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.
In place of my usual column at GameSetWatch, I was requested to do a general postmortem of “The Majesty of Colors” this time. I’ll point you that way if only for the inclusion of my initial design sketch for the game. It was an interesting experience writing the piece; usually, this sort of evaluation involves more than one person, so it’s easier to pick out successes and failures. When everything is your fault, it’s tricky to pick out specifics.
Because of the forum of GSW, I left out a few points that I was tempted to include. Here are a few of them.
Continue reading Postmortem: “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors”
Word is spreading across the net that Ziff Davis Media has sold the 1UP family of properties to UGO Entertainment, and that UGO promptly fired most of the 1UP Show contributors, as well as a bunch of other folks.
I’ve been thinking about a goal to set for the new year, and I’ve come up with a good one. Here it is: release at least one new game each month for the year of 2009. I’m pretty sure I can achieve this; in the worst case scenario, the games for some of the months will be small in scale.
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!
My latest piece has gone up at GameSetWatch. It’s called “Opposing Goals in Minotaur China Shop,” and it’s about how that game balances difficulty and player interest by offering two opposing player goals.
I love digital games that play with the oddities of the medium. Metal Gear Solid shows psychic powers by reading your memory card, and Karoshi 2.0 joyfully breaks the rules of gaming. And now we have a game that pokes fun at the phenomenon of achievements: “Achievement Unlocked.”
The TIGSource Commonplace Book Competition is in voting right now. It’s a competition where developers are asked to make games out of entries in H.P. Lovecraft’s scrapbook. I’ve gotten around to playing the games, and here’s a few I found interesting. If I didn’t mention a game, that doesn’t mean it’s not good; these are just the ones that jumped out at me.
The attention that “The Majesty of Colors” received has caused a small increase in the plays of my previous game, Necropolis. As a result, I got a bug report from a Kongregate user on Necropolis that let me track down a bug that had eluded me for months. I feel dumb for causing the bug in the first place, and it’s a perfect example of where unit testing is very useful.
Myst Online: Uru Live will soon be immortal. Cyan Worlds is releasing the ill-fated MMO as an open-source project. This is great news; Uru always had more potential than its codebase and its funding allowed. However, it’s also terrible news, as it seems likely that Cyan will not be creating new content themselves for quite some time. Still, with the likes of Andrew Plotkin among the game’s fans, I feel confident that at least some quality content will emerge.
Premier video game industry news site Gamasutra just released their top 5 indie games of the year. Number one is Daniel Benmergui’s wonderful “I Wish I Were the Moon,” which I’ve mentioned before. Number two is “Everybody Dies,” third-place winner in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition and a game I’ve yet to play. These two selections give me a great deal of hope for the future of interactive entertainment.