Blog discoveries for February

Game Criticism

Press Pause to Reflect
   » "If This Is an Open World, Why Are All the Doors Closed?"

Links

Laughing Squid

The Last Book

Last weekend, I attended the second annual Global Game Jam at NYU. The Game Jam is a sort of worldwide endurance/speed game-development event in which teams come together and in the course of 48 hours conceive, design, and produce an entire game. The results tend to be quick, dirty, and a little rough around the edges, but often innovative and off-the-wall.

This year, the theme was "Deception," and in the GMT -5:00 time zone, the design constraints were "Rain, a Plain, or Spain." You can check out all the games created for the event at the GGJ website.

I'd like to present our team's game: an action/strategy game for the iPhone called The Last Book.



In The Last Book, civilization has been destroyed by a neverending rainfall. Everything, it seems, has been washed away. Generations after the onset of the deluge, you are the Librarian, tasked with protecting the last book in existence, the only remaining example of the written word. Keep the book dry by collecting and diverting the falling rain, and do your best to hold back the flood.



The rain falls relentlessly, wearing down whatever it touches. Play by arranging pots to collect the water and protect your structure from damage. As the pots get full, you can dump them safely out in the wells. Over time, your pots will wear down, too, so use your kilns to fire up new ones. Protect your kilns, also, because the rain will quickly put them out if they get wet.

Just hold out until the clouds break (two minutes) to collect your reward.

And at all costs, don't let any rain fall on the Book!



Controls: Tap the pots to move them. Select the brick you want to place the pot on, or tap a well to empty the pot. Up to three emptied pots will be stored in each well; tap the well again to retrieve a pot. Tap a kiln that's fired up to start a new pot, then tap it again to remove the pot when it's done.

Currently, in order to play The Last Book, you must have a Mac with the iPhone SDK installed. Download the package and compile the game file in Xcode to play.

For those who are unable to try it out personally, here's a video showing the gameplay:



The Last Book was made with a five-person team, which we christened Brainfall Studios. It was a wonderful group to work with, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to get to know them. Here are the credits:

Design, Story: Jess Haskins
Level Design: Ray Reilly
Programming: Ulf Schwekendiek
Art: R.M. Sean Jaffe
Music & Sound: Justin Mathews



(The team from left to right: Sean, Ray, Ulf, Jess, and Justin).

We had a great time, and we're all interested in continuing to work on the game to flesh it out and eventually release it on the app store. I'll be sure to let you know about it when we do!

For now, here's the link to the game's page on the GGJ site: The Last Book.

Blog discoveries for January

Game Developers

In the Games of Madness
» "How Gameplay and Narrative kill Meaning in 'Games'"

Game Industry

New York Gamedev
» "A new year, a new decade, and a new blog!"

Drink

Art and Tea
» "Saturday Morning Tea"

Grinding for glory

In Upgrade Complete!, you play a Galaga-style shooter to blast enemies and collect money for upgrades in order to max out your game — not just your ship, but everything from the music and graphics to menu buttons to the copyright notice. You even have to buy the shop screen and preloader before you can load up the game. Not only a cheeky parody of mindless grinding games, it's actually well-balanced and surprisingly fun to play.

Blog discoveries for November

Game Criticism

Critical Distance

Game Developers

Click Nothing
   » "On Auteurship in Games"

Ludus Novus
   » "Six Months of Games"

New York

Loungerati
   » "Barfly's Beat: TNT - Hendrick's Gin"

New Neil

I've belatedly discovered that the entire second season of the hilarious Zelda parody webseries The Legend of Neil is out, and even better, it's still funny.

Roots to robots

It has been fascinating to follow the evolution of Amanita Design's work from the original Samorost 1 through to their latest offering, Machinarium. The first, while it introduced an innovative visual style and type of gameplay that inspired a slew of imitators, was formally little more than a loosely associated collection of hallucinatory set pieces. Machinarium, by contrast, is a much more mature and focused game. Samorost 2 was an important intermediate step, utilizing motifs from the original game and just beginning to rationalize that surreal, oneiric world by introducing elements like characters, plot, spatial continuity, and logical causal relationships. Machinarium takes the final step and brings us to a world that is solid and grounded, with rules and interlocking parts that fit together like — well, like a machine.

In Samorost 1, nothing was grounded — not even the ground.

It's like the druggy haze of Samorost 1 was already starting to clear in Samorost 2, and now with Machinarium Amanita has clambered out of the beanbag, combed its hair, put on a suit and tie, and gone out into the real world. Interestingly, the references to hallucinogenic substances that peppered the Samorost series (the name "Amanita" refers to a type of toxic mushroom, which is also the studio's logo) are largely absent from Machinarium, and the earthy roots, furry forest creatures, gnomes, and cosmic little green men of Samorost have been replaced by an industrialized metal cityscape of dive bars, jails, factories, and bombs, populated by rusty robots and hunks of junk, cops and crooks and gamblers and beggars. Is this what the world looks like when you come down?

The brave new world.

Paralleling this aesthetic evolution is a complementary formal one. Samorost 1's "click anywhere and things happen" mechanic has been gradually whittled down to a more traditional system of agency, and in Machinarium the player directly controls the main character, a charming tin-can robot, who walks, stretches, collects and manipulates items within his immediate sphere of influence. (Except for during the first two minutes, that is, where the player acts on the environment at large in order to bring the pieces together to assemble the robot in the first place — a final transition from the old ways to the new.) Gone is the out-of-body dissociative experience of Samorost 1, where the player's and main character's motivations were aligned, but their actions disjointed: the player operated directly on the environment while the sprite sat down and watched, with the player in the role of an unseen godlike manipulator, or maybe the world itself. It was the perfect gameplay model for what represented essentially a really groovy trip.

Sitting back and taking it all in.

It would have been interesting to see that mechanic developed further, but Amanita chose the opposite route and made the game world and mechanics more concrete, not less — and Machinarium is definitely the stronger for it. It's a rich, tightly-constructed game, made with purpose and clear direction. I would love to see Amanita — or someone else — go down the other path someday, though. It's perhaps a greater challenge to make a sustained, meaningful experience out of the whimsical illogic and disembodied agency that characterized Samorost 1. Can the player's sense of identity be even further shaken? Can the bounds of cause and effect be further strained? Can the resulting journey cohere and add up to something more than a succession of novel and entertaining images?

The first denizen of Samorost you encounter: a toked-out dude with his hookah.

Amanita seems to have shelved the hookah for now, and I'm glad to follow them out of the wild and into this exciting new urban junkscape. But I wouldn't mind going back occasionally into that wild forest, just for a little while. Just one more hit...

Blog discoveries for October

Game Developers

Critical Smack
   » "Stochastic Thoughts: The Trials of Hardcore PC Gaming"


Design, Tech, Advertising

Notebook


Nude & Erotic Art

Yimmys Yayo


New York

Cultural Capitol
   » "On the Salon at the Players Club (and Brian Newman @ Duane Park)"

Pixel pushing

Small Worlds by David Shute. Technically a platformer. Less about running and jumping than the thrill of discovery, or uncovering.

When game design philosophies collide

Tale of Tales makes non-linear, narrative, exploratory "art games" that largely cast off the trappings of traditional games (rules, goals, challenges). Frank Lantz of area/code is a vocal proponent of the idea that video games need to be more "gamelike," and that designers should focus on games as formal systems of challenges. Tale of Tales interviews Frank Lantz.

Machinarium is here!

Machinarium was just released on Friday, and it's bigger, longer, and better than anything Amanita Design has done before. It's got gorgeous visuals, an intriguing world, well-constructed gameplay, and a truly stunning soundtrack.

I'll elaborate on my impressions of the game in another post, but for now, I just want to remind everyone that it's time to go and play it. Go buy it now, or try the demo first if you really need convincing.

