Play This Thing

Looking for a coder and producer to take over ChipWits

dougsha — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:02:59 -0500

ChipWits is a classic geek game I wrote for the Mac in 1984 (co-designed with Mike Johnston) . ChipWits was just named the 8th-best game ever published for the Mac and Apple by a reviewer at Maclife.com :
http://www.maclife.com/article/the_top_10_apple_games_of_all_time
So at least 1 person really liked it ;^}

I am disabled with an epilepsy/pain condition and can no longer program ChipWits so I am looking for a programmer and producer to move ChipWits forward:
http://chipwits.com/recruiting.html

Here is the email I sent current ChipWits players:

---

ChipHeads,

I’ve decided that I can’t program ChipWits any longer. My epilepsy has gotten worse and programming is difficult for me. So we are looking for a programmer and a producer to take over the game: http://chipwits.com/recruiting.html

ChipWits players are programmers so we are letting you guys know first. We’d love it if a hardcore ChipWits player took over.

I will continue to have a hand in game design along with Mike Johnston and our new team. I am going to concentrate on finishing rewriting my science fiction novel – www.helsbet.com – and working on a personal game about my disability – www.brainrot.wordpress.com.

Wish ChipWits luck this week in the Independent Games Festival: http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2009.php?id=731
They announce finalists on the 7th.

I am going to make a few tweaks this week and upload a new build, but I will wait until we’ve got a producer and coder onboard before running any more contests.

Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve ChipWits. Stay tuned for cool developments in 2009.

IFFEEL COFFEE T-> PICKUP,

Doug Sharp

---

Here is my recruiting post on GameDev.net:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=519605

I also wrote Cinemaware’s King of Chicago in 1986 for Mac, Amiga, and Apple IIGS:
http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=589
http://amigareviews.classicgaming.gamespy.com/kingofch.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17xQQ-PMPBs
I am using the Dramaton system I developed for KoC for my Brainrot game:
http://dougsharp.wordpress.com/talks-and-papers-about-games-and-interact...

I live in a remote lakeshore cabin in Comstock, WI and blog about it here:
http://dougsharp.wordpress.com

I am working on a scifi novel about stealing a space shuttle and kickstarting the Singularity:
http://helsbet.com

If you are a coder or producer and find ChipWits exciting please get in touch with me at:
dougsharp@channelzilch.com

Gamely,

Doug Sharp

rara racer

costik — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:44:52 -0500

Normally, new reviews appear in full text on the front page -- no need to click through for more. In this case, I am going to post only the first part, however, with the rest below the fold, because this is a 3-minute game (actually, a 2 minute and 10 second game, precisely), and almost anything I might say would amount to a spoiler.

In other words, play it first, then read the rest of the review. Failing to do so is a lot like hearing the punchline before the joke.

rara racer is, in part, a fairly tedious obstacle-avoidance sidescroller, in which you control a little cart with the arrow keys, dodging lines of obstacles as they scroll toward you. But if that's all it were, we wouldn't be featuring it. It's brilliant, in its own little way. Did I mention you should play it before reading the rest of the review?

You didn't, did you? Oh, well.

The game itself plays inside a small window that appears to be inset on a YouTube page. The "game" takes over your window, but the rest of the screen is what you might see on your computer, at least, what you might see if you had a seriously bad viral pop-up infection and a gay porn window open in the background. (Yes, it's safe-for-work, but it may be a little embarassing if someone peers over your shoulder and sees the "Gay Sex Links" tab on the screen.)

The audio is what you might hear if some very boring person had recorded a video playthrough-and-review and posted it on YouTube.

But what's brilliant, in a way that generates a certain degree of intellectual dislocation is that you do, in fact, play the racing game -- and the narration changes in response to what happens in the game. E.g., if you collide with an obstacle, the narrator may well say "Oh, fuck," as if he had just had that crash. Indeed, the narration seems amazingly seamless and appropriate to what you see as you play, which is no mean trick.

In other words, yes, this is a game, of a sort; but it's also a commentary on itself; and a metacommentary on the nature of video reviews and the inanity of YouTube -- along with a neat technical hack for splicing audio together. And quite funny, really.

(Source code's available too, should you want it.)

Dev In

the99th — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:27:15 -0500

A guy is videotaping himself working for 100 days without leaving the room, doing the Android and iPhone ports of his RPG project, in a protest to Nintendo for not delivering the required software to finish the project. I can totally relate to what he's going through, putting tons of time, talent, and passion into a project, actually producing quality, playable content, and then getting stone-walled by suits is something I have some experience with, though I adapted differently.

Even though I'm currently involved with a liscenced Wii developer, I sort of got over walled gardens maybe two years ago. There are pros and cons, they re not the edenic paradise on the brochure. Banging your head against said wall is probably not worth your time.

Is it a legitimate battle for the distribution of game development, or a weird sort of PR cyst that only the internet could love? You decide.

Kim Pallister offers additional perspective, having been inside the beast.

MS Paint Adventures

costik — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:33:21 -0500

MS Paint Adventures is not a game. Except that it is a game, absolutely.

The current game in progress is Problem Sleuth, but two previous games have been completed, and are archived. If you check out the first page of Problem Sleuth, you'll see a crudely-drawn private eye standing in his apartment, with the canonical things present you might expect to see if this were a graphic adventure -- a gun, a desk, a phone, a wall safe, a door from the office. Below is a blinking > cursor, which you might reasonably think is an invitation for you to type in text. It isn't.

Instead, below the image is a single HTML link ("Quickly retrieve arms from safe," a bit of a joke, as the private eye in the first image is drawn in such a way that no arms are visible). Actually, occasionally there are branches, but either one dead-ends quickly, or they reunite.

Click on the link, and the image changes -- and a new link is available for your use. With each image is but a single link, which advances the story. The images (and accompanying text) seem to imply that this is a graphic adventure -- your inventory changes, as do aspects of the game world -- but in fact you never have a real choice about what to do next. It's a single, linear story. And therefore, not a game. Yes?

Except that when you come to the end of the story (as it exists so far), you can suggest to the creator, Andrew Hussie, what action the character should take next. Hussie selects one of the suggestions, draws the next image, and posts it, along with a link for that action. Or to put it another way, it's a form of collaborative story-telling with the external indicia of an adventure game, and it is, in a sense, a game itself -- at least to the degree, say, that The New Yorker's cartoon caption contest is a game. If nothing else, you're competing for the egoboo of having your suggestion selected by Hussie as the cleverest (or perhaps easiest to draw -- not sure really what his criteria are, but based on the story, "cleverest," or perhaps "most deranged" sounds about right). It's not actually an "unbranching story;" instead, it's more like a sort of tabletop roleplaying game, with a bunch of players shouting out what the single PC should do next, and the GM deciding which idea to adopt.

Which sounds like a game to me.

Problem Sleuth has the basic issue that any "round-robin" form of story-telling has; logic and narrative coherence are not strong points. Yet it's entertaining in a way, and I imagine Hussie, at any event, is having a blast. And from our perspective, it's interesting in how it uses the tropes of IF in something that really isn't IF at all, but something odder.

Brainpipe

the99th — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:07:46 -0500

Digital Eel makes deep games about weird stuff, going so far as to name one of their better games Weird Worlds. Then they went ahead and outdid themselves.

Brain Pipe is an experiment to see if a game can be designed to evoke feelings that are alien to the human condition, a design to evoke feelings that cannot be designed or accounted for. Apparently the answer is yes, we can do that. We can also instill trance-like vertigo, tryptamine-tinged illinx, but we already knew that a first person view coupled with rapidly changing scenery and a demand to avoid collisions could effect that. What´s significant here is the simplicty of the interaction, whereas Torus Trooper´s frenetic pacing was pock-marked with sudden stops when hit, putting you closer to running out of time, and deigned to have you hold the fire button or charge the blubshot, Brain Pipe has you merely gliding the mouse and holding down the button to slow down for a bit when you need it most. Collisions can kill you, but you recover your health in a Halo recharge fashion, which goes well with the time-distortion. This calm allows you to paradoxically soak up the sensory overload of hyper-kinesthesia without the stress. The quite murmur of the audio gives this gestalt a sort of spiked-Descent feel to it, little did you know...

The game possesses you with its harrowing genius, which makes it as worth having as Electric Sheep but in a more active sense. Despite that, I wish there was more to it, more extensibility in the obstacles, in distortion powers, in the significance of the sigils, or at the least a more unlimited gameplay. There´s more potential in this mode, and the subversive effect it has on the senses over time. I want it to take itself seriously enough to let me stay in the flow for hours, until my eyes dry out and the subconscious rhythms have fully deprogrammed my assumptions about time and space, the beating of my own heart, sense awareness and the potential nature of inhuman entities lurking beyond the cusp of measurable reality. I want to go into this with an innocent desire for triptastic glee, and come out of it with the demeanor of a brain damaged Zen-master. It gets close, but depending on your predelictions, it doesn´t take the practical joke quite far enough to spark enlightenment or at least burn the paper construct you call the mind. Maybe that´s ok, it´s pretty fun and we wouldn´t want to trigger the immenent disintegration of consensus reality, right? This game is more fun than mass rioting.

New Star Soccer 4

costik — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:14:07 -0500

Other than, perhaps, the racing game, there's no game genre so set in stone, so lacking in innovation as the sports game, which survives (and from a market standpoint, thrives) simply by modest tech updates and new player stats on a yearly basis. And there are really only two kinds of sports games; ones that simulate matches in vibrant 3D, and ones that simulate team management in a spreadsheet dressed up with a few graphics.

Which is why Simon Read's New Star Soccer series, of which this is the fourth, is so brilliant; Simon Read is doing something nobody else does. New Star Soccer is a life sim in which you control the life and career of a footballer. You play matches, of course, moving your character about the field, while AI controls both the opposing team and your team-mates -- but what you do between games is at least as important as your in-game performance. You need to improve your skills, suck up to your boss, keep your team-mates happy (or they'll get pissed off and won't pass to you), find a girlfriend and perhaps get married, spend time with family and friends. It's almost more Kudos than Madden.

It's also vast, far richer and more detailed than most indie games; you can start in almost any league on the planet, from soccer powerhouses like Italy and Brazil to pathetic little pipsqueak countries like Montenegro or the United States. The game contains league information about dozens of countries, and tracks games between teams you aren't playing as well as the ones you are, including support for relegation; because this takes processing time, you usually set up the game so that only one or a handful of nations are tracked, but in principle, you can have the entire world of soccer being simulated in the game's background.

One interesting aspect of the game is that it doesn't fit neatly either into the "character skill" or "player skill" category; your character does have skills, which both training and in-game performance can affect, and which affect how you do on the field, but in addition, you are moving and choosing when to kick or pass and so on. Thus, actual performance in a match is a mix between your character's abilities and your own mastery of the interface. Although if you don't want to bother, you don't have to; you can simply have matches resolved by the same algorithms that control unplayed teams, and concentrate on the game's life-sim aspect.

What's improved in New Star Soccer 4 over version 3 is far superior graphics. We're obviously not talking current-gen console-level graphics, but 3 was at about NES level; 4 is about at early Playstation, with fairly low-poly 3D characters and the ability to control camera angle (only through settings and not on the fly, unfortunately). As our readers know, I generally reject the notion that graphic quality is particularly important in judging the merit of a game, but if you like this game, you will wind up spending many hours with it, and improved aesthetics in this context certainly improve the experience. (The game also has a nicely bouncy samba score with enough variety in tunes that it doesn't quickly pall.)

In our review of 3, we said that your only excuses for not playing this game were either that you're a Murrican who doesn't give a rats ass about futbol, or that the primitive graphics put you off. You no longer have the latter excuse, at any event.

Games for Xmas

costik — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:23:11 -0500

Everyone gets both digital and non-digital games for Christmas at our house. Well, I only get digital ones, since I'm the one who buys the tabletop games.

For me: Civilization IV: Colonization. Looks like a straight remake of the original Colonization (which I still have, and quite liked years ago) in the Civ IV engine. A little disappointed at that, in that I would have liked to see more features, but I'll certainly give it a shot, and like the fact that I can play as the Dutch. (I want to play as the Swedes, though -- yes, their colony in Delaware was short-lived, but there's an interesting alternate America.)

For Karen: Agricola and Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility. I quite liked the earlier Harvest Moon games, and so far this looks like an improvement -- more interesting things to do, and skills charge-ups reduce the tedium of watering your crops. Agricola is an Uwe Rosenberg game, and really at the high end of complexity for the Eurostyle -- at least as complicated as Puerto Rico. It'll take us a while to get into it.

For Vicky: Civilization Revolutions, Fable 2, and Medici. Can't go wrong with Sid Meier and Reiner Knizia. Though she also recently bought herself Kudos 2, so maybe that counts too.

For Betsy: Shadow of the Colossus and Oasis -- the Alan Moon boardgame, not the LeBlanc & Leker downloadable game. Colossus is a few years old, of course, but at her Mom's house, where she spends most of her time, there's just a PS2. Also, since she's learning German, Karen got her Die Siedler von Catan: Deutschland Edition, auf Deutsch, on the theory that figuring out the rules will help her with her studies.

For Simona: Candy Land. Well, she's only 5. Next year, Labyrinth Junior, though.

Falling

costik — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:22:53 -0500

James Ernest games (like, say, Lord of the Fries) tend to be fast, funny, and fun, but often too luck dependent for serious tabletop gamers. Falling is instead fast, funny, fun, and with surprising strategic depth.

The set-up is simple: most of the cards are shuffled, except for the "Ground" cards, which are placed at the bottom of the deck. One person acts as dealer, Blackjack-like, but there's no betting and he's an impartial referee as well. The object of the game is to be the last person who hits the ground. (As the rules say, "It's not much of a goal, but it's all you could think of on the way down.")

The dealer goes around the board playing cards one at a time to a stack in front of each player. Each player may at any time pick up the top card on his stack and play it, either on himself or on another player. You can only pick up one card at a time, and may not pick up another until it is played, and you can only pick up the top card. There are no turns or player order -- everyone can be slapping cards at each other throughout the game, which leads to its fast, frenetic, and asynchronous -- or, in digital game terms, real-time -- nature of the game.

