Read the rest of Namatjira Dawn...

Nico Bellic was drawn to America by his cousin’s stories of wealth and comfort. A life without killing or pain, where things were easy and nothing hurt.

The main characters and relationships in the game are endearing in a dark way. The graphics were quite nice, especially when compared to the previous game in the series, GTA: San Andreas, which my wife is playing right now. The amount of detail in the city and the number of things one can do are amazing.

In reality, life in Liberty City was a struggle. It was the same cycle of steal, kill, flee as before, except in an unfamiliar place where everything is harder and everyone is a stranger. No respect and no opportunities. And always the need for money.

But the game isn’t interesting. The gameplay is the same as previous games, with clumsier driving and walking and slightly better shooting. The missions are more restrictive than ever. In GTA III, you could cleverly solve missions by blocking an escape route with a car or planting a bomb in a target’s truck. In most of GTAIV‘s missions, you must use this car and go here, and then the guy will escape in a cutscene that removes any obstacles, and then you must chase him across the city and he’s impossible to catch and then he flees on foot and you confront him in another cutscene. And if you screw up at any point, you need to start the mission over because we don’t have any checkpoints.

Nico slowly learned something about America. America had a vision of itself: rich, easy, luxurious. And it forced you to pursue that vision. Everyone pursued that vision. Even if you wanted to do something else, be someone else, you couldn’t. You needed money. And you had certain talents that were valued, even when you weren’t valued as a person.

This is one of those games where the developers have crafted this world and this game that they’re incredibly (and rightfully!) proud of, and then realize with dismay that some grubby player is going to get her grubby fingerprints all over it. So they do their damnedest to make sure the player can’t interfere with their lovely work. Any place that the player could screw up the game with her insistence on cleverness, they stop that shit.

And when you got money, it corrupted you. It hurt you. Money made you crazy, bought you drugs that tear you apart, got you in debt, got everything you love set on fire. You needed the money, but the money ruined you.

In the end, once I moved on to the game’s second safehouse, I gradually lost interest. The mission structure sprawls out and the characters are less interesting, and I became less invested in Nico Bellic’s “I’m a man full of guilt who wants a different life yet I don’t even blink when you tell me to kill folks” routine. I simply realized that I didn’t want to play any more. So I stopped.

And so Nico walked away. Got on a boat, a bus, a plane, and went somewhere else where he didn’t need to kill for money. Nico just stopped.

The good folks behind GDC Online, a professional conference for connected gaming, commissioned me to create a game for Web Wise Kids. Web Wise Kids is a really cool non-profit that provides curriculum materials and classroom video games for parents and teachers that focus on teaching kids to be their own first lines of defense against digital threats. They help prepare kids to avoid online bullying, viruses, and dangerous adults by teaching them how to safely surf the web and use other digital technologies. They use their own games to educate kids and encourage safe behavior without a lot of fear-mongering. You can donate to Web Wise Kids here.

I tried to make this game communicate a concept about how to protect kids by using game mechanics. I’m usually a story-focused person, but game rules are a great way to make a statement about the way the world works. I hope that you’ll play the game until you win, get the message I was trying to convey, and maybe even donate to Web Wise Kids!

Play “Passing the Ball” at GDC Online.

Are you using Tweensy for easy programmatic Flash tweening? You should be.

Did you know that when Flixel loses focus and pauses, Tweensy doesn’t automatically pause? You should. It can cause some weird behavior.

I’ve figured out a simple fix that pauses Tweensy when Flixel doesn’t have focus. I just did it, so be aware that there may be some unexpected consequences of this that I don’t know about.

Put the following in your main class that extends FlxGame:

override protected function onFocus(FlashEvent:Event = null):void
{
    super.onFocus(FlashEvent);
    Tweensy.resume();
}

override protected function onFocusLost(FlashEvent:Event = null):void
{
    super.onFocusLost(FlashEvent);
    Tweensy.pause();
}

And that’s that. When Flixel pauses due to lost focus, Tweensy will as well, and when Flixel resumes, so will Tweensy. Just make sure you don’t get the “pause” and “resume” flipped; I did at first, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong.

