My latest game, Looming, is up at Newgrounds. Looming is a game about… well.
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.
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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.
I’ve written another short story. This one’s called “The Latest Death of Morim,” and it’s about life, death, and music.
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.”
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.
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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.
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.
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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.