Wednesday, January 3rd 2018 – Friday, January 5th 2018.

:D

Where is 2018? It’s Here, and it’s Already Weird AF

What have they done to you, Santa? Why are you so thin, and so smol? Why have you been forcefully awoken from your slumber and made to travel through time and space to bring in another hellish twelve months? Why can’t pop culture dredge up another character from European folklore to sort this shit out so you can get back to banging reindeer or whatever it is you do for the rest of the year? Where is 2018? What is Where is 2018? Who is what is Where is 2018? No, no, I should have stopped at the last one. Sorry.

Where is 2018 is a hand drawn, extremely short but impeccably designed vignette platformer from designer and graphic novel artist Mateusz Skutnik. It’s got some incredibly tight platforming, and some neat, simple puzzles. He’s been making these yearly games since 2009, along with a whole host of others, including the Submachine series of adventure games. He’s also worked on a stack of graphic novels. Great, it’s been 2018 for less than a day and I already feel like a colossal failure in comparison. No, wait. That was there last year, too. And also forever.

Time Marches On

Where is 2018, along with Mateusz’s other games, feature some incredibly detailed, personal-feeling hand-drawn backgrounds. If you’re interested in seeing how the artist achieves what he does, Mateusz has several live streams on his YouTube channel, where you’ll be able to watch him draw his games in real time. I’ve been waiting for some of that talent to rub off on me, but no luck so far.

As well as his website, you can find Mateusz’s games on itch here. Personally, I’m happy to have discovered a one-man auteur with a distinct style, and can’t wait to dive into more of Mateusz’s work. Even if it does make me extremely depressed.

written by Nic Reuben

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Cryptic Hybrid | the Hard Croc | Jonathick | M.A.D Gaming | Famed Killjoy | Phenominis

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Nic Reuben

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The tragedy of the situation is that while being one of the most valuable objects in Kaisar’s posession, it got stolen in most peculiar circumstances. To the untrained eye it would seem that the Evaluation simply vanished from this layer, ceasing to exist in a split of a second. However, the smell of electricity left in the air after that occurence told another story.

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Visit Trstenik, Croatia and find 10 gnomes hidden around the location. Find clickable areas, navigate through the locations and zoom into every nook and cranny to find those little bastards.

Revisited, 5 years later. (shot in 2016, revisited in 2021)

772 games were submitted between July 14th 2017 at 6:00 AM and July 17th 2017 at 8:00 AM. 3,702 ratings were cast by those who entered to 617 of the entries (79.9%) between July 17th 2017 at 8:00 AM and Today at 5:59 AM. The average number of ratings per game was 4.8 and the median was 3.

[source]

What’s the most interesting urbex-related thing you’ve found that you couldn’t fit into Submachine?

Anything bigger than a simple room. That includes big shipyard halls for example, large steam engines etc

Why use hindu and buddhist theming? Karma portals, Shiva…is it just for flavor?

It’s not only hindu and buddhist. If you look closely you’ll find a lot more religions in submachine. The point is it all blends together in the post-industrial era of submachine.

If you could redo any section of any game in the series, which would it be and why?

No, I’m not the type to dwell on past mistakes or missteps. I just do another game. However, once I’ll be putting out steam version of submachine I’m sure there will be changes made to locations and puzzles.

What is the exact chain of events and circumstances behind the Submachine(s), how did everything happen, why did they happen, what are the Submachine(s), and what was actually going on throughout the games?

So you want me to completely strip down the mystery of submachine. Why would I do that?

If you could go back and change one thing about each Submachine game, what would it be (if there are any)?

Again, nothing. I don’t imagine myself going back and changing things in finished projects.

Did your vision on what was going on and what you planned to have happen change over the course of creating the games?

It was created on the game-to-game basis. Each chapter was written after previous one was released.

Is there a conventional Earth like the one that we know, or has humanity in the Submachine series been living adrift in these strange, floating worlds of the submachines forever?

Yes, there is. After all, these machines are submerged. This is a world with most of physics similar to our world.

