Daily Archives: Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Poto & Cabenga Released

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Honeyslug‘s Gamma 4 presentation piece, Poto & Cabenga, has now gone public. If you’ve got trouble multitasking, maybe this is a good life tool. It’s a single-switch game, where you control two characters at once.

For Cabenga, hold the space bar to run and release it to jump. For Poto, hold the space bar to slow down and tap it to jump. You can imagine the complications that play out, as you collect objects, avoid stray hedgehogs, and collaborate between the two characters to solve problems. All with a single button. Now there’s overloading the functions for you.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

A Life Worth Living

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Some of the typical themes to indie games, and art games, and deconstructionist games in general, include violence, death, and loss. I find it interesting that the deeper problems of game design, toward which the more thoughtful game authors are drawn, so closely mirror a boilerplate list of human concerns. At least, metaphorically speaking.

Of the three, death and loss, and the association between the two, are the bigger concerns — perhaps because in the short term, with such a narrow communication bottleneck, it’s more worthwhile to hand out monosyllabic verbs for the player to sling around: shoot, run, jump, grab. Let players use the grammar they know, while you precisely sculpt a context to lend the discussion an illusion of eloquence.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )