where making games was easy, try to channel some of that youth energy. And above all, I need you to never stop making.