The 1UP Show

Blogs, Digital Games,

Clockwise from top left: Leone, Nguyen, Frechette, and O'Donnell.

The 1UP Show does the best “traditional” digital games journalism around. Their latest episode has a review of Dead Space at around 26:13 that’s a perfect example of why this is.

Several folks who know their way around games sit and actually discuss the game. There’s no mention of a review score, but this is definitely a review, as it’s focused on the questions “how good is this game?” and “should people buy it?” The advantages over print media are obvious: you can see video of the game to illustrate their points, and you can see the reviewers as they say things, so that you can get a feeling for their attitudes and motivations. I had fun figuring out how the different people were approaching the game. This is all speculation, of course, but here are my thoughts. It was a little microcosm of all of digital games fandom.

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Necropolis Updated

News,

I’ve updated Necropolis with some tweaks and bug fixes.

Changes:

  • The player character now starts with 4 health instead of 3. (suggested by guyblade)
  • Text readability enhanced in some situations. (suggested by Andrew)
  • Disable skill made more useful. (suggested by several folks)
  • Small chest contents probabilities adjusted.
  • Minor stability improvements
  • The Bracer is now properly marked as not plural.
  • Fixed crash when equipment was generated with a suffix but no prefix. (reported by Andrew)

Necropolis

Blogs, Digital Games, Games Releases, , ,

A screenshot from Necropolis

I’ve decided to try my hand at Flash game development. It’s always been a dream of mine to make a living at creating games, and Flash games seem to be a viable way for individual, independent developers to earn a living.

My first game has just been released, thanks in part to a sponsorship from MiniJuegos.com. It’s a truly global market when a Spanish-language games site headquartered in Spain can fund an English-language game from one guy in North Carolina.

Necropolis is a game about Ms. Lilian Trevithick, lady adventurer and radical steam technician, who has come to the infamous Necropolis of Ao in search of adventure. She descends through 25 procedurally-generated levels of traps and treasure to achieve her goal.

Please give me any comments, compliments, or criticisms that come to mind playing the game! This is the first game I’ve released in years, so I’m both very nervous and very excited.

Play Necropolis now.

The Neo-Retro Urge

Blogs, Digital Games,

If you play independent digital games, you’re surely familiar with the retro style. Even the scary mainstream publishers have put out titles like Megaman/Rockman 9. This neo-retro approach — I’m not sure if there’s a common name for it — has modern developers make new games that could theoretically run on old hardware. There are quite a few excellent neo-retro games out there, like La-Mulana, a tribute to the MSX, most of the entries in the TIGSource Bootleg Demakes competition, and a work-in-progress game I’ve been playing today, This game is Wizard.

I’m making a distinction here between neo-retro games and games that just use “retro” graphics. Pixel art like in Cave Story or lo-fi art like in Cactus’s games are purely artistic choices, and don’t necessarily represent a deliberate restriction of the game design like the neo-retro approach. That’s what it is, really: a restriction.

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Games As Art

Blogs, Digital Games, , ,

Anna Anthropy, who I’ve been referencing far too much lately, posted about a discussion she attended on indie games. She mentions her irritation at Jason Rohrer, the artsy developer of “Passage” whom everyone loves to flame:

[he] kept steering the discussion back to roger ebert and the discussion of whether games “can be” art. jason rohrer clearly feels as though games need to be somehow legitimized by an outside force – that we need to prove to roger ebert that games are capable of being classified as art.

I find this question annoying. The answer to “can games be art” or “are games art” is yes, by any definition of the word “art.” I can express myself with games. Games can have messages. Great. Let’s move on and discuss games as art. It seems like those who ask if games can be art are actually asking permission from society. “Can you please call games art?” It reflects an essential immaturity and adolescence to the game-discussing community.

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Ludus Novus 015: Curse of Ludus Novus

Digital Games, Podcasts, ,
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 015: Curse of Ludus Novus
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What do we look for in digital game sequels, and why is it different than in other forms of media? Why don’t we see more sequels that give us more of the same good stuff?

References:

The music for this episode is “Darien Gap” by Josh Woodward and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

This episode’s topic suggested by Lissa.

Morbus 3 – The Dizzying Tower

Adventures, Blogs, Interactive Fiction, Morbus, Roleplaying, , , , ,

The third episode of my D&D 4th Edition game is done. In this adventure, the party is waylaid by illusions emanating from a mysterious tower occupied by a deceitful gnomish wizard.

This adventure is designed for four 3rd-level characters, and should provide them with half of a level’s experience, or take them to fourth level if you double experience as I do. Note that because I double experience, this adventure contains a full level’s worth of treasure. GMs using this adventure will want to adjust accordingly. The full adventure is after the break.

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Reducing Complexity

Blogs, Digital Games,

I’ve been working on a digital game for the past week or so, and in the process of designing and refining, I’ve found myself simplifying the rules quite a bit. Maybe the player character doesn’t need to gain experience points, if increasingly powerful equipment can have the same effect as increasing intrinsic stats. If the control scheme is so simple that it doesn’t allow movement that would be possible in real life, that can be a tactical challenge rather than a clumsy system. Simplification is a process that can turn a good game into a great one.

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Lost in “La La Land”

Blogs, Digital Games,

A screen shot from La La Land, showing chaos

Anna Anthropy, creator of the creatively structured Calamity Annie, just posted about a series by TheAnemic (I think) called “La La Land:”

the la la land games, of which there are (to my knowledge) five, are haunting and surreal short tales. in the way that static might draw attention to the pauses in a phone conversation, la la land emphasizes those vast between-spaces in the dialogue between player and game. it is here that the games take place.

A warning up front: on first glance, these games come across as some guy screwing around with Game Maker and being deliberately weird. And that’s what they might be. But it all feels so deliberate. The special effects must have taken long enough to code, and there’s such a unifying bizarreness to the games, that I might as well assume that the creator knows what he or she’s doing, and try to make some sort of sense of it.

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