New releases from Tale of Tales

Continuing in its line of artful, boundary-pushing not-quite-games, Tale of Tales this month released Fatale, an "interactive vignette" inspired by Oscar Wilde's 1894 play Salomé.

Explore a living tableau filled with references to the legendary tale and enjoy the moonlit serenity of a fatal night in the orient. Fatale offers an experimental play experience that stimulates the imagination and encourages multiple interpretations and personal associations.



There's also The Path, released earlier this year, a meandering, introspective horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood in which six sisters wander in a foreboding forest and one by one lose their innocence. Completely open-ended, the game eschews goals and challenges and invites the player to simply explore and experience.

Six sisters live in an apartment in the city. One by one their mother sends them on an errand to their grandmother, who is sick and bedridden. The teenagers are instructed to go to grandmother's house deep in the forest and, by all means, to stay on the path! Wolves are hiding in the woods, just waiting for little girls to stray.

But young women are not exactly known for their obedience, are they? Will they be able to resist the temptations of the forest? Will they stay clear of danger? Can they prevent the ancient tale from being retold?

Playing Pure Hidden

For my assignment to play a new kind of game I'd never played before, I played the 60-minute demo version of Pure Hidden, a hidden object game with interludes of other casual puzzle games and interactive toys. (The website also contains a light browser-based version to try.) It was my first time with a hidden object game, and I was pleasantly surprised. I really rather enjoyed playing it.

The basic goal of the game is to locate and click on objects hidden within a scene. Unlike some hidden object games which present a cluttered room or other physical space, the images in Pure Hidden are more like 2-d collages, so the items can be silhouettes, outlines, or transparent overlays, irrespective of solidity and scale.



The game has two modes, “score” and “zen,” and in the latter mode can be played meditatively, for relaxation and pleasure. Hidden picture games live and die by their imagery, and Pure Hidden has beautiful images and very high production values. The smooth visuals and well-designed soundscapes create a very pleasing sensual experience, which is what makes the zen mode appealing even without the challenge of formal limits. I chose to play in the score mode, which introduces pressure to perform in two main areas, speed and accuracy.

In each themed stage there are about 20 items total to find, but your list only contains about half a dozen items at a time. You must click on the listed objects in the scene to clear them and make space for a new item to appear on your list. Clicking anywhere on the screen that does not contain one of the listed objects will incur an accuracy penalty to your score. Objects are for the most part easily recognizable with few ambiguities, although there were occasional pitfalls – for example, a level that contained both a watch and a stopwatch (clicking on the stopwatch when only the watch was on the list incurred a penalty), or the inclusion of cultural items that might not be universally recognizable, like maki in a Japanese-themed scene (which I probably would not have been familiar with if not for all those hours logged rolling them up in Katamari Damacy).

In case of any uncertainty, you must balance the risk of a false click against the time you spend deliberating and searching. Indiscriminate clicking in the hopes of “hitting something” is not a successful strategy and will only tank your score. It is helpful to try to keep several objects in mind as you scan the screen rather than hunting for one at a time. It is also important to note the location of any distinctive objects that you spot – if they are not yet on the list, it will be easier to find them when they do appear.




In between the hidden object levels are several other types of minigames and non-game activities. Generally, these lack the artistic polish of the hidden object levels and are less engaging – they come across as generic and familiar without any innovative twist or even the basic sense-pleasure that might make the experience novel or worthwhile. In one, you must click on a bunch of fast-moving sheep to make them jump over a fence without hitting it; in another, you must rotate a series of pipes to make them connect in a continuous line; in another, you play with a very simple musical toy, popping a series of bubbles to produce sound samples.

These are all good, basic mechanisms that have been used to produce highly successful and engaging casual games, but Pure Hidden doesn’t do much with them to justify the effort. It would have been preferable if Pure Hidden lived up to its name and was just purely hidden images, because the mixed-bag minigames dilute the game’s core strength: attractive, visually interesting hidden object collages with objects that are appealing, recognizable, and just difficult enough to find to create a challenge (with or without formal scoring).


