As I was going back to get the game ready to post on other portals, I put in a few updates. I made it possible to create a Fiery Watcher in-game, added Y as an alternative jump key for my QWERTZ friends, and added a new behavior that really should have been in there all along. These updates are present in the ArmorGames version. I’ve put up a copy here on Ludus Novus and one on Kongregate. Other portals will follow once I work out some difficulties with a new ad provider.

One work I didn’t discuss in the column, because it seemed a bit incestuous, is my recent IF piece, The Bryant Collection.
Read the rest of The Video Game Album...

“Doctor… it is almost time…” the Heavy said insistently. He looked around, but as usual, no one paid them any mind. He and the doctor were always together.

The doctor looked up at him in surprise. “Ve only have 50 seconds,” he said, also glancing around.

“Get behind me, doctor,” the Heavy urged.

Read the whole thing at A Nerd’s Haven. It’s SFW as long as you don’t read too closely.

My June game is finished. It’s called How to Raise a Dragon, and it’s a game about dragons, humans, and eating things.

The dragon: a majestic and complex beast. How is it born? How does it live and die? Magus X. R. Quilliam’s definitive work, How to Raise a Dragon, describes all that is known about these great creatures.

Play How to Raise a Dragon on Armor Games.

Clearly, I’m trying to set up a dilemma here. This formula could be a shortcut to mortality for the player characters, but it is very dangerous; not only could it kill you, but it can also create new monsters to make everyone’s life more difficult. As a GM, when you set up this sort of dilemma, you want to create inter-player tension and discussion. I think I succeeded. At the end of this week’s session, the player characters sat down and discussed the dilemma in detail, and they each had interesting perspectives.

One character, a loner soldier and sometimes thief, wanted nothing to do with the formula. Screw the alchemy, screw the existing monsters, just get the hell out of town. Another, a naive tinkerer with Tesla’s right hand, was all for trying the formula for himself. Build a cage around the experiment area, sure, shoot him before he turns into a monster, but he wanted to take the chance. Finally, the flighty con artist of the group had a brainstorm. The tinkerer can try the formula, and if it works (and maybe even if it doesn’t), the surviving party members can sell the formula to other Prometheans. With the promise of money, the soldier was won over, and a plan is in place… for now.

As a GM, I get the most amount of glee from when players are deliberating over these sorts of interesting choices. If the choice is easy, it’s not providing the players much (high-level) agency. Only when a decision is difficult — when there is no clear “right” alternative — are the players truly choosing their own path through the narrative. And if there’s inter-PC conflict in the decision process, then that just makes my job more of a success.

So for now, I’m feeling good about my campaign. We’ll see how next session goes.

L4D is such an astonishingly complex game. So much more can be said about it, and I expect to get at least one more post out about how the weapons all work together. This is a game that, like Portal, has clearly been fine-tuned and adjusted to a glossy finish. But while Portal was cut down and simplified to make it a smooth, well-crafted ride, L4D was cut down to a tangled knot of gameplay interactions, making it this chaotic, complicated, minute-to-learn-and-lifetime-to-master enigma of a game.

This world is not as it should be. There is no truth. Reality is what we believe it to be. If you think you can fly, then that flight is real to you. Others may see you plummet and die, but you might live on, soaring above the clouds. Anyone can dream, but it takes someone special to make those dreams real.

Here is the release of my May game: LORE, the Lightweight Universal Roleplaying Engine, and its first sourcebook, Belief. Together, they form my first tabletop roleplaying game system.

LORE is an attempt to address some of the common problems with tabletop RPGs. It has an interesting dice system; a quick, easy, and original character creation system; and a system that’s lightweight, because roleplaying happens beyond the rules.

Belief is a game about changing reality, about subjective viewpoints, and about the search for a better world. It owes heavy debts to other sources, but it is its own being.

Download LORE and Belief.

Both of these books are beta releases. They have been playtested, but not enough for me to say they’re finished. Please, read them, play them, and comment with anything you think I did especially right or that I could change for the better. I’ve provided them in bookmarked PDFs slavishly laid out for optimal printing at your local print shop, and they’re released under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 License.

These are just the initial releases; I wanted to get them out and in people’s minds so that I could start getting feedback. Expect extras like quick reference sheets and maybe an adventure or three in the coming weeks and months.

There are two classic responses to this issue. The first is the author-is-king approach: refuse to go along, chastise or punish the characters, and mold them to Your Story. This, of course, ends with an adversarial player-game master relationship and probably some grumpy folks in your house where they can break your stuff if they want. The second response is the players-are-god approach: let the players have the sort of fun that they want to, and adapt accordingly. This can end in a muddled mess, where adversaries planned to be scary and bad end up being too hard to kill and trying too hard to be funny.