I also have “Games I’ve Played” (but not finished) and “Games I Probably Won’t Finish” on that page. Looking at them tells a lot about my game preferences. For example, I’m reluctant to stick with very hard or very long games, especially if they’re older console titles (Super Mario Bros.). And I generally don’t care for “real-time strategy” games. I don’t like having to plan and out-think an opponent while also managing low-level real-time play. I’m lousy enough at strategizing as it is; I don’t need added distractions.

This list also feels very short. It seems like there should be many, many more games on it. I’ve certainly left out a lot of games I’ve played emulated (Final Fantasy VI) and many games that I’ve only played demos of (Rocket Jockey, to pick one totally at random). There are a lot of games out there, and I’ve played a lot of them. But still nowhere near a majority.

If Babies Dream was, alchemically-speaking, a chunk of carbon, Looming is Weir’s lapis noster. Visually, it is perhaps the simplest of his achievements… Oddly enough, the monotony of the presentation, alongside the soundtrack of howling winds and weird, croaking wildlife, helps to evoke exactly the sense of loneliness and isolation that the name of this realm, “Looming,” suggests. And with no fancy textures to distract the eye, Looming’s colossal broken gears and Apatosaurus-sized rib bones can’t help but arouse a fundamental awe… and fear.

I recommend you check it out.

Some backstory on the universe. The bombs fell in 2077, in a world themed around the paleofuture of the 1950s. The original Fallout starts in 2161, 84 years after the War. At this point, the US Southwest is in ruins with most people living in fortified farming, trading, or raiding communities. Fallout 2 takes place in 2241. Most settlements in the US Southwest have been rebuilt from a combination of scraps and new materials. There’s a shiny place called Vault City with trees and clean buildings, a democratic republic in California, and two different organizations with advanced technology.

What Bethesda Did

Fallout 3 takes place across the country in the ruins of Washington, DC in 2277. 200 years after the bombs fell, many DC buildings are still standing. People live in filthy, makeshift towns made entirely of ruins and rusty scrap with litter on the floors of their houses. There are no farms in the game. The only sources of food seem to be some cave fungus, a single experimental hydroponics lab, mutant animal meat, and whatever gets scavenged from the ruins. And yet the ruins are simply full of food. Mashed potatoes, snack cakes, and canned meat sit on shelves and are no more irradiated than the water people drink.

This is hard to believe.

Read the rest of How Fallout 3 Should Have Been...

[Narrative creates] a form of interactive storytelling that I would say constitutes gameplay as much as anything else in games does. In some games, you click on the enemy soldier and the enemy soldier dies, removing an obstacle to victory. In my games, you click on an object and it gives you a description, removing an obstacle to understanding.

This is a very important point, and it deserves further exploration. Most games have a structure composed of a cycle of actions and rewards. You do something you’re supposed to do, and the game rewards you. Classic positive reinforcement. These rewards can be in the form of points (or money, etc.) but they’re most effective in the form of content. If you beat this boss, you get to see the next level. If you pass this test, you get to advance to the next grade. If you explore a side path, you get to see a cool room. If you examine this object, you get a cute joke.

These things are all analogous. There’s different scales to the rewards, but the 3XP you get for killing a rat is analogous to the 20 gamer points you get for an achievement is analogous to the ending cinematic you get for defeating the final puzzle. The challenge may vary, and the reward may vary, but the mechanism is exactly the same. Most games are machines that dispense rewards (i.e. pleasure) when you press the right button.

Kyratzes’s games (especially The Book of Living Magic and Desert Bridge) tend to have a ton of side content like object descriptions that aren’t part of the main beat-the-game path to the end. They have a collection of trickier critical-path puzzles or challenges, and then a lot of incidental rewards that are provided in response to easy actions. This is just like, say, Diablo, which has a set of tricky battles punctuated by a lot of walking around, killing minor monsters, and smashing barrels. In games like Kyratzes’s, you click on the right thing and instead of a spray of gold coins you get a joke or an insight into the world.

I go back and forth on pixel art. A lot of people regard it as amateurish: a way to compensate for lack of drawing ability. Others dismiss it as nostalgia for childhood games. I think that there’s bad pixel art and amazing pixel art, and while there’s definitely nostalgia there, that very nostalgia can be useful for artistic purposes. My own pixel art isn’t anywhere close to the quality that many artists achieve, of course, but I think it’s passable for my purposes.