Four kinds of cards are called "Riders." These are Hit, Split, Skip, and Extra. When you play a Rider, you place it sideways between one player and the dealer. When the dealer comes to this player, he follows the rules for this Rider, then discards it. "Hit" means that he plays an additional card to the player's stack. "Split" means that he starts another stack for that player -- meaning the player now gets two cards each time the dealer reaches him, and has a choice of two cards to pick up, the top card on each stack, at any given time. This is good in the early game, but potentially fatal in the end-game. "Skip" means that the dealer skips the player, dealing no cards on this go-round. Only one Rider can be in front of a player at any given time, except that Extras can be placed atop another Rider, doubling its effect. E.g., double-Hit means the player gets three cards, double-Split means he gets two new stacks, double-Skip means that the Extra is discarded on one go-round, and the Skip on the second, so that the player is skipped twice.

In addition to Riders, there are Action cards. These are "Push," meaning you push a Rider away from you and place it in front of someone else; Grab, meaning you grab someone else's Rider and place it in front of you; and Stop, which you can use to immediately discard any Rider, or stop a Ground card from being dealt to you -- this go-round.

In other words, at the end of the game, what you want is loads of Skips and Stops. In generally, strategy changes as the game progresses -- and tension mounts as the ground nears. While there are no true alliances -- only one person can win, after all -- there are often short-term animosities and spats among the players during the game, which lend it much of its spritely nature.

It's also a game you can play (with experienced players) in just a minute or two, making it an excellent filler between other games, and fine in a party setting.

Virtually all card games are of the round-robin variety (or, in digital terms, Igo-Ugo); Falling's asynchronicity is what makes it stand out. You both have to strategize to delay your inevitable doom, but find it very hard to do so because the options available to others are changing every few seconds, and the frenetic pace of the game make it hard for you to plan. A very interesting game from a design perspective, therefore.

Galax-E-Mail

costik — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:00:57 -0500

Galax-E-Mail isn't as startlingly original as Bog Turtle's earlier game, Spuds, but it's a nice little shmup.

It's arena-ish, in that impenetrable barriers (which cause some damage if you bump into them) partition each level; you appear at a "black hole" at one point in the level, and must make your way to another black hole someplace else. Before you exit, however, you must destroy all the "alien bases" in the level -- which are spawn points for enemy ships.

Movement is via arrow keys (or D-pad), with aiming via the mouse (or joystick), and fire with the left mouse button; the right button cycles through different ship types (as usual, one is normal, one is slower but more powerful, and one faster). There are quite a lot of power ups, the most interesting of one gives you a friendly ship that follows you about and fights the enemy as well; if you're careful, you can wind up with a substantial flotilla by the time you reach the level end.

The most original aspect of the game is the difficulty setting, which ranges from 0 to 100; at 100, this is an amazingly frenetic game, while at 0, even a useless wanker like me can play. At the end of each level, you're asked whether you want to crank it up or down for the next one, which is a nice feature. There are, however, no saved games.

The backstory, if you care, explains the name; apparently email transport actually involves routing email through transdimensional wormholes, where space fighters have to battle aliens to deliver it. Given that most of what our world generates is spam, it seems rather harsh on our allies to make them do this, but there you go. Some of the "powerups" are email which you need to pick up, and your score is mostly dependent on "delivering" it to the next black hole.

Galax-E-Mail is shareware, but the full game is a very reasonable ~~4 bucks~~$2.50 (or 200 whatsis points for the Xbox version). Nothing hugely original here, but it's well implemented, and we can hope that, having now mastered XNA, the Bog Turtle folks will take a little more creative risk with the next title.

Robokill

costik — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:01:14 -0500

Robokill is a classic overhead third-person shooter; WASD or arrow keys to move, aim with the mouse and shoot with the left mouse button. For a Flash game, it's very smooth and responsive; as with other games of the same style (e.g., RIP), it's fast and frenetic, and survival means continuous motion while maintaining a continuous stream of fire.

It's somewhat arena-like, in that each level is a room within a space station that's been taken over by hostile robots. There are the usual powerups, health packs, and the like, along with an experience system, and shops where you can upgrade your equipment (and buy more health). Enemy AI is simple but clean, and all in all, this feels less like a Flash game than a downloadable, that is, it doesn't have the slow-downs and glitches you often see with Flash, and yet there's a lot more gameplay here than with most Flash titles. (I do wish there were a full-screen mode, though; occasionally I found myself clicking outside the Flash window and losing control of the game, since mouse position is less vital than direction, so it's easy to wind up with the pointer outside the game area and click to fire...)

The game isn't wholly free; there's a ten buck charge if you want access to the second two thirds of the game, but the first third alone has a couple of hours of gameplay, which isn't bad.

There's nothing hugely original here, but it's well executed, and shooter fans should like it.