(Reposted from Bluespace, my academic design blog)

You gotta do what you gotta do

You Have to Burn the Rope, a very short game with very well-defined goals. Do what you have to do, then sit back to enjoy end credits that are longer than the game itself. You've earned it, hero!

If you've got a MacBook, but you really wanted an iPhone...

I found this slightly freaky Processing game that uses your MacBook's built-in Sudden Motion Sensor (intended to detect jarring movements that could potentially damage your hard drive) as an accelerometer to play the kind of tilting ball puzzle game you'd typically find for your iPhone. If you want to risk your precious, fragile hardware by waving it around manically in the air, this is the game you've been waiting for.

Space Patrol

(Reposted from Bluespace, my academic design blog)

The Blue Beanie

The Blue Beanie is a new game by digital artist Daphne Lim, a student at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, with music by Mark Holdaway. Inspired by Samorost, it's lovely new addition to the genre, a brief but beautifully executed piece with a gentle atmosphere of whimsy and woodland fantasy.

Thanks to Monalena for the tip.

Games on stage

The Brick Theater in Brooklyn is hosting an event all this month called Game Play, a series of performances and game nights that meld video games and theater. There will be machinima mash-ups, Rock Band karaoke, interactive plays, group MMORPG sessions, and a chiptune dance party.





What I'm really excited for is Adventure Quest, a play by Sneaky Snake Productions based on the classic Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games of the 80's, like King's Quest and Monkey Island.

The town of Perilton has been invaded by an evil wizard, and only our hero can save it! Cheer as he fights for the hand of the mayor's daughter! Gasp as he infiltrates the bloodthirsty Octopus Cult! Watch as he meticulously collects inventory items! Shift uncomfortably in your seat as the narrative gradually implodes! Glance around nervously as characters are brutally murdered for no particular reason! Despair as your faith in a meaningful, ordered universe is shaken! Evoking the Golden Age of home computer gaming, Adventure Quest is both a nostalgic treat and a glimpse into the yawning Void.

For a taste of that classic gaming flavor, the creators designed a brief "walkthrough" for Time Out New York to introduce the world of the play. It makes me wish they'd done a real game, even if only a short one.





You are standing before of the Castle of Perpetual Delight. Blocking your path is a gloomy-looking centaur.

You are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a magnifying glass.







There's also Thank You But Our Princess Is in Another Castle: Four Live-Action Machinima Theater Pieces.

Utilizing World of Warcraft, Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto 4, Machinima Theater Auteur Eddie Kim presents four classical theater texts, as performed by online video game characters manipulated by gamers live on stage. Video games as digital puppetry! Technicians will use several X-Box 360 consoles and laptops linked to each other and to gamers over the internet to control digital characters in real-time in front of an audience. See the stories of Niobe and the Japanese poet, Ono no Komachi as never before. A digital movement piece, chiptunes interludes and a version of Alvin Lucier's legendary "I am Sitting in a Room" also will be presented.

You had me at the title.

I'll be attending Adventure Quest this Saturday, and I'm tempted to check out some of the other events, too. It looks like a great line-up.

Get your Machinarium now

Machinarium, the highly anticipated new game by Amanita Design (creators of Samorost), is due out in October 2009, and is available for pre-order now. Pre-ordering will get you $3 off the regular price of $20, as well as a "pre-order pack" containing a selection of hi-res images and mp3s from the game.

My God, it's full of sh--

This is the City of Work.





Here you can test yourself at the Human Potential Institute, check out the ideas for sale from the Think Tank on Idea Island, or keep on top of your world with some informative and educational Charts.





The City of Work is the vision of artist and MIT administrative worker Michael Lewy, who uses Powerpoint and architectural modeling software to map out bureaucratic dystopias using the absurd, dehumanizing language of productivity and corporate-speak. The self-absorbed excesses of office-drone culture are often parodied, but Lewy's work eschews the lighthearted comedy of dorky bosses and cubicle antics to instead evoke the more nightmarish prospect of a frightening collective descent into utter senselessness.