Pixel art is visual video game shorthand for an array of things: childishness, simplicity, or even a sort of wisdom born from history. It’s also the video game equivalent of cartooning. Pixel art stylizes and pointillizes, making its subjects more universal and accessible. It’s also a deliberate acknowledgement of the artificiality of the device being used. In a time where the iPhone’s Retina display resolution is at the upper limits of the human eye, pixel art exposes the underlying structure of the screen.

Anyway, enough rambling. Check out the interview, and read some of the other stuff on the site; there are a lot of cool things there! He also included some previously-unseen pieces of concept art and miscellany behind a link at the end of the article, if you’re interested.

One of the interesting aspects of this game is that it’s really not about the story. Most of Kyratzes’s games are heavily storied; either you’re participating in or uncovering story (usually both). In this, however, you’re just exploring the world. The puzzles are simple and rather oddball, and your player character doesn’t make her personality very known. Instead, you’re meeting strange creatures (like Provatica the Unhefted, sheep adventurer) and visiting strange locales (like the Forest of Eyeballs). As one of Kyratzes’s games set in the Land of Dream, everything is appropriately surreal and dreamlike.

There are bits of darkness that pop out, though. Something happened to change Raven Locks Smith’s parents from dreamers to boring people, and it must be related to Mr. Urizen, Mayor of Dull, a recurring entity in Kyratzes’s works. A robot you meet is on the run from a government determined to turn him into a soldier. And the countryside around the town of Oddness Standing clearly has a long and often-solemn history that’s only hinted at in the game.

Play it. It’s short, it’s funny in a way that few games are, and it comes from the heart.

In some ways, it’s a historical aberration. If Gygax and Arneson had made some war-focused game instead of Counts and Courtship, or Will Crowther had decided to entertain his kids with his obscure caving hobby instead of an exploration of his childhood friendships, perhaps the focus of our games would be different. Doom wouldn’t have been an oddball niche title if there were a hundred other games at the time about shooting aliens with guns.

But I think there’s a more fundamental issue at work here: violence and action are really difficult to simulate, unlike simple relationships.

Read the rest of Why So Few Violent Games?...

While we’re waiting, a bit of background: The Stanley Parable is a game by Davey Wreden made in the Source Engine. It requires some form of the Source 2007 engine to play, which you have if you own Half-Life 2.

The Stanley Parable, for all its exploration of interactivity and choice and video games, isn’t actually interactive at all when you get right down to it. Yes, it has six endings and branching and all that. But as with many games with multiple endings, as soon as you tell the player that they exist, she wants to view them all. And especially with Stanley‘s left-or-right, red-or-blue choice structure, trying out the choices exhaustively is trivial.

Read the rest of The Non-Interactive Stanley Parable...

A lot of people are upset about this.

At first I was really confused about how angry people were acting, even accounting for the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Valve had put together a cool set of puzzles, offered a bunch of indie games for cheap, and then actually gave players a real-world reward for playing. However, I’ve realized that the displeasure the ARG created is due to a classic problem in game design: miscommunication leading to false expectations.

Read the rest of PO(r)TA(l)T(w)O...

The game asks you to follow a character from infancy to old age, making choices along the way. Infancy makes you crawl around your house as a baby getting toys before your sibling, in an odd exploration platformy way. Adulthood has you balancing love and work; I’m glad that they didn’t make this drag on too long. Shades of “Every Day the Same Dream” here. Old age, at least in the ending I got, was more of a little vignette to cap off the choices made in the rest of the game.

Looking up at my description, this game sounds like a mixing-together of various art games, and it’s definitely inspired by the work others have done before, but the polish and design in “Convergence” makes it feel fresh. Definitely something to check out for fans of blocky pixel games about life and choices.

F.E.A.R. was an odd game for me. The shooting part was fun and pretty and it was just the right amount of difficulty (or sometimes a bit too hard), but the rest of the game was… not very interesting. The horror elements rarely grabbed me, the story was almost pastiche, and the dramatic twists were clear to me after the first level. That’s not even bringing up one of the most offensive video game characters in recent memory. Hey, it’s a fat guy! And he’ll get bumbling clown music! And you’ll know that you’re about to meet him again when you see food wrappers scattered around. Seriously.

So while F.E.A.R. is technically advanced for its time and well-designed from a gameplay perspective, I was ready for it to be over about halfway through. And that’s never a situation you want a player to be in.

