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!

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.

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.

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.

Read the rest of 2D vs 3D: Diagram vs Architecture...

Click on the image to see it full-size.

Play Exploit on Platogo to check out these new features.

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

Download the filter here.

Save it to your GIMP scripts directory, which will be ~/.gimp-2.6/scripts/ (or something like C:\Users\Gregory\.gimp-2.6\scripts for Windows users). The filter will be added to the end of your Filters menu. To use, just make a selection of any shape, make sure the layer you want to tear out is active, and go to Filters->Torn Paper. The filter will make a new layer with the torn out piece on it.

This filter allows you to make images like the one above. Cool, huh?

I freely acknowledge the flaws of the Myst series, but there’s something utterly compelling about these games that nothing else has captured for me. The Ages serve as exploration environments as well as puzzle arenas, and the world has developed quite well, to the point that Uru and its followups require a bit of world knowledge in order to play them. The rules can be determined by experimentation, but it’s handy to know ahead of time that, say, a Link always takes you to the same position in space relative to the planet. And of course, in the Myst universe, “planet” is a very vague term.

I have several other favorite puzzles that didn’t make it into the article. Here are a few of them, in an arbitrary order:

Read the rest of Puzzle Design in the Myst Series...