Awakening: A Postmodern Musing on "Free Will", Platformers, and Games In General *rather long outline of game*

I'm only plugging this because our blog's are rather hard to find, and I would appreciate any feedback on this game outline. Much appreciated,

Dustin

Vignette (the 'gn' as in Italian, that is, like a tilde'd Spanish 'n'). Fixed.

Just to be clear, beneath all the ruminations, you're making an existential Metroidvania? What are the machanics for navigating your metaphysical platform world?

Hey, platform games... platform in the sense of worldview... this could work.

"Should you feel a moral qualm for blipping a string of code out of existence?"

Not a string of code, a memory allocation for an instance described archetypically in strings of code. The one and the many applies here.

"Like any good Capitalistic platformer, there will be gold coins to collect. If you collect all of the coins, you will be given an "I'm a consumeristic whore! And how!" award."

Go deeper. For instance you could make the coins spend-able on a performance enchancement that costs an exponentially increasing amount to use, invulnerability would be an easy one. Now you're getting at something procedural about capitalism, if only metaphorically.

"He'll mention that the enemy simply does as he is programmed, and doesn't have a consciousness."

You could kick different colored radishes his way, or whatever item you wanted to use, and have that switch a script used in his Step Event that determines behavior. Then you use the thing to solve some puzzles and ultiamtely sacrifice it to complete the last one in the set. You could turn him into a psychopath and have him kill all his friends. Lots of level design potential with that.

""people can choose within their will, but cannot choose their will""

Be careful with this Hermit cipher, you can fall into trap of trying to communicate a message at the detriment of the 4gameplay, which carries an implicit message by the process of decision making. What if the player thinks they can choose their will? What's their third option, other than shutting down the game? That's a trick you should save for the end if you're going to use it.

"The final boss shall be the hermit, who is indestructible. After you get defeated, he will resurrect you and tell you the futility of trying to complete the game. I'm tempted to have the hermit tell him "you know effectively nothing. You want the truth, but you can only glean a minute amount of it. At the very least, I shall open your mind a tad bit." The game will then slowly morph into a 3-D FPS, and make the protagonist go insane at seeing an entire new dimension."

I wanted to do this in Know which was a Chinese mythology Metroidvania based on Coleridge's Kubla Khan. You drink the milk of paradise and start tripping out in 3D basically. There's at least one way to do this in GM and you really really should.

Check out the many sprite repositories for lots of old-school parody material.

This makes me want to finish that I Wish I Were The Moon parody right now.

Free will, or the decision(forgive my broken terms, words will eat you alive) to believe that you are free or not is quite a futile truth. It is unprovable and provides nothing except, apparently, a small feeling of superiority over those who believe "incorrectly", the heathens.

While the irony of having the hermit basically force-feed the player beliefs is amusing (and rather eloquent for a hermit) I don't believe it will get your message across as well as you want it to. In this kind of game, as in games where free will is emphasized, the general consensus will likely be "Yeah, okay. This is how the game plays." It's a perceptual change that will hopelessly categorize the game. I would suggest trying to make the player understand his lack of free will through his own perceptions in the journey, as opposed to just prodding the player with hopefully-skippable text.

I would also avoid using the word postmodern. It is one of those poisonous words that makes you cling to your education like a young girl clings to her first disappointing love letter.

I wanted to read this, but the wall of text was too hard to follow. Try to hit return a couple of times to make it easier to track.

For all your 2D questions, I'll gladly help you out.
Here's my blog for some examples of my work:
indigostatic.wordpress.com
And my email:
deelede(at)yahoo(dot)com(dot)ar

It's alright, don't worry, you can just avoid me completely. It's not like I'll be waiting, constantly refreshing my inbox in desperate need of human contact.
...
I'm not crazy, who said I'm crazy? You are the crazy ones! I just happen to be the sanest person on this face of the earth! (yeah, it has many faces, like a centaur! ... *runs away*)

I read this site because I'm interested in innovative games, I used to be interested in unusual RPGs, and I narrowly escaped an early career in a code mill through the efforts of others to make their plight visible.