Did you ever sketch official character art for some of the characters like Mur and Elizabeth?

No. There was no need for it.

Did the submachines exist before humans? If so, then were the submachines ever meant for a different non-human civilization?

No. The first submachine was created by an architect.

What are some things that most people don’t know about your game series or haven’t noticed yet? Any plot details or design decisions would be cool to know.

People know much more about the series than I do. Maybe they don’t know that the series will return with new episodes in the future on steam (if they accept it).

Why is Murtaugh so mean? Leaving people to die doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to do.

It’s all explained within the games themselves.

Who are the people who worshipped Murtaugh and placed him in a sarcophagus? Is Liz pissed about being buried next to him?

That’s a mystery. How can you be pissed once you’re dead?

What is up with Einstein the cat?

What do you mean?… It’s a trans-dimensional cat, like all of them. He can move between layers at will.

Also what do you think the scariest detail you have put in your game is? For me, it is the part about how submachine can loop itself ‘vertically’.

Yeah, the idea of a loop is quite scary. So can be the location clusters in the subnet. It is possible to get stuck between two locations.

Now that old puzzles from previous Submachine games are being re-purposed, I’m ready to ask: For how long was it planned to have the final Submachine game reprise the series’s iconic locations? How many of these puzzles were designed for Sub10 and how many were extra ideas that couldn’t be fit into the previous games?

Not until writing submachine 10. I had an idea for it and then looked up previous games which part of them would fit that narrative.

I realize this is a stupid question, but I’m still trying to figure out how you bury a lighthouse while leaving it structurally intact. The Kent Lighthouse was a regular lighthouse, wasn’t it? Or is that an assumption too far?

it is. You bury a lighthouse by bringing together two layers, one of which is turned 90 degrees in relation to the other and then you let the sand slip from one to the other. You can transport entire desert that way.

Who were the Fourth Dynasty, and what happened to them? Their Winter Palace in the core of the Submachine had the same architect as the Kent Lighthouse, apparently outside of the Submachine — what was that guy doing, anyway? How were people apparently naturally living in the Submachine?

these are good questions, perhaps for more chapters of the game.

How far in advance did you plan the games? I imagine at some point there must have been some serious planning done considering items from Sub1 become useful in Sub10.

No. They were retrofitted to appear in submachine 10. As I said before, there was no series-planning up until like sub8 when I started thinking about how to finish this series.

Why was Mur buried in the lighthouse? This note “It’s no wonder they wanted to bury this whole lighthouse with him still inside. The collapse death toll was growing exponentionally. L” makes it seem like it was done to stop him from destroying more of the Submachine with his karma portals, but that doesn’t make sense to me as he was buried in it before he ever entered the Submachine (as far as I can tell). Is Liz just saying that she understands why people would want to bury him in the lighthouse even if that wasn’t the direct reason, or does the Submachine’s time distortion affect even the outside?

Murtaugh most definitely entered submachine before they buried him. That’s kind of a staple of the whole story.

Do you have a favorite fan theory about the submachine? For instance a way to look at it you never even considered yourself?

No. I try not to read too much into them, I don’t want to copy ideas from them, even semi-consciously.

Is the Submachine real?

Of course. We established that 10 years ago.

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This one is an odd one. You see, I decided to take part in the very first Game Maker’s Toolkit game jam. Because why not. The theme of the jam was – dual purpose mechanics. Yeah, I know. And this is what I came up with after… uhm… about 24 hours of thinking about it. The jam was already well on the way when I came up with this idea.  That left me roughly 36 hours to create this game. From scratch. Since they were very strict about rules and everything had to be done on the fly as I went – that’s how I did it. All code, graphics, ideas, sounds and everything was created during that 36-hour period on one weekend. When I count the hours I think I did it in about 32 hours, since I finished about 4 am, four hours before the deadline. It’s as good as it gets I guess. I found out that it’s really easier to take part in a comics 24-hour project than in 48-hour game design project.

Anyway.

Here it is. Enjoy.

Click here to download.

