Franz Kafka Rolls In His Grave

Two new games today, and thoughts on one I’ve already posted.

Through the Looking Glass

News to report: my latest game, “Dimensions”, will be showcased at Silent Barn in Brooklyn as part of a live indie-arcade, alongside Cactus’ latest mysterious work. I’ll be there in person myself (having nothing better to do). My game is only a work in progress so far, and I plan on writing about it more once I’m finished with it. But for now, here’s the latest working build.

Also, for anyone in New York who reads this blog: http://myspace.com/thesilentbarn.

 

A Week of Kindness

Another week, pleasant dreamers, another game: Questions and Answers, another conversation-platformer that attempts to teach my QAYN gameplay in as natural a flow of tutorialisms as possible. This time I followed the advice of friend and consultant Kunal Gupta, who liked the one-button-at-a-time approach of Tutorial, but thought I ought to empower the player a bit more from the start. If my games are all about seeing conversations as battles, he pointed out, and Questions are the player’s means of attack, why was I starting them off with the purely-defensive Answers, instead?

Part of my motivation for this was because of how fond I am for games that start the player off at an extreme disadvantage. In Prince of Persia, the player begins without a sword, and must explore the trap-laden dungeon to find one before confronting the close-by guard. Traditionally, Metal Gear games begin by surrounding Snake with enemies, and only non-lethal weapons at his disposal, or none at all. Even the Super Mario games start the player off small and vulnerable. But what I missed from all those examples was the aspect of choice– none of those games force you to confront an enemy before you’re ready. And in the case of Kojima and Miyamoto’s games, the player may start out unarmed, but they aren’t entirely defenseless– Snake starts out with punches and kicks, while Mario always has his classic jump.

Therefore, Kunal was right– if I’m going to teach players how to use my conversation-controls, I have to arm them with the most powerful option first: Questions. That’s how this new game came about, and I’m pretty happy with the logical flow it carries. I believe the current build might even be 100 percent bug free, but I’m not crossing my fingers yet. Until next time, pleasant dreamers, never question the power of questions…

24 Madness

I spent this last weekend alongside my friend Kunal Gupta, who along with Jennifer Walshe and others engaged in a truly singular piece of performance art at Sculpture Center in Queens that gives new meaning to the term “avant-garde”. At the same time, I busied myself on a personal project of my own– my newest game, Tutorial. The first results of my latest skills in animating with my Flash games, I quickly wrote, coded and built this game in an off-and-on 24 hour stretch of ActionScript programming and dialogue-driven game design. It’s still got some bugs here and there, but they’re all minor aesthetic ones, as far as I know. And now, since I’ve had little sleep in the time I cooked this up, I believe I’ll leave any other thoughts of mine for another post. Until next time, pleasant dreamers, never underestimate a starving artist…

Like a Rolling Stone

Well, pleasant dreamers, I was going to write this article as part of my E3 meditations, but since so much time has passed since then, it might as well stand on its own. I’d feel bad about making you wait (if any of you were still out there reading, anyway), but as it stands, it’s nice enough to publish a piece like this around Bloomsday (although I missed that by a day, too). Suffice to say, however, that the continuing thoughts I’ve had following the trailer-debut of Fumito Ueda’s The Last Guardian are broad enough to stand without any glint of superficial timeliness. Furthermore, while I’ve been away at revising and reworking my game Limbo (which happens to be the main reason I haven’t posted since last week) those thoughts have arrive somewhat refined and revised as well, as though the act of game-design itself has helped clarify my feelings about a certain gaming trope I’ve been noticing lately.

But before I talk about Ueda’s game, my own game, or even the yearly festivities of Bloomsday, I want to talk about something else entirely: The Come Out & Play festival, and what it has to do with the difference between games & sports, and what that difference has to do with the social atmosphere of gaming in general.

What Kind of Week Has It Been? Part Two: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here…

Halfway through the road of our lives, pleasant dreamers, I found myself in a dense forest– Just kidding. But if you think for a moment that image is unrelated to current events in games, you might want to check out one of Electronic Art’s latest titles: “Dante’s Inferno”, which they announced at last week’s E3. I’m a big fan of Alighieri’s work, and I’ve long considered one day adapting his trilogy of epic Catholic poetry into a game myself. After all, my games are all about interactive dialogue, and what is “The Divine Comedy” but a journey through the afterlife with Virgil as your tour guide?

