Daily Archives: Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Daray Manning’s Baggage

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Undoubtedly Rockford Illinois’ premiere indie game developer, Manning betrays his Cactus/biggt heritage, as well as a touch of Eugene Jarvis, in his skewed-n-crackly platformer study Baggage. The game is one of those hardcore S&M things, where you die a dozen times just to work out how to get past an obstacle. The generous aspect is that modern indie convention of infinite lives and just trying again without a pause. Yet the game does a good job of instilling a certain dread, both though its difficulty and through its presentation.

Just about every line could use a carpenter’s level, resulting an a dissonant Dutch angle effect. Likewise, every solid surface is filled with an ever-changing static and the background (and sometimes the foreground) is filled with an ominous orange fog. Your character is tiny; the levels are comparably large on the screen. Each has a sort of strange, one-straw-short-of-familiar shape to it. Ostensibly helpful text scrolls across the screen, though it spends more time taunting or giving inane protips or generally being bleak.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Cactus takes you to Norrland; reservations open

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Space Fuck! and Krebswelte designer Cactus has joined Messhof in the realms of insane public display art games.

Last Friday, Cactus debuted the Swedish love letter Norrland at an art exhibition at Kulturbygden in Sollefteå. The game seems like an inscrutable collection of minigames that illustrate various aspects of Swedish life and culture, filtered through the mind of Cactus and a sort of Atari-meets-Grindhouse visual scheme. Wonder at the hunting, the fishing, the sexual uncertainty.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Compelling a Complete Performance

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

So somewhere after the early ‘90s game design became affected, vertical, content to build on established concepts for their own sake and so distort them out of all the representative or practical value they might have had. This became exacerbated after the industry’s multimedia and “virtual reality” phases, and the eventual rush for polygonal majesty. Early polygonal games were expensive to make, and only so many polygons would fit on the screen. Contemporary hardware could hold only so-large an environment in memory. It took developers about seven years to figure out what that extra Z-axis meant for controls, a sense of space, and all the assumptions about design that had built up since the mid-’80s.

In the short term, developers relied on the novelties of real-time animation and 3D space. They built modest, often jury-rigged, playpens where the dodgy collision, imprecise movements, weird cameras, and minimal detail would be less likely to stand out. Either that or they went hard in the other direction and used 3D animation to glam up familiar 2D twitch-based design. Those games were, of course, struck with the same technical limitations as their free-roaming cousins.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Easy Lifting

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Indie game design being what it is, especially for younger developers the impulse to kife elements from your favorite games is almost irresistible. Witness Duke Nukem (icon of the shareware movement), which not only copied its catch phrases from Bruce Campbell movies; the 2D entries blatantly ripped art resources from Turrican and other Amiga games. Depending on your philosophy, you might call this reappropriation lazy, criminal, postmodern, or pragmatic. Frankly, theft is a fact of the creative process. The creative aspect depends on how far you take the theft, how well you reinterpret the material you’ve stolen, and how well you cover your tracks.

Game-Maker being set up the way it was, a certain amount of reappropriation was almost encouraged — particularly of RSD’s own sample games. Some of the results were more blatant than others. The male and female characters or the background tiles found their way into practically everyone’s games at some point or another. I had a few original sprites and tiles lifted, myself. Generally all it took was an e-mail to the derivative author, and I would get a credit and a virtual handshake. It was a pretty loose culture.

And of course that loose-fingered approach had little real effect on the quality of a game. Granted, the more borrowed elements generally the lower the bar. Still, it’s interesting to see what can grow from someone else’s seeds.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )