Ludus Novus

I’ve spoken with a few people lately, and two of the interviews have gone live. First, there’s my talk with the Armchair Gamer Podcast. We chatted about games each of us is playing, and then the hosts asked me an array of questions. I even talk more about some upcoming projects than I believe I have before. You can listen to the episode on its page.

I also spoke with Games For Change about my recent title “Passing the Ball.” They asked some interesting questions about mood and interactive storytelling. You can read the interview on their blog. I understand they’ll be posting a part 2 soon with an interview with some of the GDC Online folks who commissioned the game!

I started playing Grand Theft Auto IV a few days ago. I uninstalled it today. Steam says I spent 16 hours playing, out of its assuredly fifty-plus hours of content. Many of those hours were spent paused while I was doing something else.

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.

Based on a request by Kongregate user Enthernalcz, I added a new type of block to my 2009 game Exploit. His original message read:

Gregory, could you please add buffer nodes that make the blocker node active instead of deactivating it in Exploit? It would then be Turing complete, allowing us to do complete gates.

I think he was actually requesting functionality that would let blocker nodes act as a rudimentary 1-bit memory unit that could be turned on and off at will. However, that’s a bit complex to do with how Exploit handles its blocks, so I went for a simpler interpretation of the request. I’ve added the “Antiblocker” block type, which always allows packets through unless it’s sent a signal from a Buffer node. I haven’t actually done the thinking to figure out if this allows Turing completeness, but it’s probably a step in the right direction. I let this request sit for almost a month, but it only ended up taking me an hour or so to code.

Note that there’s odd timing discrepancies between the life of a Blocker and an Antiblocker. Exploit, to my shame, keeps track of block lifespans using Flash’s built-in alpha variable, which doesn’t always behave as you’d expect. They should each take the same amount of time to recover, but for some reason Antiblockers are recovering quicker for me. Oh, well. If you want a demonstration of the new unit, check out the sample level I made.

I do have plans for an Exploit 2, by the way, although they’re strictly on paper. These plans include social engineering, puzzles with obscured contents, and a virtual gray marketplace where you can purchase (fake ingame) DDOSes and other bonuses with money earned through optional objectives. Perhaps the best features I’ve got written down are scripts and tools. I’d like players to be able to record and replay click sequences, as well as set ports to auto-fire as soon as they recharge. This should eliminate some of the frustration that players experienced with the game’s sometimes overdemanding timing.

Let me repeat that any plans for a sequel are just that: plans. Not one character of code has been written for such a game, and the due date isn’t a question of “when it’s done,” but rather a question of “if I start in the first place.”

It’s always cool to see art inspired by one of my games, and I think Mick “RicePirate” Lauer has captured a scene from the game perfectly. Click through to the art on Newgrounds for a link to the full-sized image.

The ’90s was a decade of tremendous change for video games. 1992 birthed Ultima Underworld and Wolfenstein 3D, heralds of an oncoming wave that crashed ashore with 1993′s Doom. This wave brought the supremacy of 3D. During the ’80s, 3D was mostly the domain of roleplaying games, but by the end of the ’90s virtually all new mainstream video games were rendered in polygonal 3D.

This was more than just a graphical innovation. It was a revolution of perspective. The transition from two dimensions to three also marked a transition in the role of the player from observer to inhabitant. More important than 2D or 3D graphics is the 2D or 3D perspective. A 2D perspective places the player, the narrator, in a role of watching the game world from outside. A 3D perspective places the player inside the game world.
(more…)

From time to time I receive stuff that people have made that’s inspired by my game “The Majesty of Colors.” Jessica works in an office, and they hold coloring contests for some reason. She took a perfectly innocent picture of some fish and turned into something just a little more… creepy.

Click on the image to see it full-size.

I’ll be out of town all this week attending Flash Gaming Summit and Game Developers Conference 2010. My lovely resident PHP expert will be looking into the Case of the Missing Comics while I’m gone.

I may or may not be heading out in a few minutes to drive across snow-covered Charlotte to do the first character-creation session for the Geist: the Sin-Eaters LARP I’ll be running. Designing for LARP is very different than designing for tabletop or for a digital game; it’s really more about logistics than creativity.
(more…)

I made a Twitter account today. Username GregoryWeir. It will likely be a mix of personal and game-related tweets. Bear with me as I get the hang of yet another new service (new to me, anyway).

For those of you who have played my game Exploit and wanted a better way to create and share levels, you’re in luck! The flash game site Platogo has just launched, and Exploit is one of its initial games! Platogo’s got a neat developer API that allows, among other things, level creation and sharing. You can make levels, rate them for quality and difficulty, comment on them, and generally do all sorts of social stuff. There’s even a leaderboard for each user level ranking how fast you complete it, and a global leaderboard for how many user levels you’ve finished.

Play Exploit on Platogo to check out these new features.

(My August game is delayed. I’m still working on it.)