Have you already read about the first two rooms of Trinacria Manor posted earlier? Or else, have you played the first level of Killing Machine Movement?

     Continuing on from those first rooms, where you encounter the first enemy of the game, discovering that enemy aiming and shooting are fast and that headshots do matter, you come to a great hall. Above you, you may be able to see the roof and things atop. There’s a nod to some lore here. As, if you could notice the length of the colour coded lines printed on the sides of the light blue containers stacked next to the plants backed with what may be artificial light emitters. The lines would be the references for the user, for which genetically engineered nutrient worms are contained in each box for consumption. The homegrown plants too, all a nod to the self-sufficient, optimally healthy lifestyle that Mass City citizens collectively boast. I wonder what else could be found that on the roof, maybe hidden from sight? Could you reach that area now, or would you have to return after having chosen favorable custom equipment?

Across from you is the other end of the balcony and a chandelier with a ridiculously long chain just asking to be shot. In terms of path, here is your first split decision. (As long as we don’t have equipment which allow you to bypass walls.) Do you float across to the other balcony, depleting most of your low level float mana or drop downwards, mana intact? By the end-most bannisters of the balcony, we were to include small vases - which have already been illustrated - which could be shot and made to shatter. Since this was one of the first levels made, at that stage of production, the enduring decision was made, not to make too many objects that would take up memory such as this. So, the vases and future unnecessary, purely cosmetic destructibles were canned. Since the time of this early production stage and the ensuing progress of computer strength at the time of release, a greater amount of destructible material could perhaps have been included. But it is of no great loss for this version. If you recall the first movement tutorial, you would know not to fear fall damage. If not, then perhaps you’d have gritted your teeth on the way down to the floor of the hall.

Behind you, on the wall, are your first paintings. The ensconcing, smaller paintings are my first experiments with the Windows 8 onwards version of MSpaint, from when I first owned a portable machine which had that OS. Every illustration in Killing Machine Movement made by myself either uses Vista paint or pre Vista. Greg condemns Vista’s default colour palate for straying from the XP default. However, I would say that despite that, Vista paint is probably the most superior of the three. This is mostly because of the addition of right click zooming out from the image beyond the default maximum resolution. This is incredibly useful for larger drawings. At the same time, the old school interface and tools of pre Vista paint are still maintained. What we can both agree on is that post Vista MSpaint was ruined. Though some of the brush effects are pretty and more sophisticated than those under older paint limitations, the line tool is disrupted to the point of redundancy. Of course, for me, the line tool is the primary illustrative tool for the vast majority of Killing Machine Movement MSpaint drawings. In gameplay, cutscenes and additional images, even if it looks like it was drawn freehand or traced, it was probably done with a pre Win8 MSpaint line tool. Any experiment I ever did on my machine with Windows8 paint - regardless of relevance to Killing Machine Movement - was saved and later used in Killing Machine Movement, canonically as in-game, in-universe traditional art paintings. The painting in the center was not made in Windows8 MSpaint. But who is that mysteriously lionised figure holding a Bizon? Is it a once prominent character from an 08 script, now reduced to a humble reference and piece of background lore? Yes, it was a long-term consideration that we would have unlockable flashback/backstory levels to flesh out the past of Kador Mazing and the lore of the South, providing some answers.

Some of the males in attendance in the hall (as well as that of the busts) are modeled after Leone mafia family character models from GTA3. The tall woman in the black dress is correctly proportional in terms of leg and torso height and was a proportion base I started to create in addition to the proportion base I was met with after joining the Killing Machine Movement project post alpha stage. She sports two features which were to become fashion lore in the game, bandages on the arms and the holding of a flower in one hand (In her case - due to the symbolism of her particular flower - to connote purity or something else misogynist perhaps.). Our Mr. Cass upon witnessing my illustration of the model in real time, commanded that I increase the proportion of the breasts and the character’s behind to accommodate the sexist tendencies of the medium. The development of the social narrative had not yet made it to my ears, informing me that ironically referencing sexism by being sexist is still sexist, though I surely conveyed to Mr. Cass that I didn’t care to do that. However, this was the essence of where I was in that introductory stage. That this was not my project as it were, and I had to do what I was commissioned to do within reason. And as a result of that inevitability, that much of what I did not want had to then be comedically included and was then to be embraced and accentuated. Soon even greater inclusions which I did not desire to come forth were sought out by me in order to flood the piece with so much of what was undesired, to the effect that we could soon make it successfully ambiguous that what we had created was at all in any way, something which we could claim to be something that we wanted or liked in terms of its components. Truly pretentious. Sardonically humourous. Arguably correct. Another immature escape from responsibility and being held accountable? A joke on that level too? An acknowledgement that on the grand scale, likely, nobody cares.