I’m trying to reach a middle ground. I’ll present the players with the world more-or-less as it was originally intended. Vampire princes will be grumpy, monsters will be scary. The players, however, can be as cheery and carefree about it as they want. I’ll feed them straight-men for their jokes all day long, including burly bikers named Jim and long-suffering, maybe over-indulgent vamp princes. But when it comes to conflict, I’ll expect them to match their humor with actions.

In a sense, I’m turning my game into a Marx Brothers film. The players aren’t nearly as silly or disruptive as Groucho, but I’m going to aim for the same feel: NPCs will play it straight, but indulge the PCs their jokes and play around a bit. As in Duck Soup, it may all end with the walls shot to pieces and the characters wisecracking about it, but I’m going to try and enable silly, humorous play within a darker, more serious framework.

I’d love to hear what you think! Comment if you have any opinions on the things I discuss in this episode.

Case in point: I’ve just started up a campaign of Promethean. It opens with the player characters being drawn to a mysterious, sprawling house, where they discover an otherworldly being called a qashmal who dispenses a cryptic riddle.

This is the second time I’ve run the beginning of this campaign with different players each time. The first group did what I expected: they searched the building top to bottom for clues, then proceeded to follow up on the riddle. This latest group, however, decided against that.

Read the rest of Never According to Plan...

Left 4 Dead is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as told by Samuel Beckett.

Read the rest of Left 4 Godot...

This week’s episode is a special False Narrativism piece, discussing the obscure but visionary Polish game Oszustwo, or Incongruity. I can easily envision a world in which this game never existed, but fortunately we have access to the most technologically-advanced, creepiest, and hardest-to-play game ever developed.

Check it out if you have been looking for more Exploit action.

No More Heroes

The gameplay is very odd. I realized during the final boss fight that it is as if the developers really liked the swordplay and treasure seeking of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and decided to make a whole game about it. The swordplay has the same rhythmic feel as the GameCube Zelda, and even has a prominent timed dodge mechanic that lets you break past the defenses of vulnerable enemies. Even the way that the enemies’ corpses explode is similar. At the same time, the repetitive “do jobs while driving around an empty city searching for buried coins” sections call back to Wind Waker’s late-game “try to find tiny treasure chests in a big, boring ocean” activity. The fighting portions are a whole lot of fun, except when the developers make the puzzling decision to subvert the character’s abilities. One late-game boss is immune to the protagonist’s very-useful wrestling moves, and other bosses regularly demand an entirely different approach than the rest of the sword fights.

And the story… it’s tough. The game is simultaneously a celebration and a condemnation of geeky, oversexed, otaku, socially awkward gamer culture. The main character, Travis Touchdown, is almost entirely unlikable; his only redeeming trait is that he is entirely honest about his goals: to be number one and to get laid. Other characters philosophize, or seek money and fame and power. Travis states, again and again, that he isn’t interested in all that. He just wants to be the best.

Sex and gender are strong motifs in the game. It bounces between wry postfeminism, with Sylvia using her body to manipulate Travis, and simple self-aware chauvinism, with Travis’s constant search for sex and his special treatment of female bosses. The phallic imagery is in-your-face the whole game: enormous swords, a bulbous motorcycle, and the need to jack off your Wiimote to “recharge your energy.” Travis takes a dump to save, has a homoerotic relationship with his sword trainer, and has a rather intense love of professional wrestling. Just about every character in the game is defined by sex and gender, from the estranged father to the effeminate pelvis-thrusting superhero fetishist to the sadistic loligoth with projectile men in gimp suits.

The whole thing really hasn’t fit together in my head yet, though. By the end of the game, it’s deconstructing itself, with characters offering ludicrous twists and explanations and openly referring to Travis as the protagonist. It’s just so silly and disjointed that I’m not really sure it has anything interesting to say. The well-read game hobbyist is familiar with the idea that gamers and game developers are “stunted adolescents.” The gameplay is fun but flawed, and doesn’t have much to do with the motifs and concepts thrown haphazardly around. I’ll think about it some more, and if I come up with any sort of synthesis from the game, I’ll post again.

It’s a shame, because despite the premise and backstory, The Bryant Collection is a real game, and one that I poured a lot of effort and heart into. But I haven’t gotten a single review, game entry on an IF site, or even a comment from someone who’s played the game. The only e-mail I’ve gotten about it is from my parents.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t be surprised. Mixing truth and fiction is risky enough when it’s not on a day dedicated to lies, and the games from the Spring Thing were released at almost the exact same time. The Spring Thing is probably the second or third biggest IF event of the year, so naturally Bryant would be overshadowed by those games, especially if it’s dismissed as a joke.