And here we are. The most controversial and unexpected release of this year. Submachine Universe HD for free. This project started as an online exploration experience back in 2010, and now, almost seven  years later transformed into a proper HD sort-of game. And it’s also twice as big as the initial release. And it’s still an open project with more expansions on the horizon. It is the last and only project in Adobe Flash that is still active in my workshop. You can enjoy it for free before it’s inevitable recreation in more current technology. So take a long stroll along empty corridors of the Submachine and try to find all locations, all secrets, read all theories and discover all red herrings. Though it doesn’t look like much, there’s a lot to do here. But most importantly: enjoy!

This article is a follow up to >this one<, in which I expressed moral and technical problems that emerged while creating a HD version of Submachine Universe. Go read that one if you haven’t, it’ll make this one more cohesive.

First of all – thank you guys for all your comments, opinions and suggestions on what I should do in this situation. You really helped me to see the way. That’s why I’m doing this the way I am. I don’t want to keep you in suspense, so here’s what will happen and I’ll delve into the details afterwards.

I’ll be releasing Submachine Universe HD for free, as a downloadable game for PC and Mac OS X. It’ll be available to download just as my newer games, created in Game Maker on my website.

– From that point on, the Subnet will be updated regularly with new content on that free HD, downloadable version. These expansions will also remain free of any charge.

– Current small-windowed, online browser version therefore becomes obsolete and will be removed. You lose ability to play it in the browser, but you gain so much more, believe me.

– If you still want to pay for it, then please hold on to your money and spend it once my Big Game hits Steam. That will be exponentially more valuable than buying the Subnet right now.

Ok, Mateusz, that’s all great, but… WHY?!

I hear you ask, and just hold on for a minute, I’ll explain everything. Well, maybe not everything, like the meaning of life (32), but I’ll try to shed some light on why am I going with a solution that wasn’t even on the table in that previous article.

– Firstly and most importantly the Subnet was created for fans and in part by fans. As much as I hate the word “fan” as it doesn’t apply most of the times, here it actually kind of does. I’m talking about people who like Submachine so much, that they spend time writing theories about it, draw their own machines, locations etc. Some of them even created 3D renderings and real life models of parts of Submachine. As I said before, I can’t imagine this project stripped of that user-generated content. It would  be like ripping the heart out of it, and without it the Subnet is nothing more than bunch of empty rooms. All those people were making their contributions to the free version, and the only way to honor that is for the Subnet to remain free. As long as it is community-enhanced project, it has to stay free. So that settles the money issue right there.

– Secondly this move gets rid of the version multiplication problem. This one is more technical, but equally important to me. This solution allows me to keep the Subnet in just one version. No need for separate free, HD, enhanced, patreon-only or legacy builds. All reverted to the one and only free HD.

– Thirdly (thirdly?… Is there such a word?…) – let’s go back to your comments and suggestions. Most of you opted for the Steam solution, meaning recreating entire project in Game Maker and publishing it on Steam in due time. And I will, but that due time is probably several years from now, as I want to release my Big Game on Steam first, and then maybe go back to porting old stuff to it. And Steam version of Subnet will be drastically different from what we have now. That Steam version will have a price on it, so it probably will become a normal game, a large one, but stripped of user-generated content, rearranged and basically – completely new. But that’s ok, this current version of Subnet will remain free even then.

– Moreover, Steam version would mean abandoning current, Flash HD version. Which would be kind of sad, as I worked hard so it looks good. I just can’t toss it aside without sharing it with you. So once again, while selling it to you would be shady,  I can share it for free without any problems. I know some of you have been waiting for that HD version for a long time, and now postponing it another couple years when it is actually ready to be released seems kind of heartbreaking.

So…When’s the release date?

So here it is. A clean solution to all problems. Seems too good to be true, right? But you guys deserve this to be free as, in part, you’re responsible for it as well. I’ll be releasing the HD Subnet right after I finish two more locations for you to discover, which are kind of half-done.

You can wait a bit longer, right?

Cool.

See you later then.