I'm not sure why this is on the front page; this hasn't really been a site about development. If you want brutally honest feedback about your idea, post it to Tigsource, where they can also help you with the portion of development that requires real work.

I might as well offer my opinion: It sounds like bludgeoning the player with your ideas.

You have a point, although one of the problems at the moment is that blog posts are pretty invisible. I'm thinking of adding a block in the left column, maybe under "recent comments" to give them a bit more visibility. Until I do, the only real way to do so is add them to the front page feed.

Patrick: Thanks for the feedback. I was thinking this existential game to be more akin to Mario than Metroid, with more emphasis on linear levels than the exploration element and more focus on mastering the spatial aspect than combat. But this is Awakening, after all, and the exploration could symbolize the protagonists inner exploration. I'll see which route to go down as the game further develops. And I definitely will make the hermit and his message less heavy-handed in the game, to save for the dimension bending conclusion. Could you possibly direct me to this GM tool for the 3-D transition? My computer died on me when I was trying to torrent a Morphine album, but as soon as I get it running again I'm going to start work on this.

Everyone else: I'm not going to make the game as heavy-handed and have my motives as explicit in the game. The hermit will only be visible in the beginning and conclusion, with gameplay fueling the rest of the experience. For example, I was thinking of including a Bioware-esque episode where you have conversation trees to follow that ultimately have a negligible effect on the game, resulting in the same outcome- another ghost of agency that games mask as choice. I didn't write this here for specific game-feedback (a la TIG), but for more structure and grander feedback akin to what Patrick gave me. Thanks to the dude who offered technical help, I'll hit you up when I hit the inevitable snag in development. Haha, excuse the linguistics of this blog, with copious tangents within my ruminations. It's a recollection as it came back to me, with not much structure in mind. Outside of being "heavy-handed", what do you guys think of this? Are there any quirks of platformer gameplay or videogame narrative you guys would want addressed?

I meant "adding a block to the right column." Except of course, I didn't mean that. Since I am the blog, in some metaphysical sense, I am looking out at you, and therefore your right is my left.

Or something.

What happens if I load up the game and do nothing? Does doing nothing have a meaning, does the 'life' of the character continue along a determined line regardless of my (non-)intervention as a player?

Is there a save feature so I can stop playing and come back to the game? How will it function? Does the world move on while I, the player am away (see Virtual Villagers)? Or is everything stored safely away as if cyrogenically frozen?

Is there anyway to persuade the Hermit to stop returning the character to life and end the cycle of re-birth and re-death that is the endless plight of every being in a platformer universe?

I think you have some very interesting ideas, but it really seems like you're trying intensely to force your own views on the player, which is generally kind of a bad idea. The concept of a platformer that takes some of aspects of Passage has a lot of potential, but I really think you might be going about it in the wrong way.

I personally think that games about the gaming industry are rather naive and use the subtext of commentary to hide behind the fact that the game is really not that good. The point of a game is to be fun and enjoyable to play, not to leave the audience with weighty maxims to be pondered over. Gaming does not possess the same intellectual qualities as books or film, and cannot really portray human emotion or craftsmanship in the same way. A game can certainly raise important issues and cause the player to think, and indeed, good games do, but this sounds more like an interactive version of a philosophy textbook.

Also, some of your plot points need serious redress. The consumerist whore thing trivializes what you're trying to say about capitalism, and frankly sounds a great deal like pseudo intellectual debate from an angsty teenager. It's one thing to do commentary, it's another entirely to make your criticism base and insulting. You've absolutely got to get rid of that rape bit, rape is an issue that has no business being used in media other than in very specific and carefully planned instances. In what way are you claiming that your proposed scene "tastefully" deals with rape? In order to complete your game I have to rape an innocent woman or quit? I understand moral absolutism, but you have no meaning or context to justify forcing your player to commit such a horrible crime. I would also probably recommend you rethink your ending a bit, it suffers from the same issues of a lot of novice game design, no one wants to play a game without an ending or a resolution.