This post isn’t a cry for attention or anything. I just wanted to share my reactions when a game doesn’t get very well-received, since I always post when a game gets positive reactions.

Right on the heels of my last release, here’s my April game, The Bryant Collection. This one is a bit of a cop-out; it’s not actually my game. Instead, it’s a translation of someone else’s work into interactive fiction.

An excerpt from my release post on RGIF:

A few months ago, I found an old strongbox at a garage sale. The box was full of papers written by a woman named Laura Bryant. The majority of the stuff in the box was a collection of what she called “story worlds.”

These story worlds are akin to interactive fiction or roleplaying games; they’re designed for one player and one mediator who serves as the parser or the game master. The earliest date on a story world in the box is 1964, which means these works predate Crowther and Woods’s Adventure, Dungeons & Dragons, or Wesely’s Braunstein. The Bryant Collection contains the five stories that I found the most interesting and feasible to convert to IF:

• “The End of the World” is a story about lunch.
• “Morning in the Garden” is a story about dealing with annoying people.
• “Tower of Hanoi” is a rather interesting little puzzle, but not what you think. It came with a sort of feelie in the strongbox, which is included as an IF object.
• “Going Home Again” is a story about growing up.
• “Undelivered Love Letter” is a story about airports.

Download The Bryant Collection.

For more information, including links to interpreters that will run the game, see the game page.

My game for March is out! It’s called “Sugarcore,” and it’s a game about bullets, naturally-occurring candy formations, and the hazards of gardening.

Find out where sweets really come from as you mine licorice, demolish candy orbs, and defend confections from attack! Three quirky characters guide you through 18 levels of sugary goodness.

Play “Sugarcore” on Ludus Novus

Whose Fault is That bills itself as having “interviews with wonderful people,” and they really do. Joe Bernardi and David Cole have interviewed interesting people, from cartoonists to photographers to musicians. They seem to think I’m wonderful, too, and put up an interview where I talk about Knytt and learn that my too-seldom-updated podcast has a stream-of-consciousness feel.

Good Game Get! is a blog that talks about video games in a pleasantly NGJ way. In this interview, I discuss upcoming games and my unhealthy month-long obsession with the Stargate franchise.

In other news, I’m going to be attending the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco. “The Majesty of Colors” is up for an award there, and there should be some interesting panels. The topics are all business-focused, which is a little disappointing to my game-designer-and-analyst heart. But hey, I also like eating, so I think the panels will be useful.

The Orange Box wins in my book for best characters in a 2007 video game package. Alyx and Eli Vance, GlaDOS, and the TF2 cast together are an amazing accomplishment, especially when you realize the games were released on the same day by the same company.

086: Seeing Red

Thanks in part to a rush from Armor Games, “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors” has been played over 1,000,000 times. I can’t resist big, round milestones, and I remain overjoyed that so many people liked my little tentacle game.

As promised, my February game is finished. It’s called Exploit, and it’s a game about computer security, terrorism, and totalitarian governments.

Information is freedom. As a hotshot computer security cracker, you will solve over 50 puzzles and fight against totalitarianism, abuses of power, and terrorism. Story Mode offers a twist-filled story of international intrigue, and Challenge Mode offers 19 more puzzles to engage the mind. When it’s all done, use the built-in puzzle editor to make and share your own creations!

Play Exploit on Kongregate.

We all knew one. That kid who always told lies about video games. Maybe they knew a cheat code to make Lara Croft naked, or said that something special happened in Sonic if you collected 1000 rings, or that there really was a Carcer City in GTAIII that you had to be awesome to get to. Maybe you were that kid.

Do video game lies arise out of a desire to trick people, or because the liar wants to look cool? We may never know, but we can record all of these lies for posterity. Years from now, historians will be able to observe this unique bit of video game culture.

Because of positive response in a thread I started on the TIGSource forums, I’ve created a wiki at Wikia to record the odd phenomenon of video game lies. The history of video games is poorly-recorded, and this is especially true of the cultural history. The video game liar seems to be a universal experience of people who grew up around video games, and I’d like it if we could better document our experiences with it.

Visit the Video Game Lies database, and browse through the entries or add one of your own. The site’s a bit rough right now, but I’ll try and clean it up when I get the chance.

Read the rest of Update on Majesty of Colors...

Read the rest of Preview of Exploit...

I write a lot about agency, the ability for a player to affect the outcome of events in a piece of interactivity. Most games we play have very little high-level agency; the player can determine how a battle is fought, but victory always results in the same outcome. Terry “Xoldiers” Cavanagh just released a game called “Pathways” that plays with the concept of agency. It turns out we don’t have any. Let me elaborate.

