Play This Thing

Maru

TheDustin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:15:03 +0000

It's been a while since we've checked in on Mr. Venbrux, a fan favorite over here at PTT. His latest outing is a portmanteau of two of his previous works; it combines the dreamlike tone of Pazzon with the planetary-hopping gameplay of Frozzd. Since both games accomplished their respective aspects quite well this mash-up title doesn't feel as innovative as it should, but that's forgivable. The aesthetic here is wonderful, with soothing background music and an oblique art style. It's fairly short as well, but may require a second playthrough to reach the proper ending. No overwrought analysis this time around, but if you dug his previous work I'd advise you to check it out.

We're All Plain! 2 SE

costik — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:08:20 +0000

We're All Plain! 2 SE is a little level-based Flash puzzler created for the Global Game Jam. On each level, there are an array of colored orbs. They're on springs; you can pull one back and let it go. If it intercepts an orb of the complementary color (red/gree, blue/orange, purple/yellow), both turn white. To clear the level, you must turn all orbs white.

In addition, banging an orb into a non-complementary color changes the target into the intermediate color (e.g., banging blue into red turns the red orb purple). At higher levels, the springs have limited pull-back, so quite often you cannot change to white immediately -- instead, you must manipulate the orbs, changing to intermediate colors to establish an array that can then be turned white.

The resulting puzzles are actually quite challenging, given the simplicity of the underlying scheme. Graphic designers, to whom the color wheel is second nature, will doubtless find it easier than I, of course.

Hey! That's My Fish!

costik — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:21:27 +0000

Hey! That's My Fish! has got to be about the silliest possible theme for what is, when you get down to it, an abstract strategy game with surprising depth. True, its rules are sufficiently simple as to be accessible to quite young players, but as with any abstract strategy game, the ability to plan and think several moves ahead is critical. In other words, this is not exactly a kid's game.

Before game start, the players lay out hexagonal tiles in a set pattern. Each tile is printed with between one and three fish. Each player places penguins of their colors on tiles, pretty much as they wish; it can be played by up to four, and the number of starting penguins depends on the number of players (e.g., in a four player game, each starts with two). On your turn, you may move one of your penguins any distance in one of the six directions permitted by the hex grid -- but not through an empty hex, or a hex containing another player's penguin. When you move, you remove the hex you formerly occupied, and score between one and three points, as indicated by the number of fish on the tile.

The main strategic element of gameplay is working to isolate other players' penguins, trapping them in small areas; when this happens, and an area is isolated that contains only one penguin, the owner scores all tiles in the isolated area, and the penguin is removed from play. Maximizing score by getting high-fish hexes is a secondary but important strategic consideration.

What is striking and admirable about the game is the strategic depth it provides for a remarkably sparse rules set. As Eric Goldberg says, it is far harder to design a good, simple game than a good, complicated one, and Hey! That's My Fish! succeeds at the task.

Hardcore Gaming 101

TheDustin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:57:44 +0000

If you're like me you most likely have fond memories of the games of yore, and also haven't played all of the classic games you should have. Enter Hardcore Gaming 101. I just recently stumbled upon the site and am impressed by both it's breadth and depth of coverage; it approaches series and individual games from an historical viewpoint while also discussing gameplay mechanics. It isn't as thorough or in-depth as Dessgeega's dissertations, but still is an excellent primer for any games you might have missed over the years. While it probably doesn't feature that one obscure game you name-drop to pick up nerdy chicks, it covers a large amount of titles across various consoles and time periods -- it even has a few write-ups of indie games. If you ever wondered what the deal was with those Nippon Ichi strategy RPG's or wanted the skinny on the Ghosts 'n Goblins series, here's your site.

Air Pressure

TheDustin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:39:45 +0000

A Visual Novel about breaking up with your girlfriend? That's indie in more ways than one -- we're dipping into indie music territory here. This is a game for everybody who's been in a bad relationship that lingered on more than it should have, which should cover just about everybody in attendance. The backstory is vague enough that you can impose yourself into the role of the protagonist, who is struggling with ending a courtship that isn't exactly healthy. The game plays out as a series of conversations with the young lady supplemented by your own interior monologue. Occasionaly you're prompted to choose between two options, which usually either relent and placate her or push towards ending your entanglement. The game's short so exploring the various options doesn't take much time, and the dialogue is well written and easily identifiable with. The pixel art has a clean and appealing style to it but the tinny chip music wears thin after a while. Instead I'd recommend some early Elliott Smith to set the mood. With that in mind, give it a shot and come back for spoilers and musings. I'll promise to not pull out my acoustic guitar.

