Would you stand above me?

This is a quick post, and not much more. Many months ago, I sequestered myself into game-design seclusion to produce my next work. In that long stretch of monastic isolation, I had hoped to create a game with a randomly generated map of levels, so that every time you played the game, it would be a brand new experience, and while it was simple enough to create the randomization element, providing a procedural-memory system for those spawned-levels eluded me. It’s why I went for so long without finishing any games, or making any posts here. My vow of ludological silence only broke a few short weeks ago, when I finished my “Film Socialisme”, “Maskovy” and “Debate!” games for Wonders in the Dark and Babycastles @ Showpaper, and at that time I had no hopes of ever returning to that planned system of procedural level-memories. For the foreseeable future, I considered it a lost cause.

Then I changed my mind and finished the damn thing.

I only used “Maskovy” here as a test subject, and don’t really consider this the “definitive” version of the game– granted, I think it works better with this, but the non-memory system was sort of what I had in mind for the game thematically speaking. Still, either version is cool. With this under my belt, I can finally set to work on the games I’d been planning for my gaming-monastery time, but had escaped my capabilities. Until next time, pleasant dreamers, remember that the title was either going to be this or “Forget Me Not”, and I’d argue this is the more honest pop-music reference.

This past weekend I’ve been able to showcase two of my newest games over at the Manhattan location of the Babycastles Arcade, one for a set of Halloween-themed games curated by my “Waffle” collaborator Arthur Ward, the other a stand-alone game in the spirit of tomorrow’s Election Day that, had it not been for some unexpected trouble with Metro-North, would’ve been there at the same time as my “Ministry of Silence” collaborator Charley Miller’s latest version of his presidential election board-game. All in all, the experience was a little more stressful than I would’ve liked– “Maskovy“, my spooky-game, worked fine, but “Debate!” had a few bugs I would’ve liked to have discovered in time. Still, as I try to do, I’m now here to deliver a kind of post-mortem on the events and the games themselves, for anyone out there who’s interested in playing and/or reading about them.

I should first say that these games, while far from perfect, represent a step-up for me in terms of creating more believable interactive conversations, as for the first time I’ve been able to put both the player and computer on the same level by having them play by the same rules. In the past, the player has had to operate under more restrictions– time-limits, losing health for wrong answers, charging up to choose the next move– that the computer has been immune to. Now, they’re equal– when the computer asks a question, it has to charge up to one, and possibly drain away all its health, etc. As such, the games are now not only more balanced, but a new element of strategy enters into the plan– it’s possible to win not just by asking enough questions to chip away the enemy’s health like attacks in an RPG, but simply by answering questions correctly and staying one step ahead, waiting for them to essentially commit verbal hara-kiri.

That aspect is especially in keeping with the first game that I showcased over at Babycastles, the spooky-game “Maskovy”, which I created specifically for the event and the public-arcade venue itself. When I learned that Arthur was going to curate an event for Halloween, I thought it would be interesting to try and create something for that specific theme, something with the same brevity and simplicity from the story “Knock”, by Frederic Brown, that later inspired Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend”: 

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

Originally, the game was going to be as simple as that– an old man in a room, answering a knock at the door, or a ringing telephone (perhaps a ringing door-bell? it’s still a possibility in the future). However, my plans took a strange turn when the news hit of all the recent student bullyings leading to kids taking their own lives– I was never targeted as severely as any of these poor souls, thankfully, but I could understand the dilemma just enough to want to express something on that matter in game-form. Obviously, however, it’d be rather distasteful to explicitly mine that material specifically for a mere quickie-Flash game (perhaps it’s suitable for a longer, larger and more genuinely thoughtful work with full resources and backing behind it), so in order to approach the idea with equal amounts of sincerity and care, I decided it’d be necessary to put a figurative mask over the subject matter. In the end, of course, that turned into something fairly literal…

“Maskovy”, among other things, is about cult mentality, about the peer pressure of conformity and trading one identity for another in a world where the only path to escape is a good ol’ fashioned quietus over the bare bodkin bed of classic gaming spikes. It’s a tentative exploration of the notion of suicide itself in a gaming form– if death and lives are such cheap concepts in most works nowadays, does it become more meaningful, more consequential if the only way to restart the whole process is to literally depend upon some kind of reincarnation? By no means is it even remotely a substantial enterprise, containing only a handful of randomly spawned rooms, two characters and a very minimalist set of graphics and conditions (it relies very much on the Cat People/Bad and the Beautiful rule of shadows = scary, or at least stylish), but it’s all there more or less by design.

