President Hulbert was the much-loved and eternally admired friendly old president of Rose-Hulman. He’d been president forever, but he finally retired after my freshman year. He proved irreplaceable; we went through two more officially selected presidents during my time there, as well as the assorted interim administrators and de facto triumvirates that arise during any rough political transition.

Fun fact: During my first quarter, I got to play a ninja who was kidnapping Dr. Hulbert for a Film Club production. I was the one who held the chloroform rag to his face. I may be the last Rose student to ever get that close to the man.

This is the last comic from my freshman year at Rose. Year 2 heralds some longer (loose) storylines.

Lovecraftian horror names are hard to spell and pronounce. According to some stories, Lovecraft would give each person who asked a different pronunciation of “Cthulhu.”

I think my first encounter with gaslighting was in the book The Twits by Roald Dahl.

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.

I suspect that “Last Saturday…” caption is there because that was when roommate assignment requests were due. The Thorn newspaper went out on Friday mornings, so I must have been concerned that the topic wasn’t quite timely enough.

Rose did not have co-ed on-campus housing.

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 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...

Chemical Engineers are strange creatures that only use computers to talk to their friends and download spyware.

Hoosiers are strange creatures that play games that aren’t digital, use cards that aren’t collectible, and have rules that make no sense.

Cthulhu has no problem with killing humans. He is, however, aware of the complications that other humans would experience if they do so.

Geeky college students often have trouble distinguishing between making humorous allusions and parroting tired lines from popular works. The cake is a lie.

Morim woke up with his lungs burning. His whole body was cold. His joints were stiff, so stiff that he couldn’t move. He struggled to remember, to somehow grasp with his mind where he had just been, to hold on to some detail. But there was nothing.

“That one was the hardest yet,” a voice said. “You almost stayed dead this time.”

Read “The Latest Death of Morim” here.

Ahh, Unreal Tournament 2004. Excellent game. My (eventual) roommate ran a server with a stats mod on it that let you gain experience and upgrade your abilities. It was a bit broken.

Edit: Speed was one of the dorms on campus.

Sorry about the lateness. I forgot to schedule this post.

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 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...

Civil Engineers bore the brunt of a lot of jokes at Rose. One reason is that one of their early classes involved surveying, which meant that they got to go outside during class and play with cool mirrors on sticks and stuff. They also had classes that discussed weird topics like mud and harmonic resonance.

Remember the woman in the third panel.

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...

This is a variation on a classic gag that has appeared many places. Unfortunately, I know of no fictional students ever enrolled at Rose.

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...

Around February (I suppose) of my freshman year, an e-mail was sent to all students from the RAs. It was a letter urging for the tolerance and embracing of diversity. It was one of those deliberately vague e-mails that is clearly in response to a specific event, but where the senders don’t want to actually talk about an embarrassing incident, and don’t want to make it seem like they only care about diversity when things go wrong, even though that’s the only time they do care.

I don’t remember if I knew what the instigating incident was. I don’t think I did; it wasn’t public knowledge. If I had to bet, I’d say it was in response to homophobic slurs being written on some student’s dorm room whiteboard or something. But the RA letter was so vague and tentative so as to be pointless. “Hey, everyone! We’re all different, and that’s great!” All it did was increase the amount of social isolation on those people who were different, because everyone around them was wondering and whispering about whether they were the ones who tattled to the RAs.

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.

It’s always fun breaking out of the three-panel format.

My roommate (future roommate, at the time) actually owned that water gun. It was pretty damn impressive.

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...

I never actually saw much locker-room talk about sexual exploits at Rose. This comic stems more from my annoyance at the general concept of such conversations.

Click on the image to see it full-size.

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...

I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that this comic ran in the same issue that the Entertainment section did a full-page spread on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Movie theaters should so have fondue at the concession counter.

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...

Read the rest of TASOAE: 012...

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...

Not much to say here, except that this is the first appearance of Cthulhu’s attendant demon.

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 page of choice at Rose was, of course, Goatse.

Somehow I got the idea of destroying laptops in my head during my second quarter at Rose. How weird. I wonder how that happened…

The real evil here is making the CS Guy drive an hour to the Indianapolis airport when Cthulhu could have eaten people at the Terre Haute International Airport.

This strip appeared around when Half-Life 2 came out.

Of course, there have been several other awesome IF pieces released this year. I need to play more of them myself before I can make a proper decision.

The Cam is not the only global LARP campaign around; One World By Night is another organization that runs a similar campaign for the old World of Darkness setting, for example. As far as I know, though, the Cam is the largest global LARP around. A global campaign means that local games are connected to games across the US and the world, so that I can go on a trip to California and use the character I play in Charlotte to a Camarilla game there. Events that occur in Alabama can affect nearby locations, and there are periodic conventions where players and characters from all over the world come to play in a single game. This results in all sorts of interesting consequences and annoyances.

Read the rest of A Global Chronicle...

The dorm rooms at Rose had awesome old-school steam radiators that would hiss and spit at times. I grew up in the Phoenix area, so I had never encountered a radiator in real life, and I found it charming that they looked exactly like the ones in the movies. There was a fateful day when they turned them on, and they were always careful to notify everyone about it. I doubt they ever got hot enough to start fires, but I bet they could burn you or melt a thumb drive if you were especially unlucky.

Judging by the mention of a final project, this ran near the end of the fall quarter, in early November.

RIAA humor was slightly less out-of-date in 2003.

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...

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon, Zekleinenezzar, who had taken over their town. They took refuge in an abandoned fortress overlooking the abandoned city of Decolay, which has been taken over by kenku, goblins, and possibly other forces. They returned from a trip to the dream world to find kobold worshipers of the dragon making advances on the fortress.

The party consists of:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner; he is branded Etzlojek the Traitor by the attacking kobolds
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard with a penchant for shapechanging spells
Donaar, dragonborn warlock and enemy of dragons, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town and seems to have vampire heritage
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is level five.

Read the rest of Dream Project 5 – The Battle for the Fortress...

And so, in my sixth comic, I made an extended Dead Alewives reference. I am not proud of it. It did, however, allow me to have Cthulhu playing himself in an RPG, which is, of course, the only character he would ever play. I seem to remember some D&D or Call of Cthulhu sourcebook explaining that Cthulhu ate 1d6 cultists per round, but I can’t seem to find the reference on the internet.

All of these jokes, of course, were completely unfunny to 90% of the population, even at a geeky school like Rose.

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.

Read the rest of TASOAE: 005...

Read the rest of TASOAE: 004...

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.

Read the rest of Murder and Red Faction: Guerrilla...