I tend to view things through the lens of addiction and have a penchant for junkie-folk so naturally when I saw this was about a bad relationship the drug corollary was evident. After exploring the various options I eventually came to the hospital ending which proved me right and made the connection explicit. This game isn't as much about addiction as it is about the difficulty of quitting an addiction. It's easy enough to cave into the girl's pleadings and follow the path of no resistance, but to completely rid yourself of her you have to constantly and consistently say no to her. The double entendres in the text also point to addiction and the protagonist's conflicted desire to leave. Hopefully if you play with this mindset it might clear up some of the more esoteric moments. If you have any alternate theories, feel free to post them in the comments section.

Sociopath Design

the99th — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:11:03 +0000

Jesse Schell has gotten a lot of attention lately for his snake-handling about extrinsic rewards devouring the surface of planet earth like so many nanomachines. However he took the opportunity at GDC, like so many controversial DICE speakers, to clear things up. He painted a very nice categorization of game designers, and being a game designer, I like to play with categorization schemes. According to Schell designers fall into 4 groups of intent:

Persuaders: not to be confused with what Ian Bogost talks about, this is closer to the creative director of the ad agency Bogost once worked at than the professor himself. These are people who think "how can I mass mind-control people into giving me their money?" and then DO it. More designers are adapting this mentality from their bosses and applying it to their own base of knowledge because it's what seems most professionally and economically advantageous. In paid-content there wasn't so much of an incentive to do this because the audience was niche (see Fulfillers below), but as things have become increasingly granulated and webbed-out, the audinece has shiften, and this mentality has become proportionally more lucrative and prevalent. This is how I'm designing these days because they pay me and I have a kid - did I just summarize the entire history of civilization?

Fulfillers: this constitutes the vast majority of game designers living and dead (including perhaps H.G Wells) and involves trying to please a niche expectation that the designer himself typically enjoys (and let's be honest here, it's 99% dudes designing these games). You want to make a procedurally generated action/puzzle/adventure game? Fucking great, Darius and I will play 200 goddamned hours of it.

Artists: Artists aren't in it for the money and they're not necessarily even in it for the joy, they're in it for the art. Joy and money can accompany art, but fuck it - it's art! Paolo Pedercini certainly falls into this category (along with Humanitarian) ,as did Danny Ledonne in the six months when he was a game desinger. Maybe Cactus is a dual-class Artist-Fulfiller, level 12 and 10 respectively. I'm sorry, he's multi-classed - Americans can Dual-Class and Europeans can Multi-Class, if I'm remember Baldur's Gate correctly.

Humanitarians: finally we come to the 200 bodhisattavas that will turn the tide at the end of the world and usher in an age of enlightenment. Humantiarian designers don't care about money, genre or even the art so much as Impact. Many designers who do projects commissioned by NGOs or foundations fall into this category. Jane McGonigal might be a perfect example, even if she is unwittingly being manipulated by Persuader designers running the World Bank. I mean no offense to her work as a designer and I do not doubt that her intentions are good, but the funding arrangements behind these works carry with them an inherent Persuasion. Here's where "persuasive games" in the Bogost-ian sense is co-opted by the Persuader mind-set seeking return on investment - in these games, so far, the ROI by the funding party comes in the form of persuasive impact. The impact sought by the designer, who believes that play can unlock and harness the inherent good in people, ends up being co-opted by the impact sought by the funding party.

Money is a game, I think we've clearly established that most fiat currency such as USD exists in precisely the same substrate as CafeCash, silicon baby!

So the question then becomes, how do we reconcile one game from the other? I think the reason Schell claims we must quickly "wake the hell up" is because almost all designers who think they are humanitarians are in fact being paid by Persuaders who aren't as hip to modern game design and see the actual designer as "skilled labor".

Consider games in a lense that they are inherently social rituals rather than confections consumed by individuals in the darkness of their gaming caves. In this schema of design, designers are determining the logic by which social paths thread. Single player games still have a social thread in that all the rules and content becomes a point of common experience for those who have "beaten it", giving them a common bond. In that model, we should consider carefully how we are pathing human behavior lest we be sociopathic ourselves...

Most of us don't want to dehumanize our audience at all, we want to hyper-humanize them, we want to set them free! Maybe we don't have the power to truly do that, but trying is a Schell of a lot better than sitting on the couch eating Cheetos.

Bottom line, no matter who you are, you need to figure out the money thing. Get your finances sorted out so you can stay in business and leverage a massive distribution capacity, things that Persuaders tend to focus on, and then apply those tools to your goals as a fulfiller, artist or humanitarian. Plot the social paths while being something more than a sociopathic plotter.

Platform Games

the99th — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:22:39 +0000

I've ranted on about the dark-side of platforms, and elsewhere I may have ranted about the Federal Reserve, but you've got to admit that draconic control of the currency is better than feudalism and that even egregious or inconsistent policy on a mostly open platform is better than the retail game biz. Maybe things are getting better, win-win-win (not to be confused with its non-buzz-worthy little brother: win-win). Take for example platform competition in social games, where hi5 is trying to frame itself as the friendlier, less capital-intensive girlfriend developers have been looking for. You just have to win their approval first.

Now we have this strategy game run by platform holders that isn't unlike the intransitive relationship underlying games like Starcraft: deployment flanks cost-effectiveness, cost swarms power, power outguns any deployment. With platforms this translates to distribution... uh, cost, and the power of the product is known as "quality". My favorite conspiracy blog sheds some interesting links, on just how spurious this quality may be, Playfish's games are ostensibly higher quality than Zynga's games but Zynga's games have more "quality" in the sense of power through the application of effective behavioral psychology to its Skinner box. This mind-controlling sort of quality is actually a fulcrum of distribution masquerading as quality, but that doesn't stop it from dominating revenues since WoW crawled out of the Swamp Of Sorrows.

As far as platform holders go, their choices have never been what ratio do they themselves pursue in their portfolios - unless they were Nintendo they never really had the werewithal to control that - instead their choices was what indirect mechanisms do they use to target a particular ratio. XBLA was like the Terran army, quality but not stellar quality, very good distribution, expensive to dev for but not so expensive. PSN was like the Protoss, not a lot of stuff, expensive to dev, really high quality (and they actually funded stuff). WiiWare was like the Zerg, and every game that didn't hit the 6000 unit pay-out threshold (whoops, was that confidential?) was like a Zergling splashed with a classic scream. The iPhone is like the Terrans but you can only use Goliaths, medics and firebats (I admit the analogy is being stretched). Facebook is like the Zerg if you played with only Zerglings using the anabolic gland upgrade for super-speed, so far at least. In Facebook, either your nuerohacks and/or quality is tight enough to blast you into the seven figs right after launch, or your zergling rush fails. Congratulations, by the way, to Steve Meretsky and co. for a very successful delivery.

So here we have hi5 trying to be closer to Terran, still a platform as wide open as Sasha Grey, but attempting to be as poised and thoughtful as Sasha Grey. Because in the wake of everyone trying the Zergling rush, the need to build more hatcheries (advertising budget) rose, and thus the rush becomes a bit saturated. This is a play to try and tap their 50 million users with a higher gross margin, either through higher conversions or cheaper reach, they'll see where the cards fall. 50 million is a number which at once incites sneers or awe, depending on whether or not you work in social games. Personally, I enjoy playing the Protoss, but I tend to play Zerg.

Where we will see platform strategy evolve in the future, perhaps in another 6 months considering how exploratory Facebook has been, is around the intersection of real quality and "quality" in terms of mind control and viral Zerg rushing. Game spam is the social equivalent of cheap-o nudie apps on the iPhone or shoddily produced games on a "premium" console. The classically trained game designer (as if we have a classical period already), someone such as Tadgh Kelly or even our own Señor Costik, might claim that the lines are being drawn more sharply, that quality as-we-know-it will win the day, because it has to goddamnit, because good must triumph over evil, because people are smart.

Hey, many individuals are smart, but to quote the late, great George Carlin: "people are fucking dumb".