What Kind of Week Has It Been? Part One: Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss…

Well, another E3 has come and gone, with news, rumors and announcements aplenty. Whenever this time of year rolls around I always find myself a little melancholy, a little left out– while we starving artist folk might wax eloquent about the high minded ideals of indie-gaming, witnessing all the buzz and attention garnered by the Triple A people always makes one feel like you’re on the outside looking in. Granted, it’s not like there isn’t an insanely hypocritical degree of hierarchies within the indie-gaming community, as well, but at least most of the attention there is somewhat insular. But when the mainstream press and television coverage on G4 is brought into the mix, all the discrepancies come floating to the surface, and it’s no longer possible to dismiss the vague subtleties of your useless, unwitnessed efforts. If a tree falls down in a forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, we question of it produces sound. What sorts of questions should we ask of artists, then, whose work go unnoticed? Does a game unplayed count as a game?

Ah, fuck it. I could keep on with this depressive soliliquizing and whatnot, but you all know why I’m really here, pleasant dreamers– Just as I predicted back when I wrote on a blog that people gave a damn about (for whatever reason), it turns out that Hideo Kojima is, in fact, writing, designing and directing a new Metal Gear Solid game: MGS Peace Walker. However, the details of this new title are noteworthy enough beyond my usual Kojima fanboyishness, and alongside some other announcements of the past week, it merits another of my rare returns to this Bob-forsaken blog…

Return of the Dead Eye (Seriously– I’m Rather Tired)

I’m not a very good blogger, when you get right down to it. I can go for days, weeks, even months at a time without bothering to write a new article or update anything. While it’s true that I enjoy the instant gratification of posting something up on the web, it’s a short-lived thrill– after all the effort put into writing something, there’s seldom much reward of attention or feedback. That’s to be expected, thanks to the saturation of all the different writers out there– the thought-polution of the blogosphere. Still, every once in a while one must return from the ether and bring tidings of some kind. In this case, I come with 4 items which may warrant the attention of all you pleasant dreamers out there (all three of you, as far as I know).

Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other

Patrick McGoohan, star, creator and mastermind of The Prisoner, one of television’s premier experiments in thought provoking entertainment, has been dead for about a month. Having been turned onto McGoohan’s trippy, Kafka-esque spy-thriller long before, I’d have written about it if I hadn’t been busy about the business of trying to actually get a job somewhere or another. But seeing as I’m feeling just about as hopeful as Number 6 usually is at the end of one of his abortive attempts to escape the Village, I fugured there’s no time like the present to take a second look at this seventeen episode masterpiece, and as I’ve been rewatching each instalment (and trying to figure out exactly what order they should be played in) I stumbled across a strange realization I’m embarassed never to have noticed before.

Patrick McGoohan wasn’t just an actor, writer or director– he was also a game designer.

48 Hour Misogyny

 

Well, the first annual Global Game Jam has finished, and I’ve managed to get two games into it at once. Working steadily over 48 hours at the floor of ITP, at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I collaborated on a zombie text-adventure game, and whipped up a quick, heavily re-coded new dialogue game of my own, another kind of text-adventure. You can click the links to follow to the GGJ site and download the games, or just click the picture above to play the game I developed solo, if you’re willing to accept the lag-time of image-loading…

As for my game, I’ve decided to invert the usual themes I deal with when it comes to the narrative of a prisoner and an authority figure– here, the player gets to be the executioner instead of the executed, and must either talk a series of identical women into marrying a king, or chop off their heads. It’s up to you, pleasant dreamers, if this is simply a ludologically better position, or whether I’m venting some frustration towards the fairer sex. I really have no idea anymore. If I had more time, maybe I would’ve tried to weave together a mature, sophisticated take on the Arabian Nights inspiration, and created a tale truly worthy of Scheherezade. As it stands, however, I think this might be just a little more enjoyable than the games I’ve made in the past, even if it is also several times more mind-boggling.

As always, pleasant dreamers, always remember to get 8 hours of sleep a day, even in the midst of marathon game-design. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to have any pleasant dreams…