The book Chart Sensation gathers all of Lewy's strange graphs and Powerpoint artwork into one delightfully baffling collection, so you can take your time pondering the secrets revealed by illustrative charts like the one below.






Less tongue-in-cheek, unfortunately, is this apparently earnest 27-page design document for PepsiCo's pricey new logo, which was redesigned by branding agency Arnell Group last year at an estimated total cost of hundreds of millions of dollars (over a million for the actual design, plus the cost of replacing all of Pepsi's branded material with the updated logo). When I saw it, I was immediately reminded of Lewy's work.





While most people responded with a collective yawn at the result of that protracted and expensive five-month process, shrugging it off as an Obama logo clone or forming their own mental associations that Pepsi probably didn't intend, Arnell's design document, entitled "Breathtaking", reveals where all that time and money was spent — drawing arcane diagrams to demonstrate the new logo's deep cosmic connections to life, the universe, and everything.





The document was "leaked" from PepsiCo this week, almost certainly intentionally, since it's quickly become the fascination of the blogosphere and provided loads of free publicity for the newly transcendent brand. Bravo. (I refer you to the title of this post, which ought to make sense by now.) The document is indeed hilarious, a true masterwork.





You can read the full thing here.

Via the Consumerist; more from Gawker and Advertising Age.

I am unmoved by Pepsi's breathtaking show of mystical connectedness to divine perfection. When a beverage company takes pains to demonstrate how its brand identity is inextricably linked to Satanic soul trafficking, that is when I become a loyal drinker for life.





Years later this ARG, the first I ever encountered and the only one I ever paid attention to, still inhabits my consciousness, even though the game itself was judged something of a flop. A few of the game's sites still exist, though most seem to have gone — including the travel agency website where you could book trips to destinations like Devil's Island, Valhalla, and Babel, which can only be visited now courtesy of the wayback machine. There was also one that alluded to the demonic significance of the stars, horn, and other elements of the Stella logo, but I can't for the life of me find it. Oh, well...perfection has its price.

Choose your own vignette

Game designer Daniel Benmergui of Ludomancy has been experimenting with some very interesting stuff. In some brief posts on the subjects of Experimental Gameplay and Defying Genres, he sounds the call for a radical departure from run of the mill games and tried and true mechanics, and his growing collection of innovative, unclassifiable game prototypes in no way belies these intentions.

I wish I were the moon looks to be the inauguration of a new genre. (Perhaps an inevitable side effect of successfully defying genres is creating them.) The game consists of a small scene of movable characters and objects, and how you manipulate them determines the outcome of the story. This is done with a camera which can take snapshots of the elements in the scene and place them in a new position, a kind of copy-paste mechanic. If there is a goal at all, it is to replay the game different ways in order to discover all of the possible endings — but Daniel freely admits that even this is a "gimmick", and the real point is simply to explore the emotional experience of the game.

While the underlying mechanic is unusual, the style is equally singular, with its simple pixellated graphics, dreamy, poetic atmosphere, and quiet, understated storyline, which is inspired by Italo Calvino's story The Distance of the Moon.





Storyteller is the next game to build on this mechanic. The gamespace is a triptych of three moments in time that tell a miniature fairy tale, and the characters can be moved around in any of the three timeframes to instantly change the outcome of events.





Third is The Trials, which allows for the elements to be duplicated instead of simply moved. This game, like its predecessors, explores themes of conflict, longing, and contentment.





Finally, there is Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans, which also showcases similar themes (love, loneliness, loss), but with a new mechanic: you play an alien (?), floating around the city strategically cutting the lines that join people and letting new ones form. Some may find true love, and some may be left in the cold. As with the other games, this one is about exploring the consequences of your choices.