Consider that civilizations are platforms and their rules mean to accomodate the proliferation of memes of a certain range of character, such that an underlying behavioral pattern will emerge - on average - in the population at large. Research like that of Mr. Hopson in the above linked article, or my own, will continue to refine these tentacles. In the process we will transcend the fuedal system of platform gating and go abstract, toward a system of mind-tunnels burrowed by Zynga et al. in homage to the Viet Cong. In the same way that control of land abstracted toward the control of currency, so too will platform power diffuse toward design, but not the kind of design you wanted. hi5's move, along with Buzz, suggests early positionings that will put pressure on the monolithic network and a premium on new, "innovative" ways to wrangle people up (in the sense that Credit Default Swaps are "innovative").

Beware the New World Order, it is here, it is private, it is "fun" - you will be monetized, resistance is futile. The conspiracy is our own, we click on our animal instincts. Living free in the Snow Crash is a game in itself, perhaps the ultimate.

I leave you with the sharpest bit from the Cryptogon rant:

"You might have been like me and never even heard of this FarmVille madness before today, but if we are to believe that 75.2 million people are spending any amount of time doing this…

Holy shit and sweet baby Jesus on a stick: What does that mean?

Has reality become such a mean and ugly bitch that tens of millions of people are searching for a functional society inside the screen? Why is a game about small scale agriculture the most popular game of all on Facebook? Do the people playing this game have access to safe, affordable, good tasting food?"

When the CIA sexually and physically abused children in their Project MONARCH experiments under the umbrella of MK-Ultra, they would induce trauma and then provide an escape, "somewhere over the rainbow" in which the victem would find an alternate personality. This technique is now being applied on a mass scale, the fiat-currency system provides trauma to everyone that participates and these games are the "cure".

Wavespark & Dragondot

TheDustin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:39:27 +0000

Crafting a game in under a week is hard work; making a game fun is harder still. Managing to pull off both with aplomb is by no means an easy feat, so I have to hand it to Mr. McCoy here. Every 168 hours this man graces us with another short-form game that isn't only just playable, but actually pretty fun. The game mechanics that are the crux of these two titles are solid and well designed. Admittedly the two games I'm highlighting have spheres for protagonists, but who plays indie games for sexy graphics anyways?

Wavespark is the lovechild of Excitebike/Truck and RunMan. It takes the positioning mechanic of Excitebike -- but instead of tilting a bike you merely have to land on a downwards slope -- and combines it with a satisfying sense of speed. It's a one button affair, press any key to increase your sphere's gravity. It's ultimately a test of timing and momentum. Land on a downwards slopes and you'll get a speed bonus, but land on an uphill section and you'll grind to a near-halt. It doesn't sound exciting on paper but trust me, it's an absolute blast. There's four modes of play, of which Time Attack is my favorite; the time restriction lends itself well to quick-play sessions for whenever you have a few minutes to kill. Once you get the ball rolling (Editor's Note: because putting these in somehow qualify as an excuse for a shitty joke) and get a hang of things you'll most likely get addicted to its simple yet charming gameplay. Now how about an iPhone version?

If the above sounds too Jay Is Games for your taste (which it shouldn't, you snob) Dragondot should give you a reason to break out your prosthetic Hyrulian ears. It's an action RPG that's in the vein of Game Boy Zelda titles or, say, Shining Soul for Game Boy Advance. You take control of a dragon, erm, dot and fight your way through screen after screen of enemy dots. It controls fairly well, imagine wielding a sword and Roc's Feather in LoZ and you'll have a good idea of combat. Despite the lack of innovation in the character designs the enemies have distinct movement and combat patterns. There's also a nice attention to detail; if you're savvy enough you can have enemies whack each other a la Wind Waker. The game exploits your hard-wired love of doled-out progression by having an RPG system in place that gives you extra health and the occasional attack to your solitary combo. It's pretty basic but good and stupid fun.

Both of these games aren't especially deep but are solid foundations for larger projects, should McCoy want to pursue these further. The quality of these weekly experiments have been consistently fun, so I'd keep an eye on this guy if I were you.

Costik Reacts to IGF Awards: Die, Motherfuckers

costik — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:43:59 +0000

I am weary. I am tired of being me. I am tired of being the angry middle-aged man of the game industry. I would like to hang it up, like an old coat, and shut it in the closet. But I guess I can't put it aside.

