No More Sweden 2010
No More Sweden occurred again, this year in the town of Skövde. Less places to go to, but easier to get around and a - thankfully - air-conditioned locale. I did make a game, but it wasn’t very good… And not in a “I had a cool idea but it didn’t work out” - way, rather a “I did something completely uninspired just to do something” - way. Anyhow, I’m not going to post it so the above picture is from Daniel Remar’s brilliant entry Man Enough. Hopefully the game and the soundtrack will be available within the next few days.
The organizers have stated that they want this to be more of a gathering than a jam though, and it is definitely moving in the right direction. Lots of interesting presentations were held on different topics and a lot of time was spent just relaxing in discussion and trading stories. Coming straight from an increasingly commercial mainstream games industry, it is a true breath of fresh air to meet people who think that games can be something more, do something new and mean something else - and people who also are not afraid to try it out.
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.
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.
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.
Max Barry on virtual violence
Australia is, like Germany, one of the countries in the world were unrated media is actually forbidden - games refused a rating by the government’s media classification organ cannot legally be sold there. What makes Australia unique is that it is also one of the few democratic countries in the world where the highest age rating you could grant is 15.
Max Barry, Australian author and originator of the web game Nationstates, has spoken up on this in a recent blog post;
the game developer, like other developers before it, deleted some of the gorier parts and resubmitted it. The Australian Classifications Board noted that “large and frequent blood splatters are seen,” but now “dead bodies and blood splatter disappear as they touch the ground.” You can still rip zombies to pieces with a chainsaw, but “no wound detail is shown.” It was awarded an MA15+ classification (meaning 14 year olds and younger require a guardian present), tagged: “Strong bloody violence.”
Instead of Australia having a violent, bloody computer game restricted to adults, it will have a violent, not-quite-as-bloody game on sale to children. This is the effect of our law: to take content that was designed for adults and tweak it until it scrapes under the MA15+ bar. We’re making available to children material they would not otherwise see, clustered at the extreme end of what is acceptable.
… An interesting point, to be sure. I get into more detail in my virgin post at the Game Industry Insiders blog.
Just Cause 2 looks nice
In these troubled times of layoffs and studios closing, it is nice to see the new Just Cause 2 trailer looking really good - I am not usually excited about sandbox games, but I will most likely pick up this one.
Though it is hard to deny that the fact that there are a lot of unemployed, experienced developers makes it easier in our own recruiting work, the situation is hardly good for either Starbreeze or myself. Disregarding the fact that a lot of my friends have been let go, less companies means less money and less people for the Swedish games industry. This in turn means less incentive for press and larger publishers to visit here, for educations to be held and less possibility for events like the Swedish Game Awards to be funded and staged.
Hopefully, this trend will turn - even if things did not turn out so well for Grin, I would go out on a limb and say Avalanche has a good chance of survival - if only because I recognize the situation they are in. Five years ago, Starbreeze had hired too many and grown too quickly, was forced to let go all but a small core team and then Riddick was released to rave reviews giving Starbreeze enough recognition to sign more contracts and today we are doing just fine.
No More Sweden 2009
I spent the weekend in Malmö for No More Sweden, essentially hanging out with indie developers and making a game in 40 hours. In my opinion, one of the most interesting things about the Indie scene is how different each developer takes to the craft - judging what is important, what is less important and when it is time to scrap an idea - something that shines through some of the games that were made. Hopefully, all of them will be available in the next few days - my own game, Alain, can be downloaded now.
The game is essentially a platform game that has you maneuvering an ape in order to get a maypole through a level. As with most games written in a compo under a short time limit, it has certain flaws that are there due to a lack of time - lack of time to polish, and a fear of killing my darlings seeing as there wasn’t enough time to replace thrown-out features. For example, I would like to have spent more time on the firing and climbing mechanics, seeing as it can be somewhat uninituitive and difficult to control now, and I also would have reconsidered the graphical style and gone for something that would give a clearer image of what platforms you could actually stand on.
Doing it again, I would spend less time on creating assets (although I lucked out as a friend offered to create background graphics) and more time tweaking the level design to weed out the brute-force-solutions and making the proper ones easier to perform. There’s also a bunch of features I would like to have added as they would have given me opportunity to create a lot of new and interesting puzzles, and I regret not observing people as they played the game as much as I could, as this had surely given me a lot of more things to add to this list.
