Blast from the Past
Logan Westbrook wrote some nice things about the Darkness on the Escapist, it’s been almost three years since it was released so it is nice to see other people still thinking about it. I personally liked the game but the story parts got kind of ruined for me since the important scenes in question were horribly broken the first time I saw them, but we worked a lot on the game over a long period of time so I am somewhat relieved to hear the hard work paid off.
Also, the results for Assemblee have been revealed! Congratulations Ivan! Our own project Backworld ended up sharing a 6th place (with Tiny Crawl, one of my personal favorites), which is not half bad considering there were 73 entries in the competition.
Global Game Jam
The Global Game Jam was this weekend, and after failing to set up a local event me and a few friends decided to go to the Nordic Game Jam, reportedly the largest GGJ site. Besides hanging out with friends, acquaintances from the indie scene and making a few new connections, we (Juha, Martin, Tobias and I) created a short game called “Fake“.
We were in development up until the final minutes so there is no proper tutorial; consider this an introduction. Your role is that of an art forger working for the mysterious mafioso “Don Key”. Funds being sparse, you are limited to cut and paste existing images in order to reproduce the paintings.
Start out by selecting a painting, then selecting a theme for your photos on the right. You can re-select the theme later by clicking the button on the top-right but it will reset your work. Click any of the images on the right to select a source, then use the left mouse button to cut out a pattern and use it on the forgery. The left menu bar can be used to select or move the active layer, you can also use the right mouse button to delete a layer. When not cutting a picture, you can move the active layer with the left mouse button, rotate it with the right or press both mouse buttons to scale it. The button on the top left will swap the preview mode of the real painting, how it is shown will have no bearing on the final result, though. When you are done, press the button second from the right at the top to submit the painting for approval by Don Key.
I was really out of my element when hacking this together and too much time went into hacking GUI elements that a proper tool would’ve provided for me. This being the case, the final version does not only miss a proper tutorial but also some basic UI elements and it comes with a lot of bugs. That being said, the game was fairly fun for what it was, the idea feels solid and we managed to make a game out of the development itself by taking pictures of jam attendees and using them in the final version - always fun to do at events like this. All in all, we had a great time at least.
Sadly, we had to leave halfway through the finals and I have not seen very many of the other games from NGJ yet. I would like to give a shout out to Shoot Stop Lollipop and Shadow Ninja… Monkey though, as they both had genuinely interesting gameplay mechanics.
TIGSource Assemblee rundown
I have finally managed to play all of the other 72 entries in the TIGSource Assemblee competition … Well, I managed to play the ones that started on my machine. Some really good games in there, and some real diversity in the innovations provided. While a lot of the games have already garnered attention outside of TIGSource, I would like to mention two of the games I personally liked a lot.
Tiny Crawl by Sparky is a very simple flash-based dungeon crawler. Deceptively simple, actually, as I didn’t even think about sinking an hour into it. A great diversion.
Mr. Kitty’s Quest by pgil is an action-heavy zelda-like game with mouse aiming. A solid experience enjoyable from start to end.
Backworld
The deadline for the second part of Assemblee has passed, me and a buddy from work submitted a game we call Backworld. Early reactions have been positive, but as always the competition is stiff - I have yet to play any of the other games but I am looking forward to doing it sometime in the next few days.
Backworld is a puzzle-platformer featuring a rabbit, with the twist that the world always consists of two layers. Each layer has a separate set of physics and the player can use the mouse to paint on the screen to decide what layer should be used at what position in order to progress. I do not really have the patience for things like animation so the competition rules - that we were only allowed to use content from part one - did not really bother me personally at all. The timeframe more so, it felt like even though the original idea was interesting and fun to work with a few months more of experimentation, polish and weeding out the levels that just didn’t work would have made a huge difference. Of course it is always hard to produce something in a limited time, when you encounter something that works okay but not as well as you’d hoped you have to make the tough decision of either throwing it away and risk having a game without content or polishing it up and risk having a game of varying or all-out mediochre quality. In Backworld we mostly opted for the “keep and polish” solution in order to see how people reacted to different kinds of challenges, time will tell if this was a good idea.
And who knows, we might even keep working on it and make something better.
IGF 2010 Finalists
… Have been announced. Very few playable versions among the finalists, sadly, so it’s hard to make any guesses at this point. Again it’s nice to see Limbo pop up, and the fact that it was nominated for a technical excellence award makes me anxious to see what it’s really about. It’s also nice to see Heroes of Newerth get some recognition as a game of it’s own, hopefully this will silence some of the zealots claiming it to be a bad DotA ripoff.
Less obvious than last
Again, it feels good to be a rebel. But I digress. Games to honor, and all that.
Spelunky, for a lot of reasons. My main point would be the balance between what’s expected and what’s randomized, and how the randomized parts feels interesting every time. You always know what you’re after, but you have no idea of what you’ll have to encounter to get there. For years the commercial gaming industry have been pursuing different multiplayer modes as means to prolong the lifetime of a game, Yu’s take on procedural content might just provide an alternative to that.