I attended the IGF Awards this evening. In general, I love the IGF. Not unreservedly, of course; it is not without flaw. But it is, by and large, a Good and Fine Thing, and has been instrumental in creating and sustaining independent games as a movement. I was quite looking forward to it.

You can find a video of the ceremony here.

And award winners here, since I'm not actually going to talk about that

My first intellectual discontinuity came when I approached the awards venue and discovered Steve Petersen, one of the designers of the Champions RPG, working to ensure that only VIPs got into the VIP line; apparently my speaker badge authorized me to sit in the VIP area. I elected to sit instead with the plebes.

I was basically okay through most of the proceeds, snarking to myself a bit at the lame scripted "jokes" of the presenters and the intellectual discontinuity created by their adoption of tuxedo and gown. A tux does not say "indie" to me. But I understand that to the average American it says "class," and perhaps this is understandable as some sort of external index of respect.

Cactus, by the way, was perfect.

When the presenters were swept off the stage to make room for some chickie from IGN (that lickspittle shih-tzu of the major publishers that sustains its existence by posting reworded press releases and raving about big-budget releases while providing only occasional and condescending coverage of indie games) I sighed deeply, but reminded myself that the IGF depends on corporate sponsorships, and no doubt had received a nice piece of change from this corporate entity in return for their right to grant, and brand, the IGF's most important award.

After some forgettable blather, we were then subjected to a video, presumably prepared by the sublime idiots at IGN, about what they claimed were the "top five indie games not in the top five indie games." This consisted of short gameplay videos from five imaginary games. These imaginary games were supposedly humorous, but consisted of a) really stupid game ideas, b) implemented in a really stupid way, with c) really stupid graphics. Haha. Indie games are stupid. (At 38:40 in the video linked above.)

Did ANYONE at IGN consider that they were basically totally dissing the games their spokesperson was just about to issue an award to?

Did ANYONE at CMP consider that they had, in exchange for a corporate sponsorship, just set up a situation that totally undermined the gravitas of the event as a whole?

Did ANY of the idiot audience members who tittered at this inane video realize that, in context, it was essentially insulting the whole enterprise of indie gaming?

I stalked from the room in fury.

I was the only person to do so.

I don't like living in my skin sometimes. Apparently, I was the only person in that room filled with thousands who was revolted and offended to the core. I am a fool.

I was about to write: We deserve better. But of course, I created no game last year that I could have submitted to the IGF, so it would be inappropriate for me to take on the mantle of "indie game creator" or to have the temerity to speak for those who are. But I can say they deserve better; they deserve to be treated with a degree of respect, and indeed, the whole structure of the IGF ceremonies, and the prominence it receives within the GDC awards as a whole, and even the noxious tuxedo-and-gown garb of its presenters, is calculated with the idea of promoting a degree of respect.

Why then should CMP, and for that matter IGN, however gormless they may be, think it remotely acceptable to undermine that respect with this jejune, unfunny, disrespectful, noxious, subversive, lame, and repulsive piece of juvenile "humor"?

Ha ha.

Die, motherfuckers.

And so to bed.

El Beso

the99th — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:41:40 +0000

In write-up of Daniel Benmergui's talk at GDC, it's mentioned that a "friend" showed him the poetry mechanic that he adapted for his game. That friend was Agustin Perez Fernandez and I know because I was there in the room rolling a J. His latest work could be his most defining yet, at least in terms of its artistic poise.

El Beso ("The Kiss") is a sort of performance art art-game, you wield the mouse as a lure for a sort of ethereal fluke draped in ribbons of light, trying to kiss against red squares to turn them blue and then grey, harvesting points. The dynamic is that these squares come in all sizes and vectors, overlapping and forcing you to dance your way through them. The opera track highlights this dance while sometimes giving an apophenic sense that the music is somehow responding to your actions, some actual procedural sound would have been an interesting feature to explore but it works. The opera also lends the game a certain air of, as the French say, "I don't know what". It's almost enough to make you pop your monacle.

After your first play through you'll notice some more things that make it come together as being more than just another experimental Jackson Pollack love explosion. The game times your overall session and doesn't really penalize you in a "game over" sense, but instead just slows you down, which affects your performance. So the better you dance with the mouse in-between the cascading overlaps of red squares, the better your score. You are the opera. Give that fat lady a kiss.