I loved you once, split-toed dirt-swimmer. These idols are the bones of wonders. Why should the sun claim the land any more than the sea?

Play Beneath the Waves at Armor Games.

Read the rest of Beneath the Waves Released...

• 15 puzzles done out of a projected 30
• 49 NPCs; the final game may have over 75
• 248 lines of dialogue out of perhaps 400 or more

This is sort of what I was talking about a month and a half ago with respect to the cost of content. I’ve done very little in-depth programming on this game. Most of the time has been spent writing dialogue and hooking up the logic between the various NPCs. To be sure, this is still coding, and it can be interesting and tricky, but it feels a bit daunting.

“Ossuary” has no procedural content, so every minute of playtime the player experiences is the result of ten or thirty or sixty minutes of my development time. There’s a concept in film called cutting ratio that measures how much footage is filmed compared to how much ends up in the final movie. A cutting ratio of ten-to-one is perfectly acceptable. In game development, even if you never discard any code, there’s still an incredible concentration of developer time into player time.

Games discussed:
• Alan Wake by Remedy Entertainment
• “Babies Dream of Dead Worlds” by Gregory Weir
• Perfect Cell by Mobigame

The music for this episode is “The Temple” by Out of Orion and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike License.

This podcast is certainly not a complete discussion of the topic, so please leave any input or feedback in the comments section.

2. Fortitude

2.1: Joining the Knights of the Five-Sided Temple

In order to gain access to the temple, you will need to get past the outer gate. Speak to the outer gatekeeper and tell him you are a FRIEND. He will let you through.

Speak to the Recruitment Officer in the western tower and ask him about himself (“ABOUT YOU”). He will mention that he doesn’t want to be greedy about getting a better position. Sounds like a way in, but we’re not yet corrupted by Greed.

Speak to the inner gatekeeper. He doesn’t want to let you in, but it sounds like he’s a bit overworked. Corrupt him with the sin of Sloth. He’ll sit down to rest and let you in.

Speak to the Lieutenant on the west side of the keep. He’ll say he’s happy, but keep asking him “REALLY?” until he confesses that he wants the commander’s position. You’re now corrupted with the sin of Greed. Go back to the Recruitment Officer and corrupt him with Greed. He’ll admit that he’s always wanted to be a drill sergeant, and ask you to speak with the commander on his behalf.

The commander is in the center of the south wall of the keep. Talk to him about the RECRUITER, and he’ll ask that you check with the Temple Clerk about the recruiter’s experience. Go to the Temple Clerk and talk to him. He sure doesn’t seem to appreciate the effort that the Recruitment Officer puts in! If only you had a sin that made people understand the viewpoints of others.

Corrupt the Temple Clerk with the sin of Envy. He’ll admit that he’s envious of the Recruitment Officer’s experience in his job, and that he deserves a promotion. Inform the Commander, who will ask you to inform the Recruitment Officer. Return to him, and he’ll enlist you as his final act in his old job.

What do you think? Too convoluted? Not convoluted enough? Any suggestions?

Burnout Paradise

Recently, I’ve resumed playing Criterion Games’s Burnout Paradise, an open-world car stunt and racing game. When you start a game of Burnout Paradise, you’re greeted at the pre-menu loading screen with the opening bars of Guns N’ Roses’s song “Paradise City.” This song plays through the menu experience, and continues to play even when you start the game. The song always plays once when you start, and then the game’s background music proceeds to whatever selection it’s picking from.

“Paradise City” serves as a theme song, marking the transition from the “real world” to “game space.” Because you hear the song every time you play, it serves as an almost Pavlovian trigger. The song becomes associated with the fun and the action of the game, so it helps to put you in the mood for the game as soon as you start it up.

Alan Wake

Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake has a structure that also lends itself to a transition into the game space. Instead of levels or sections, Alan Wake is divided into “episodes.” Each episode ends with a large “end of episode” message, a credits song, and usually a cliffhanger. The next episode then starts with a “last time on Alan Wake” montage, reviewing the story so far. This helps keep the player up-to-date on the (somewhat convoluted) plot and helps to break up the game.

This technique would be even more effective if it were incorporated into the game’s start-up experience. When an episode ends, it presents a natural stopping point, but the player is instead sent directly into the next episode. Instead, the developers should have returned the player to the main menu, to view the new episode-related main menu background and manually start the next episode. This way, the end of an episode would encourage the player to transition back to the real world, and it would be more natural to resume the game before the review montage instead of just afterward.