While making it, I started considering “Maskovy” not quite as a traditional game but as some theater-of-the-absurd experiment in ludological form. Perhaps you could say the same thing about the current political landscape, and the game I’ve made in its spirit, “Debate!”, which is another experiment for me as it marks an attempt to actually make a conversation-game for two players, instead of one. In theory, it should be pretty simple– just take the control of the opponent-character out of the hands of the computer, and into another player’s button. Already my new level-playing-field system pretty much makes the game a 2 player event to begin with (one side just happens to be automated), so figuring out this should’ve been a piece of cake.

Guess what, though? It kinda wasn’t.

In the end, I was unable to figure out how to have the players controlled by separate buttons, and had to settle with the idea that they’d have to simply take turns pressing the same one (bad idea). And even then, the system created a fair amount of bugs that I’m still not able to fix, and can content myself only by disabling (lazy idea). What I’m left with is a game where essentially you have to control both sides of a conversation (and a political one, at that) yourself, something like playing both sides of a game of chess. In the long run it doesn’t really pan out, especially for more traditional gamers looking for externalized conflict. But in a strange way, I actually really like the way it works– who says that you necessarily have to assume agency over only one character in a game, especially during a sequence like this where you’re not even given physical demands? Assuming control over one character is a bit like first-person narration, wheras this would be more third-person– objective ludological experience, rather than subjective. Granted, it’s still really only in experimental mode right now, but sooner or later experiments do tend to reap rewards of discovery.

Anyway, I’ve also been considering continuing work on game reviews in the same form as my “Video Game Socialisme” piece, but those will come eventually. Until next time, pleasant dreamers, do at least try to remember to pull the lever in tomorrow’s elections, unless you’re working one of those new-fangled voting machines that doesn’t have one…

Anyways, I’m writing now both to add that mention (especially the rather cool appraisal from the site’s resident madman, Patrick “The 99th” Dugan, who said of my game “Convey Or” that I’m something like “Chris Crawford with a chaser of Red Bull” and thinks I’m a rampant misogynist), but also to post my latest game, a long-in-the-making experiment with my conversation system that is based, for some odd reason, on Jean-Luc Godard’s latest movie, which I saw twice during the New York Film Festival. Godard himself once said that the best way to review a film is to make one of your own, so perhaps I’ll use this format to review games in the future.

Aside from that, there’ll also be a couple of other updates in the coming week. I’ll have a game featured over at the Brooklyn location of Babycastles this Friday in the spirit of the upcoming Election, and another at the Manhattan branch for Halloween (that goes up on Thursday, however, apparently). I shan’t say any more than that at the moment, if for no other reason than this season always carries some natural nail-biting suspense with it thanks to both of the aforementioned occasions, and I always like to add to it in my own special way (also– they’re not actually finished yet). So until next time, pleasant dreamers, sleep tight and don’t let the Lincoln Center bed bugs bite…

Well, pleasant dreamers, I come bearing tidings of the most exceedingly bogus variety: my submission for the Gamma IV competition was turned down. I can’t really hide my disappointment over this turn, as I’d labored long and hard to fit my conversational gameplay mechanics into Kokoromi’s one-button constraint. All in all I’m happy I participated, as I genuinely feel that pushing my QAYN design into one button makes it work much better, but still…

At least this means I can release my game a little earlier than I’d hoped. And considering that there were a whopping 154 submissions this year, there’s at least the consolation that the competition was fierce. Probably more quality games were rejected this year than were even submitted to all the Gammas combined. I’d hope that all of those games will eventually be played, recognized and maybe even supported by fans online, but that might seem just a little self serving.

If anybody wants to play my game, you can open it in a BROWSER or download it in a ZIP. It’s called “Convey, Or: The Countdown”, and maybe I’ll write about it a little more in the future, once I get over this tragedy.

Until next time, pleasant dreamers, if some charming little talking cricket tries telling you that with nothing more than a wish upon a star that dreams really do come true, make sure that you listen to him and keep hope for the future alive. Then squash him.

Well, pleasant dreamers, another Global Game Jam has come and gone, and just like last year I’ve come through it clean the other side. Cleaner, in fact, than I had twelve months ago, because this time I was able to commit myself fully to a single project that I can proudly stand by as one of my best, and one that I hope to revisit in the near future as a long-term work.

Over the past weekend I joined the designers who congregated to the NYU site of the Global Game Jam event and wound up teaming with Arthur Ward, with whom I made the game “Waffle”. It’s something that represents the best of all the work I’ve done in the past year– moody, minimalist platforming and conversation gameplay– but with Arthur, I was able to take it much further. For most of Friday and Saturday we mostly brainstormed ideas and experimented with his programming in Construct, where he built an initial prototype of a physics-based platformer, one that we mostly hoped would be as depressing as possible.