And this is why I suggest that Daniel has created a new genre: Gregory Weir of Ludus Novus has created (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors, an intriguing game modeled on the style of I wish I were the moon, with a storyline inspired by Lovecraft. You play a tentacled sea creature who is revealed for the first time to the humans of the world above, its attention attracted by the enchanting colors of balloons, and the choices you make determine the outcome of this tricky first contact scenario.

Gregory has been kind enough to share an illuminating postmortem of the game in place of his usual column on GameSetWatch.

Last night I dreamed I was an immense beast, floating in darkness. I knew nothing of the surface world until I fell in love with the majesty of colors.

Fourth annual Halloween roundup

Happy Halloween, all. Here are some offerings in the spirit of the season. Enjoy.

Exhibits

A large collection of vintage Halloween postcards on Flickr.
Via Mira y Calla.






Spookshows.com is a treasure of vintage things suitable for Halloween, like this collection of vintage poison labels, or poster art advertising spook shows.
Via Mira y Calla.







The Art of Mourning is an excellent collection of antiques representing various funeral and mourning mementos and paraphernalia. There are also some articles about mourning art and practices through time.
Via Regina Noctis.









Cabinet Magazine visits the Museum of the Dead, a small church in Palermo that curates a startling display of preserved corpses.

There are no tickets and no reductions for this visit to the underworld. A fat, unspiritual, greasy monk just takes the money and throws it into a basket with unexpected abruptness. A guidebook I buy later dresses up the visit and, after a serious discussion of burial customs in different cultures starting in antiquity, talks about all the artworks lining the stairs going down into the catacombs. I don't notice these important paintings. It seems a minimal space, stripped bare of all pretense that what lies ahead is anything but grim.






Games

Ben Leffler is the talented designer behind the spectacular Exmortis series of games (1 and 2; there's also the horror short Purgatorium). I had hoped there would be an Exmortis 3 ready to offer you for Halloweentime this year, but no, it's still in development. There is, however, Goliath the Soothsayer. Rejoice. Play.
Walkthrough at Jay Is Games.





There's also a new sequel to The Bat Company's horror series, Atrocitys: Atrocitys 2: The Revenge. Point-and-click scarefest. Be warned, subtlety is not in their toolbox.





Scuttlebuggery is the latest flash oddity from super-stylish gothic design studio My Pet Skeleton. It's sort of like a game of liquid soccer played between beetles with drops of absinthe and formaldehyde. Is that clear?





In Zombie Inglor, you are an ordinary man who has been bitten by a zombie, and you have fifty days to find a cure. Saving the village from the zombie infestation would be nice, too. This is a neat little RPG game with adventure and combat elements, with some nice touches like day/night changes, weather, and fully voiced characters.
Via Regina Noctis.





How will you fare when the outbreak occurs and undead roam the streets? Take the Zombie Survival Quiz to test your fitness, wits, temperament, and knowledge.





Video

It's time for the annual pilgrimage to Childrin R Skary for the newest works from this prolific gothic animation studio. Check out the films playing in the theater, or visit author Katy Towell's non-Childrin site, Crookedsixpence.com, where you can find more movies like the gorgeously spooky Never Woke Up.







For a whole pile of Halloween-themed animation, check out Newgrounds Presents Halloween 2008, a Flash film fest and competition from the popular Flash gaming site with ten cash prizes for the best entries. Some notable entries:

The Dark Room is slow, dreamlike, and gory, and features some very nice background locations. Aside from that, it's hard to tell just what happened.





While it may not feature the slickest animation around, Vampiric Wit is a short, humorous entry that wins points for its clever premise.





.Alice. is a moody little piece, short on plot, that aims to recreate the effect of a horror movie haunted highway scene. Very cinematic in style.





Fear.net is a horror-themed video site that offers a mix of full movies, clips and excerpts, shows, shorts, and other videos. It's a slasher/thriller/horror lover's playground. Try the Halloween FEAR Fest for some seasonal fun.
Via Regina Noctis.

ADDENDUM: io9 has just posted a great list of several places to find free horror movies online in addition to Fear.net.

For more, check the "Halloween" label for past years' offerings.