Tales of Monkey Island

It would be especially effective if Alan Wake dynamically generated a review montage every time the game started, showing the current episode’s intro and then short clips of what had been accomplished so far. Telltale Games’s Tales of Monkey Island episodic game series does this in text form; the game greets you with a short review of the story so far to welcome you to the game experience. With Alan Wake‘s greater development time and budget, it could have contained a video form of the same idea.

Too often, games make the start-up process and menu system an afterthought. While a game might be stylistically excellent, the initial user experience is frequently marred by long unskippable sponsor logos or simple, dull menus. It can be jarring to move from a spartan main menu into a rich game world. Instead, games should take a lesson from Burnout Paradise, Tales of Monkey Island, and Alan Wake: welcome the player into the game space from the moment the application starts, and make the menu experience one that facilitates the transition into the world of the game.

I am a geek: a person inclined to get excited over the minutia of a topic or topics. One of the ways I manifest this is by being a foodie. I enjoy the history, science, and craft of food preparation and consumption. Food has more in common with games than one might think. In fact, everything about food can be appreciated in the same way as a game.

The first-world way we approach food fundamentally a luxury. We need to eat, but our basic needs can be taken care of by any number of inexpensive and simple foods. The countless choices available at a grocery store and the multitude of preparations are frivolous from the perspective of our pre-technological ancestors or even from the perspective of a less-well-off third- or second-world citizen.

That means that my grocery experience was only a short hop away from being a game.

Read the rest of Playing With My Food...

I’ve had a shift in my gaming tastes over the years. There was a time when I most wanted story from my games; that is to say, a narrative, an interesting series of events that needed not be too interactive. These days, however, I’m most interested in character and setting; I want to be an interesting person and/or explore an interesting world. Oh, I still want a good story, but it’s now third on my list of priorities instead of first.

“Fine-Tuned” does an amazing job of letting you roleplay its characters. Miss Melody Sweet, the opera singer, is proper and polite yet independent and practical, and playing her is a pleasant joy. However, it’s Troy Sterling, a daredevil-for-hire(-in-training) and all-around likeable guy, who steals the show. There’s an early sequence where Sterling, controlled by the player, drives to town, pausing only to clean up litter, rescue a baby bird, and wave to a passerby. It’s a joy playing the cheery and friendly Sterling. Read along in this edited transcript:

Read the rest of Fine-Tuned: Being Troy Sterling...

Morning again. Time to check the beacon.

You can play “A Ride Home” at Kongregate. Give it a rating if you like it!

3D is an interesting tool to work with. Unity is an amazing tool and its free version is totally worth checking out for anyone interested in dipping their toes into 3D. EDIT: This game was made entirely with the free version, along with free tools like Blender, GIMP, and Audacity.

There’s this mistaken feeling among players who self-identify as “hardcore” that they’ve been left behind, that there’s this shift in the culture of development that has abandoned them. This is mostly nonsense. It’s true that for about a decade, most every game was made for a hardcore player… but that decade was the worst one in the history of video game design.

Read the rest of The Myth of Hardcore...

I’ve been sick for the past week or two, so I’ve been getting very little done and pursuing rather escapist past-times. One of the unhealthier things I’ve done is play a lot of Bethesda Game Studios’ Oblivion. A whole lot of it. Steam says I’ve put in 39.3 hours, and I’ve only been playing for four or five days.

It’s an escapist game that appeals to my urges for exploration, completion, and optimization, even if I feel the need to patch the hell out of it. I’ve got 39 mods installed for it, all graphical upgrades, bug fixes, or interface tweaks. People no longer look like corpses and most of the bugs are fixed, making the game quite playable.

As much as I clearly enjoy the game, it suffers from a fatal flaw: the developers sacrificed user experience in their pursuit of their game system. Oblivion has an elaborate, interesting setting and backstory, an impressively large and detailed world, and a complex set of mechanics. But it’s all a lot less fun than it should be.

Read the rest of The Player in Oblivion...

In part, this is a corollary to my past writings on challenge and punishment. In my definition, challenge is when a task is difficult to accomplish because it requires a high amount of skill, ability, or experience. Punishment is when failing a task imposes a burden on the player, usually in the form of lost time.