Speaking of self-awareness, I’ve laughed on many occasions where one of the female NPCs’ death screams runs on way longer since after she’s been killed dead. Also when I first played Greg’s updated version of the level, where he had implemented the piano oggs, and how the Rudess ogg ends mid sound with such an abrupt cut without any reverberating resonance to transition into silence. I still find myself bursting into laughter when pressing U on that one.

       The first two books you’ll find here are excerpts from Genesis (clearly chosen because of its thematic relevance and reflection of the story) and a story I adapted from another story which I remember our very own Anoush S (Who voices A Axiom, President Michael Dorn and The Chilli King) writing for a school assignment. I can’t remember the exact words he used, but the story is more or less the same beat for beat. Some lines - and of course, the ending - are exactly as they were.

Take the right doorway and we have a trope that I’ve been comforted to notice even good sagittal 2D games include, stairs to nowhere. At least at the beginning, we tried to put Z doors in the background so that in-universe, the stairs would make some sort of sense. I pondered if you could make some of these Z doors interactive, making it so that when you press U on them, you are transported to another Z door, elsewhere on the level from where you exit to the other side. Greg laughed at how in his mind, the momentum you initially enter the door with would be preserved and carried over to the accompanying exit doorway as well. Though not implemented in this level, this was the birth of Z doors in Killing Machine Movement. The lines of Sam W’s cantankerous Mafioso were inspired by a conversation me and Greg were having about the differences between the freedom you had to kill ally NPCs in Half-Life 1 compared to the freedom you don’t have in 2. I chuckled at how it was clearly even encouraged sometimes in Half-Life 1. Like when you first get the Gluon gun from a scientist and he goes, ‘I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to test and use it on another living creature.’ With poorly placed distain in his voice, he then goes, ‘I’m sure you’ll have no problem doing that.’ Greg laughed out loud at the immediate flag that speech signals to the player and commanded that we must copy that straight away. Obviously, ours isn’t as brilliantly done as that version in Half-Life 1. Lol especially since, when you immediately do in fact use the gun on the scientist, the Barney who led you into the room is still there. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ He exclaims as he opens fire on you and you in turn, blast him to pieces to get him to stop, in-universe having just impetuously escalated to the point of murdering two innocents and former allies. Outside to the right, you can see the Trinacria flag. There’s a field of lowered gravity covering this flag. It’s to imply that Kador can use it to partially climb or slow his descent. Greg pointed out that that may not really be immediately obvious and players would just ask ‘why is gravity lower in this area here?’

At the top of the hall are a bouncy bed and a one-liner which plays when you kill all the inhabitants of the room. Now personally, this does not work well for me. It had been a long since edified note pre beta that Greg wanted one-liners included, akin to Duke Nukem. I could be bitchy here and whine that if Greg had ever read the script during the decade which he had available to do so, he may have noticed that Kador Mazing’s character and the hark back to a stereotypical 90s’ action movie star are not wholly compatible. To the extent that it was appropriate to press concern in regards to this, it was more applicable to include what we may have done at that early stage and have the striking nature of incongruity stand out as self-apparent. In fact, the thematic incongruence is strained between these two elements very much in my opinion, to the extent where the product becomes very ugly. The game gloats at its anarchic off-the-wall break with tradition to the extent that semblance of a game or of player consideration or appeasement barely even remains. And yet, call backs to older influences from the 90s persist in a much non-nuanced way throughout that one can’t stand to claim both traits in any non-schizophrenic mind. Greg is far too intelligent not to be unaware of the laziness of a ‘hey, remember this old game, lol that’s comedy’ comedic reference, so that ham-fisted approach - now even louder in tone so that it cannot be missed - is obviously also a joke in itself and another big part of Movement’s perhaps unappealing and trolling anarchy. But still, the striking tonal contrast becoming all too jarringly noticeable and unreconcilable may have well been the case because - for whatever reason - the amount of one-liners in levels eventually dies out. Nevertheless, we had two players laugh at the one-liner a lot when they play tested this section.

We can skip through the second great hall and all the mysteries in between to talk about one of the big components of the level and game, Karnage Man. See you next time.

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