It sounds like you've taken all of the bad parts of Passage and ignored all of the things that are good about it. If you introduced a Castleroid style game with an aging system that affects performance, the choice of taking a partner to aid you in some situations while holding you back in others, or even the choice between progression in the game and acquiring items, you would have the makings of one of the most innovative and fun platformers ever conceived.

Instead you picked up the forced philosophy and lack of gameplay that makes Passage not really a game at all. It's not fun, has no elements of gameplay, makes no emotional connection between the player and the characters, and has no visual appeal at all. I will say the music is rather catchy. Passage is attempting to take games in a direction where they are not meant to go, and in doing so, fails rather miserably. You could very easily watch a flash animation that mimics Passage entirely, which doesn't really constitute a good game in my book.

As I've said, I think there's a lot of interesting ideas relating to what you're trying to do, but your hangups on philosophy and commentary mar the entire concept. I sort of doubt you have the subtlety required to make a game that is both good as well as thought-provoking, much less the skill required to code it. I'm sorry to say this, but without a serious redesign, this is not going to be a playable game.

Again, I am making everything more explicit since this isn't the game, but simply documentation of said game. To clarify: this game isn't my homage to Passage. This is going to be my second game, which effectively makes a two player Metroidvania meets Lost Vikings in the style of Rohrer (which of course means using Passage as a template.) This game is just the result of the ruminations I've had about the platformer genre since my introduction to the genre at the age of three.

By no means am I making a strictly "art game" i.e. a game with limited gameplay in lieu of a "message." While I highly respect Rohrer, Peter Perdicini and the like, I think that including a worthwile platformer in it's own right would make the experience more enjoyable. I do in fact believe that games can be an equally as valid medium to express "human emotion or craftsmanship." They said the same thing about graphic novels ( or to the layman comic books) till Gaiman, Moore, or Spiegalman wrote their respective craft, right? I think the fact that this is an interactive medium makes this all the more potent, personally. But enough of the tired "games as art" shit.

The majority of problems you specifically address are incongruities in the platformer genre, and I am trying to explicitly make them apparent-rather than being an implicit part of the experience. Why do platformers cling to crass consumerism? (I totally am an angsty teen, btw. Doesn't the constant Nirvana references make that readily apparent?)Why is it acceptable for a protagonist in a platformer able to effectively get with the object of interest simply for jumping through a bunch of levels? It's all part of the misogynistic view that women are simply conquests to conquer; most platformers (especially SMB, the archetypal platformer-and the backbone to the genre) have sex as an implicit goal for the player to reach for. *insert Meat Boy's explicit sex scene reference here* I also am including the rape scene as an example of the player's lack of agency, in an analogue to Pazzon's section where you are forced to slaughter innocents so a priest can selfishly ingest them. I'm including something the player shouldn't want to play, instead of some power trip as a super powered, megalomaniac plumber with fireball-throwing capabilities - thereby exposing the player's lack of agency, which should come fully apparent by the ending. And who says that a game should be beatable? And I think there should be unbeatable games as well as films with a chopped-up narrative or music that doesn't shoe-horn itself with archaic terms such as "chords." Simply following convention makes boring works that typically end up as products for a consumer base. Hell, I could work for *insert third rate industry platformer developer here*. And of course *insert errata about not making things for the sake of being different, but to actually say something. I'm not a DaDa game developer, by any means. (Which could be interesting...but Videogame Game is a great example of)*

All those gripes you have seem pretty preemptive, seeing as how I haven't made the game yet. =p I don't know if you'd enjoy the game in the first place, as the "philosophy and commentary" are what I'm trying to achieve with this. Given Game Maker's GUI system and the time I'll have this summer, I don't think the gameplay will be a problem. And you can be the judge of the final product's "thought-provoking" content when you play it, alright?

RE Costik and Patrick: If you didn't get my other note in my previous comment, I'm still trying to fix my computer at the moment. As soon as I get that back up I'll get my platformer critique written up.