Feel free to try the game and add your own comments!
GGA09 and other memories
I again was honored to help judge the Gotland Game Awards a couple of days back, and in many ways it was a return to core values. The event itself was more about the students than last year, with almost no projects coming from other places than the GAME educations, and the games in general seemed to focus more on interesting gameplay mechanics and only added innovative input mechanics if it seemed like a good idea, instead of the other way around. The event itself was grander, but it still felt more focused and of higher-quality - I give both the students and the teachers and administration credit for this. The only real beef I do have with it was with some of the teams claiming to want a “pure experience” by avoiding powerups or progression in their gameplay - if you intentionally make your game less interesting, you’d better have something incredibly interesting to begin with.
Also, on an unrelated note, it seems David Eddings passed away. It was long ago now that I quit reading his books, long ago when the lack of challenging stories and annoyingly smug presentation became too much for it to be worthwhile. Still, I read the entire Belgariad and the Malloreon some 6 or 7 times each in my youth and I can’t deny the attraction they held for me then or the possible effects that might have had on my development as a person. People have claimed he made fantasy accessible to the world, and that is a worthy achievement indeed.
Etch-a-sketch
A few of my coworkers formed the demogroup Candela a few years back, and this weekend they released their new demo Etch-a-sketch;
This last month has been insane, really, and there are a lot of things I should be saying something about. The Nordic Game Conference, the Trico trailer, the Death of Duke Nukem forever - on a purely personal level there are even more things for me to cover, which is probably why it’s been quiet around here - lack of time for gathering my thoughts. I meant to write a reflection of being done with Apollo Justice, but quite frankly I don’t have anything to add to my thoughts about earlier Ace Attorney games. Even with new features it is the same game with the same problems and the same payback, if it ain’t broken don’t fix it I suppose but it is getting to the point where even the story feels repetitive and seeing as that is the only thing keeping the games going I don’t see myself coming back to it.
The year of Jeans
A couple of slightly self-centered paragraphs before going on to the games, seeing as 2008 has marked sort of a culmination where many of my previous social, ideological and professional achievements paid off in some degree to give me a review of what I’ve done so far. With the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, it’s been a year where I’ve been to 4 foreign countries on 3 different continents, been honored with the “Alumni of the year” at Gotland University’s Game Development education and for the first time in my life has consistently made more money than I could reasonably spend - a very ironic situation considering the world economy, and something that could well be foreboding of darker times to come, as if 2008 was the very peak of this part of my life. I don’t fret, though, as I prefer some challenge.
I hope to turn my attention back to my craft in 2009, both by advancing in my work (something that has been very slow in 2008) and by developing my own ideas further, to what degree both of these goals are possible. While 2008 was a year of stepping back and enjoying what I had accumulated, this didn’t translate to development and I have yet to take advantage of the fact that I now have every opportunity to create games that I passed on five years ago due to lack of programming ability. Hopefully 2009 will give me time to pick up that thread again as well as further my professional career. But really, enough ranting.
World of Goo feels alluringly simple every time I start it, but yet I keep starting it just to replay a few levels here and there. The core mechanic is very simple and it feels very solid and responsive - even though you can use the intuitive physics to device your own crazy ways to solve each puzzle. As such, the game is open to experimentation and has a high replay value, but also low in frustration making it hard to stop playing.
Mirror’s Edge introduced something immensely cool into first-person games. Where jumping and running is traditionally something done out of necessity rather than to create new gameplay, Mirror’s Edge took the challenge to make platform gameplay work in first-person head-on. It’s far from a perfect game, but it feels like the things it does well could inspire better gameplay in so many other games.
Grand Theft Auto IV was a larger production than any other earlier game, and the level of coherency they managed to keep with so many people involved is mind-blowing. Compared to it’s predecessors, it is a more seamless blend of more varied gameplay elements, and the presentation of Liberty city is more alive than I’ve seen in any other game. Sure, it has it’s boring and repetitive parts, but it seems that’s what you trade for not being led by the hand through the entire game.