Spinach is making a documentary about indie video game developers.
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.
This podcast episode is about an unreleased game from 1990 that a guy showed me at GDC. It’s called Awesome Zone, and it was created by developer Theodore Alby for a company called KnowSoft over the course of a six-week nervous breakdown.
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.
I’ve been thinking lately, as I’ve been playing around with 3D tools like Unity, about the nature of perspective and visibility in games. Most games limit the amount of information that the player can see. It’s very rare to see a game where the entire game world is visible from the beginning (see “Flood the Chamber” for a counterexample that does). This design decision, of how much of the world to show and how much to keep hidden, doesn’t get enough credit for its importance to the nature of a game.
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Cyan, now Cyan Worlds, released Myst in 1993. The work became one of the most influential video games of all time. It made the CD-ROM a must-have, led the rise of the atmospheric adventure puzzler, and is the leading suspect in the death of the adventure game. It was the bestselling game of all time until The Sims came along, and is probably, along with Mario and Pac-Man, the game even gaming-illiterate people have heard of.
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.
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And it’s out! My December 2009 game is up at Newgrounds. Babies Dream of Dead Worlds is a game about family.
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.
I just got finished playing Red Faction: Guerrilla. It’s an excellent game; the breaking-stuff gameplay is so fun and natural-feeling that I anticipate disappointment when I play all the other games where you can’t knock down a wall to get to the enemy on the other side. It strikes a nice balance between open-world and narrative styles of gaming. There’s something else about the game, though. Guerrilla makes me uncomfortable with its violence.
This is something that I haven’t experienced outside of so-called “art games” like Jesse Venbrux‘s “Execution.” When I play Guerrilla, I feel a disconnect with the actions my player character is taking: not ludonarrative dissonance, but a genuine case of disagreement with my character’s motives and callous lack of concern for human life. I’m a pacifist. Alec Mason is not.
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My final game of the year is done, and boy did I delay it to the last minute. “Procrastination” is an abstract experimental game, my attempt to communicate purely through game mechanics. It’s my tribute to Rod Humble, if you must.
Play “Procrastination” at Ludus Novus.
Astute fans will notice that I have only released eleven games this year, despite my resolution to do a game a month. Fear not; the twelfth game is done, but “Babies Dream of Dead Worlds” will wait until it is sponsored before it gets released. Does it still count? Sure it does. I set the rules for this thing.
My other work-in-progress, the procedurally generated metroidvania with the working title of “Millions of Space Stations,” will be released in early 2010.
Any creative work is a sort of conversation between two people: the author and the reader. Except it’s not.
Books, movies, music, video games, and so on are created by one or more people, and then are consumed by one or more people. The work in question (let’s call it a game) serves as a medium by which the player communicates with the authors or developers. One can imagine an experience analogous to digital gaming where two people sit in a room, one telling the other what’s happening and the other responding with their actions. This actually wouldn’t be too different than tabletop roleplaying.
But playing games doesn’t really work like that; there’s this big thing between the authors and the players called a game. The authors and the player can be in different states; they might not speak the same language; the original author might be literally dead in real life. But the work, the game, spans this void of time and distance to allow a sort of mediated communication. And in the middle there are a bunch of imaginary people existing in a series of nested universes that make the exchange possible. Let’s meet them, shall we?
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I’ve put together a game! I guess this is my November game, as the space station game would be October’s, and it’s still under construction. “Backup” is an Interactive System Failure about killing.
The Prosperity Commission transportation facilities are designed for the utmost safety and reliability. They are equipped with weapon dampening fields, highly-trained security forces, and four redundant computer cores. You are the third backup computer core for a facility under construction. You should never have to wake up. Something is wrong.
Download “Backup” from Ludus Novus.
To play the .zblorb file, you will need a Z-machine interpreter, which is like a media player for interactive fiction. If you use Windows, I recommend Gargoyle. If you use Mac OS X, I recommend Zoom. If you use Linux, I recommend the Linux version of Zoom.
This game is heavily inspired by Gun Mute. It is a (potentially) violent piece of interactive fiction with multiple endings set in a science fiction world of robots, plasma swords, and intergalactic finance. I’ve attempted to create something that rarely occurs in interactive fiction: a game that requires tactical thought as a challenge rather than puzzle-solving. In-game instructions and hints are available by typing HELP in-game. “Backup” is written in Inform 7. Let me know what you think in the comments!
I beat Prince of Persia 2008 last night, and I’m still thinking about it. This is a very well-crafted game. Although many folks derided it for being too easy, it’s actually not. The game is very challenging in places; it’s just not punishing. I found myself struggling at certain points, especially boss battles, and there was a genuine sense of accomplishment when I succeeded… without any frustration from having to endure cheap deaths or repeat long sections of the game. Additionally, this game has the best implementation of quick time events that I’ve seen. It’s always clear when you should expect one, and the button you need to press is either obvious from context or random for effect. The only annoyance I had with the system was when I came back to the game after a break and forgot what the “block” symbol meant, especially when it is so similar to the “grab” symbol.
But the most interesting thing for me about the game at the moment is the ending. There will be spoilers. (more…)