Persona 4, for sticking to its guns. Looking too deep into academia and (ironically) into reviewers’ opinions, it is easy to discern certain things that should guarantee a game being bad. There are many things about Persona 4 that I dislike, but they certainly helped make the things I did like about it feel like an achievement to get to - design by tedium might not be a wholly bad thing.
Uncharted 2 for the exact opposite reason. Making a game that does just about everything right from a technical and academically sound point of view does not make it enjoyable, apparently.
A decennium has come to an end, and for the first time of the three new decennia I have seen I feel like the Uggla song is an appropriate way of entering it. On the other hand, it might just be because I had not heard it at any of the other shifts. The future will tell.
On Introversion
Introversion’s Mark Morris takes part in a lengthy interview, and discusses the history of Introversion as well as the importance of considering the business side of things. Being strictly a business person, Mark sounds slightly out of touch when talking about the creative side of the games but luckily almost all of the interview is focused on areas of marketing, company management and profitability - something he excels at. An interesting story about one of the oldest and most iconic indie developers today.
VVVVVV and Modern Warfare 2
I feel more than a little stupid admitting to having played Modern Warfare 2 after complaining about only having played Uncharted 2 due to peer pressure. Yes, I would not have played Modern Warfare if it weren’t for the hype and no, I did not particularly care for this one either. While it is varied to some extent most of the time I felt like I was just shooting random things until one lucky time someone wouldn’t start shooting at me from a random direction for long enough for me to get another checkpoint. I’m sure the multiplayer is great and that there is some real depth to the weapons and AI, but the randomness of it all just made it tiresome.
I should probably say something about the story, though, which felt less like a somewhat realistic war drama (as the first, decidedly better Modern Warfare story) and more like an action-conspiracy-thriller movie with convoluted plot points. The “No Russian” mission has received a lot of publicity and the game even warns you about it being controversial, but what scares me is how people react differently to this mission and for example the bomber mission in the first Modern Warfare. Both has you killing harmless people en masse, and even if the “enemies” are designated as soldiers in MW1 the fact that there’s such a big uproar over slaughtering hundreds of helpless people in one scenario and not even discussed in another scares me a bit. Which is maybe the reaction Inifinity Ward wanted, I guess. In any case, I have to applaud them for trying to do something that raises the art form when they already know they are going to sell millions.
But to the important part, namely the game VVVVVV by Terry Cavanagh. VVVVVV is a simple exploration/platform game that revolves around the mechanic of instead of jumping, the player can invert the direction of gravity when standing on the ground. In itself not very groundbreaking, maybe, but the important part in this game are the ingeniously designed levels that really force you to think about how to use this ability in a multitude of different ways with fairly few building blocks. The game has an open world of sorts, but it is separated into areas with very distinctive mechanics making them feel a lot different from each other even though the presentation is simple.
My one gripe with VVVVVV is that it became very hard towards the end; the placement of checkpoints was uneven and a lot of the timed things you needed to do had a needlessly narrow timeframe. On the other hand, I have only played the Beta so maybe Terry has already changed all that - in any case, I wish him luck in the Independent Games Festival.
Gotland Game Jam 2009
Gotland Game Jam is an event consisting of a 48 hour game-making competition for students and ex-students of the Game development education of Gotland University. As my participation was offsite and I spent most of the weekend on IRC I do not have that much to say about the actual event, though I did play the games created and there were some delightfully weird creations among them.
My own contribution is metroidvania based on the theme “Popecat” called Leim [download]. I am reasonably happy with how it came out.
To be completely honest, I had decided beforehand that I was going to make a metroidvania platformer and crowbar it into whatever theme selected for the Jam; there are sure to be people who consider this the wrong approach to take to a gamejam (and with good reason), but to paraphrase Jon Mak it is usually a better idea to make something you really want than to force innovation for innovation’s sake. There are some other drawbacks though.
For starters, exploration games tend to be sort of a tall order and maybe trying to make a worthwhile one in 48 hours is a lost cause. You need a lot of content to make it interesting, and if you are growing the avatar abilities there are lots of things that can break the level design, forcing you to play it very safe if you do not want to create a horribly broken game. Also, going against what John Harris said about interesting environments I tried to force small areas where each had some gameplay idea instead of doing what I should have done, attempt to create ideas for the world and then build levels around those ideas (although again, maybe not feasible in 48 hours). Adding to this is the central hub I placed in the game and the ever-decreasing energy - originally the idea was meant to allow for incrementally more exploration as getting more energy allowed you to move further in the gameworld instead of having obvious borders, but the concept didn’t really mesh with that idea and all it did was discourage exploration. The cohesiveness of the experience was sort of tacked-on as well as I had to remove a lot of the themes and presentation ideas I had in store, again due to lack of time.
Technologically, this wasn’t really a challenging game and although I did sort of fail design-wise I would say I learned enough from it to make the weekend a worthwhile experience. Anyhow, it was very much fun so perhaps it didn’t have to be in the first place.
Time Cufk postmortem
Edmund McMillen has posted a very interesting postmortem of Time Ukcf. He goes into detail both about how it was developed, what worked and what didn’t, but also in depth about what inspired it, expanding on his earlier comments. While I can’t say I “got” everything he talks about only from playing the game, they definitely managed to nail the atmosphere.
A fascinating read.