Over the course of that 24 period, however, we discovered that we were having a lot more fun with the simple imagery that was conjured up by the rain physics he’d developed (rain being one of the central constraints the GGJ designers in the Eastern Atlantic timezone had to work with, the main one being “deception) than we were with physics platforming itself. Following Arthur’s idea of a game that included invisible tiles made visible by rain in certain areas, we decided to make the game with rain as the only visible element, and all level and character elements rendered as silhouettes.  Moving into Flash for our final draft, I spent the next 24 hours programming conditions, animating sprites, building levels and writing a quick script for the game, using the basics of my previous platforming and conversational works to provide gameplay to fit the minimalist aesthetic and conceptual design we’d fleshed out together. Justin Matthews provided us with a great loop of somber chiptunes, thus making this the first game I’ve made to feature any kind of musical accompaniment.

All in all, this was one of the most fruitful 48 hour periods I’ve had as a game designer, and though the finished product is certainly short, it should only be taken as the shape of things to come. I’ll continue to work on this, and report back as I do, to anyone who’s following this. But for the time being, I’ll just sign off and get some much needed sleep, which is something of a rare commodity in the GGJ experience. Until next time, pleasant dreamers, if you really want to know why the game is called “Waffle”, don’t ask– we still haven’t made up our minds yet…

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

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve rapidly made two games based on stories by Franz Kafka: Before the Law and Give It Up!, both of which were written and designed over 48 hour stretches, with only the latter taking additional time thanks to my own ineptitude as a programmer. Don’t ask me why I’ve suddenly taking to adapting the works of the famously bleak visionary, but there’s just something about the world he puts together that practically begs to be rendered interactive.

No matter how confounding and nightmarish, his stories seem to exist according to a certain set of rules, and even though those rules are often stacked against the favor of his protagonists, one cannot help but recognize the logic within them. Perhaps it’s anathema, attempting to succeed where his characters always failed, but for me it’s almost a kind of philosophical thinking exercise. I hope to do more of these, and maybe cover some of the big stories.

Now, about Dimensions: This is a game that, as I mentioned earlier, played for a while at the Indie Arcade over at Silent Barn in Brooklyn. It’s a game I had originally conceived a year ago, around the stereoscopic 3D rules for the Kokoromi Collective‘s Gamma 3D. Unfortunately I wasn’t well versed enough in Flash at that point to put it together myself, so when the time for Gamma 4 started getting closer I decided to finally build it as a means of testing myself for rapid game creation. It was a great relief to finally see the rules and world I’d envisioned a year ago come to life in some fashion, and as such it’s a game I plan to return to over time.

What I was surprised by, however, as I made the game was how quickly it turned into something I hadn’t quite anticipated. See, originally I’d thought about this game in broad strokes, thinking it’d be cool to have a platformer in which your sprite interacted with different dimensions, passing through alien objects from a plane of existence foreign to their own. The red-and-blue design constraint felt perfect for this concept in terms of gameplay, theme and also aesthetics, allowing me to indulge in some nicely retro Virtual Boy-ish graphics.

Paired with the wrapping-level mechanics I’d already explored in Limbo, I figured this would be a nice, quick warm-up and a fun little ditty, but not much else. By the time I started outlining and building the game in earnest, though, this simple dimensional-platformer had turned into something more, and something I’ve long held an appreciation for as a player and designer: an escort-mission.

Without going into too much detail (for those of you who might actually play the game, hypothetically) I find it an interesting concept to employ this type of mechanic while crossing the dimensional divide. What does it mean to lead a character besides your own, to extend your agency to an entity which is not entirely “other”? Does leading your doppelganger across the wastelands of time and space count as an escort-mission in the same way as leading a complete stranger? It’s the sort of thing that shoots me off into a mood of revery– if shadows have minds of their own, as Peter Pan’s did whenever he left the temporal pause-state of Never NeverLand, then does every moment of your life become an escort mission, of a sort? Do we best protect ourselves by thinking in the third-person, instead of simply looking out for number one?

Perhaps it’s best not to self-interpret. I have no idea what anything I’ve done means, when you get right down to it. All I’m interested in at this point is making sure it’s interesting enough for others to be curious about what it means. And for the time being, that’s where I’m going to leave it. Until next time, pleasant dreamers, don’t let the bed bugs bite (unless you wind up turning into one yourself)…

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.

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…