Read the rest of Branching Pathways...

I love games that break down conventions to their basic elements and make something new out of them. Joining the ranks of Karoshi 2.0 and Braid is Jumpman, a new game by Andrew McClure that’s been making the rounds lately. It’s got mechanics and aesthetics from the Atari 2600 era, but it’s modern under the hood. I’m not sure if I can succeed, but I’ll try discussing what makes this game interesting.

Read the rest of Jumpman...

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...

It’s been 21 years since The Fool’s Errand. A sequel was originally supposed to come out in October 2003. Some people have had the sequel pre-ordered for five years. And Johnson just released a demo of The Fool and His Money. You can download it from the “Teaser” links at the bottom of that page.

This is a game from another world, where people are smarter and more masochistic and entirely disinterested in the normal mapping of giblets. Has Johnson succeeded in reproducing his fiendish masterwork? Well… I’m stumped.

And now for some hardcore interactivity theory geekery. I’ve been doing design for my current work in progress (working title: The Mold Fairy) and it’s caused me to think, as I often do, about the nature of interactivity. Most any interactive work is a simulation. Usually, this is a simulation of reality, or of a reality very similar to our own; two to three dimensions, strict sequencing of time, the possibility of containment and spacial relations, and various energies and forces. Different games have different levels of abstraction to their simulation. What makes it interactive is that the player can tweak the parameters of the simulation. In most games, the player can only control the behavior of an actor or group of actors within the simulation. This ability to affect the progress of the simulation is called player agency. It’s essential to interactivity, and it’s used in different ways in different works. I’d like to see this agency take a different form than it usually does. Let me lay some groundwork first.

Read the rest of Simulation, Structure, and Agency...

The Majesty Of Balloons by ~dangertable on deviantART

What’s next? Rule 34?

Other games in the awards that caught my eye:

Read the rest of Majesty Wins JIG Art Game Audience Award...

Back at the beginning of the month, I resolved that I would release at least one game each month. January’s is “Bars of Black and White,” a game about barcodes and Orwellian experimentation.

You can’t remember the last time you left your room. When you receive a barcode reader in the mail, you discover that the world around you is not what it seems, and must escape the bars of black and white.

Play “Bars” on Kongregate

Play “Bars” on Ludus Novus

Tyler “Aether” Glaiel and Jon Schubbe’s new game Closure is worth some attention. It’s a platforming game with a rather cool gameplay mechanic: the player explores a dark world, where surfaces only exist when they’re illuminated. The art’s roughly-textured but pretty, and the lighting mechanic looks good and works quite well. The story’s quite competent, if a bit cliché. (that car accident you see at the beginning of the game? Guess who was driving.) There’s just one problem: the character control is awful. Let me elaborate.

Read the rest of Wanting Better Closure...

I’m behind the game on this one, but Derek “Tigsource and Aquaria” Yu has pre-released a game called Spelunky, and it’s the best roguelike I’ve ever played. Yu bills it as a cross between La Mulana and Nethack, but it’s fairer and more fun than either. The procedurally-generated levels and swift death is balanced by an incredible depth that has helped me finally grok what the whole roguelike thing is all about.

Read the rest of The Depths of Spelunky...

I’ve been playing Crayon Physics Deluxe, Petri Purho’s fully realized version of his startlingly fun 7-day prototype, “Crayon Physics.” The game lets you draw any shape, which then reacts with appropriate physics to help get a ball to a goal. It’s fun and creative, and it comes with a fully-featured level editor. Now, I’ve had something on my mind recently, so when I tried out the editor, I made a scribbly crayon version of “The Majesty of Colors.”

Read the rest of I Fell in Love With the Physics of Crayons...

I’ve just completed Aquaria, the excellent underwater exploration game by Bit Blot, which is another name for Derek Yu of TIGSource and Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo. Besides making a gorgeous and atmospheric game that rivals Super Metroid for exploration goodness, Yu and Holowka did something interesting: they included an entire constructed alphabet with no explanation.

Read the rest of Learning to Read Aquarian...

Because of the forum of GSW, I left out a few points that I was tempted to include. Here are a few of them.

Read the rest of Postmortem: “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors”...

Read the rest of 1UP Show Out of Lives...

The satisfaction in releasing a game and knowing that people have played it and enjoyed it is incredible. At the moment, “Majesty of Colors” has been played over 700,000 times. I don’t know if I can duplicate that kind of success, but I know that I can put more of myself out there for people to enjoy if they want to.

So expect something by the end of January, and something each month after that, at least through December. Sometimes it may just be a little piece of IF, but I have bigger ideas in the works, too. Wish me luck!

Read the rest of New Theme for 2009...