Read the rest of The Obsolescence of Lives...

If I name an embedded bitmap resource “sprBatteries,” the app hangs at startup on the iPhone.

I can name it “sprDryCells” or “sprBatteriesX,” and it works fine. I can replace the resource PNG with a PNG I know works elsewhere, but if I name it “sprBatteries,” the app hangs. The app runs fine on my desktop. I believe (although I haven’t done systematic testing to confirm) that it works on the iPhone if I compile it as a simple AS3 app using the Flex compiler instead of compiling it as an AIR app. The resource variable name doesn’t collide with any others in the project.

If you’re not a programmer, let me explain that this behavior is bizarre. Variable names are totally arbitrary. As long as you don’t use any prohibited characters, you can name a variable anything you want. A college friend of mine liked to call his loop iterators “taco.” Many languages/compilers won’t even bother remembering the variable names once the source code is turned into a program. Flash happens to record theirs in the compiled SWF for various reasons, but there’s no sensible reason why “sprBatteries” should be treated differently than “sprBatteriesX.”

I give up on AIR for iPhone unless someone can get me a solution. I’ll see if I can get this running in simple AS3 without any hardware APIs, but it’s unlikely that my final product will contain any accelerometer input (for example). This is frustrating, and I’ve spend a total of over 12 hours fighting with this thing. Adobe hasn’t represented this as a finished product, and rightfully so. In its current form (and assuming I haven’t overlooked something simple), the Packager for iPhone is not ready for use in serious AIR development.

It’s Tia’s birthday, and she’s looking forward to beating all of her friends with the new card her dad gave her! Beat the other kids by choosing the right cards, and earn more cards until you’re the best of them all!

And don’t go into the woods, or the guards will kill you.

The game is an experiment in orthogonal goals.

Play “The Day” at Armor Games.

The craft guild educational system started with apprentices. Apprentices worked for and learned from a master. When they were finally able to earn money on their own, they usually became journeymen: craftsfolk who worked and produced good products, but weren’t officially recognized as experts. In order for the guild to recognize a craftperson as a master, she would need to make a masterpiece: a work that demonstrates her skill.

It’s interesting looking at this concept in the context of game development. Terry Cavanagh‘s masterpiece is VVVVVV. His work beforehand was excellent, but 6V demonstrated that he had a mastery of every aspect of the craft: challenge, story, managing the player’s feelings, and creating a unified feel. The concept is a little awkward to apply to teams, but it can be done; Ico was an excellent game, but it’s only with Shadow of the Colossus that Team Ico created a masterpiece.

The way I see it, a masterpiece must be perfect. I don’t mean that it must be without flaw, but it needs to be complete in every way. If there is a big piece missing, or if the work is not expansive enough to fully demonstrate mastery of the form, then it can’t be considered a masterpiece. Masterpieces are dissertations, theses, graduation projects: they are evidence of the creator’s skill and control over the totality of the craft.

It’s fun to play a game to decide on masterpieces for various creators. Frictional Games have Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Jonas Kyratzes has Phenomenon 32, a great example of a perfect masterpiece that still has flaws. Valve has Half-Life 2… or maybe one of the episodes? Or maybe some other game entirely, depending on your opinion. Personally, I don’t think Anna “Auntie Pixelante” Anthropy has made her masterpiece yet, although REDDER comes close.

As for me, I know I haven’t produced a masterpiece yet. I’m still a journeyman. I have been thinking lately about what I could do for a masterpiece, though. I’ve got one tempting idea involving survival in a warzone without weapons.

Do you disagree with any of my choices for masterpieces? Do you want to suggest candidates for other creators? Please comment with your ideas.

The music for this episode is from “medieval evil” by Baal Anamelech and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 license.

I could also do the same thing, but not on a physical CD; buyers would just get a DRM-free download containing the games.

Would any of the visitors to this blog be interested in some sort of merchandise along these lines? Any special requests or suggestions? Any ideas as to an appropriate price point?

[EDIT: Trythil raised a question in the comments that I should address. Games wouldn't be locked to a specific computer; they would just be prohibited from being hosted online. Specifically, some of my sponsorship agreements require advertising to be included in any widely-distributed version, and I don't want to force paying users to watch ads. I also should have said that I'd personally like to make sure ad-free versions don't get hosted on portals, as that would mean I wouldn't make money off of it. Whether you consider this "DRM" is up to you; it probably technically falls under the definition of the word. However, the package would contain no digital restrictions on copying or distribution, which is what most people think of when they say "DRM." This release would not be offered under a CC or otherwise copyleft license, so ethical restrictions would still apply to certain kinds of copying. I don't believe in enforcing those restrictions, though.]

After a long journey, you will reach the Narthex, the waiting place before the oracle. There you must wait until your time. Then you will be given the answer to a single question. This game has two endings. The second is not worth getting.

Play “Narthex” at Ludus Novus.

This game is about two lovers named January and September.
No, wait; it’s about a group of people who don’t believe in the sky.
No, it’s about a pantheon of scientific disciplines.
Or maybe it’s about an ancient beast who knew exactly when it was going to die, and how.

It’s about a place. A place called Looming.

Play Looming on Newgrounds.

Read the rest of Looming Released...

The other night, I picked up Gaijin Games’s Bit.Trip Runner for WiiWare. This game is the best example of pure, brilliant game design that I’ve seen in a good while. This is the game designer as teacher and leader; it’s what Anna Anthropy calls design as sadism:

As a designer and as a domme, I want the person who submits to me to suffer and to struggle but ultimately to endure: I challenge her while simultaneously guiding her through that challenge. The rules of the game and the level design carry that idea.

Runner does this through the gradual layering of new game elements, high challenge with low punishment, and optional bonus goals. Most of all, though, it guides through repetition. This is a game about rhythm, after all. For my favorite example of this, let’s look at a single measure of rhythm from the game, no longer than 2 seconds, that appears everywhere.

Read the rest of One Measure of Bit.Trip Runner...

For those who are interested in mixing linear prose and poetry with gaming, there’s a project that looks very interesting: “Moon Taxi,” brought to my attention by GameSetWatch. “Moon Taxi” is a game for Xbox Live Indie Games (not PC, sadly) where you play a taxi driver to the moon. Your passengers tell stories, some submitted by fans, and important words in those stories appear in front of you as you hear them. It looks very cool; a creative writing prompt and a clever way to approach storytelling all at once. Check out the recruitment video for another view at the game and a pretty funny monologue.

And for those curious about my work, my next game is almost done.

It’s about two lovers named January and September.
No, wait, it’s about a group of people who don’t believe in the sky.
No, it’s about a pantheon of scientific disciplines.
Or maybe it’s about an ancient beast who knew exactly when it was going to die, and how.

It’s about a place. A place called Looming.

This game is so good, it’s distracted me from playing STALKER.

Jonas Kyratzes‘s new game Phenomenon 32 has a similar setting to GSC Game World‘s Chernobyl shooter: the familiar modern world, distorted by the folly of science unbounded by ethics into a place where the very rules of reality can’t be trusted. This isn’t a new premise: STALKER is indirectly based on the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, and the seminal work for this concept is probably the “Dying Earth” series. It’s sheer coincidence that I was playing these two games at the same time, but there are several good reasons why Phenomenon 32 is winning out.

Read the rest of Phenomenon 32 and the Cinders of Earth...

A lot of people really resonated with the idea. I heard plenty of compliments for the visual interpretation of the text, and for making the text interesting to read, and for the potential of the game for education… but no one really said the game was fun. So here’s a question for you: how can I make a spiritual successor to “Silent Conversation” that’s actually fun? I’m seeking your help here.

Read the rest of Fixing Silent Conversation...

Games take a set of rules describing how things work, and they apply those rules to a world state to determine how that world changes over time. Sometimes the rules are very simple; “Snakes and Ladders” has about four rules. Sometimes, they are extraordinarily complex; World of Warcraft has rules that govern the actions and interactions of thousands of actors at once, with each actor having maybe a hundred different ways to affect the progress of the simulation. All games, however, share these fundamental attributes: they simulate the changes in a system over time using a set of rules.

Inherent in their status as a simulation is the fact that games are abstractions. No simulation can be an exact model of real life. Therefore, games use only a subset of the rules present in the systems they simulate. Sometimes, games simulate the real world: Roller Coaster Tycoon simulates the everyday workings of a theme park. Sometimes, they simulate a fantastic world: Morrowind is a simulation of the fictional fantasy island of Vvardenfell. Sometimes, they simulate an abstract world: Conway’s “Game of Life” simulates a world composed of either a grid of unicellular organisms, or a world of multicellular organisms with a very strange way of living. In all these cases, however, the designers of the game have chosen which rules to include in the simulation and which to abstract away. Roller Coaster Tycoon does not require the player character to get sleep. Morrowind allows the PC to eat, but does not require it. The “Game of Life” uses a very limited set of rules.

What distinguishes a game from, say, the sort of airflow simulation used by aerospace engineers? Player interaction. In games, players can modify the progress of the simulation. They can change the starting parameters, or choose what an actor will do, or even modify the rules of the simulation as it progresses. It is this interactivity that is essential to the nature of games. Games simulate worlds, but their most important property is that they allow the player to affect the simulation. It is from this ability that goals emerge, that agency arises, that fun appears. Games are simulations with life.

Note that the work-in-progress builds linked below will probably require you to click on the game to give it focus before it will react to your keystrokes.

Read the rest of Waves: A Ludum Dare 17 Postmortem...

Saira is an explorer. Three years ago, she was a photographer, working to take pictures of exotic and dangerous wildlife. She is brave and athletic, able to leap from rock to rock without hesitation. Her eyes are trained to notice things hidden in the world around her, and her hand is steady as she takes each picture. She can scramble up air shafts, dodge hungry wildlife, and hazard cruel environments to achieve her goals.

Saira is a character piece.
Read the rest of Saira...

While we were on the bus to the ill-fated Zynga-hosted afterparty, Tass and I had a conversation where he tried to convince me to put links to video walkthroughs inside my games. Obviously, he has a vested interest in this, but he also believes in it from a player’s perspective. Walkthroughs, he feels, should be as accessible as possible to the player. My initial reaction, as a video game auteur, was to disagree. The presence of a walkthrough ruins the carefully-crafted difficulty curve I’ve prepared for the game. But as Tass continued, he began to sway my mind.

Read the rest of Difficulty and Walkthroughs...

SR2 is a game that borrows liberally from Grand Theft Auto 3 and its successors. The player character is a sociopathic criminal, doing a series of missions to gain power in a city while murdering thousands of people in the process. Playing a game like this, the player should expect to do horrible things; it’s a game (in this case) about a street gang leader taking over an entire city. These games set up an environment in which the player can suspend their ethical disbelief. The world is farcical, with corrupt police, over-the-top raunchy radio ads, and stereotyped characters. All of the characters with dialog are criminals, and none of the bystanders get enough characterization to make the player empathize with them.

But there’s something weird in SR2‘s approach. The middle of the game consists of three parallel storylines, corresponding to the PC‘s strengthening of her gang, the Saints, through destruction of three rival gangs: the Sons of Samedi, the Ronin, and the Brotherhood. The Sons of Samedi plotline is a drug-running crime story in the Tarantino vein. The Ronin is a full-on action movie, complete with katana duels. But the Brotherhood is the brutal story of the cold-hearted destruction of a man and his family.

Read the rest of The Brutality of Saints Row 2...

At that link above, you can see footage of an interview he did with me, Anna Anthropy, Daphny, and Amon26. Spinach is a cool guy and he’s trying to get some exposure for a bunch of folks who I’m really interested in learning more about. He needs your help to do it, so go and pledge to donate on his Kickstarter page.

The music for this episode is from “Three Goes On Forever” by Time Slips By, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike License as part of the compilation Ctrl-N.

The magnum opus of Cyan Worlds, however, is a sequel: Uru, now known as Myst Online: Uru Live. It’s a Myst MMO, first scheduled for release in 2003. Before the game was even released, the online portion was canceled. It was briefly resurrected in 2007-08 by GameTap, then canceled again. Recently, it has been revived again in donation-ware form, but it still has all the bugs and issues that helped contribute to its repeated downfall. Why should anyone care about or play Uru? Because it’s unique. It does things no other game does.

Read the rest of Why Uru Matters...

Before we have memory, before we know what this world is, we dream. Babies dream of what came before, of universes that are no longer there. Babies dream of dead worlds.

Play Babies Dream of Dead Worlds on Newgrounds.

This game is a sort of surreal platformer, I suppose? It’s a bit hard to describe. It’s developed using Flixel, and tells the story of three siblings at the end of a world very unlike this one.