published works

The Game-Maker Archive – Part 10: The Integrator

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

One thing that Game-Maker serves to underline is the sheer talent that goes into game design. Especially by 1995 standards, Game-Maker makes it simple to whip up some graphics and sound resources, click a few flags, slap them together, and call it a game. Depending on your tools and the time you invest, you can get your game looking rather snazzy. Depending on the thoroughness with which you read the manual and study the program’s quirks, you can pull some clever tricks with Game-Maker’s engine. Yet a videogame is more than a bunch of sprites and levels and samples.

As Game-Maker’s own structure suggests, to a large extent a game’s content is just window dressing for the main executable to call up and sell itself to its audience. Unless there’s something more fundamental to justify and connect that information, it’s all just data. Facts. It doesn’t have a perspective; it make an argument. It doesn’t communicate a coherent idea.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Gideon Simons’ Rise: Sea of Static

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Or, if you will, “An Invader’s Traumatic Platform Experience”. This is a curious one. Inspired by a game jam about experimental graphical styles, Run, Dino! Run Like the Wind! designer Gideon Simons (aka QuiteOddGames) has blessed the world with an art platformer that seems to borrow more than a page from La La Land’s warped psyche and then runs that vibe through Jeff Minter’s personal indexing system.

The soundtrack is a constant, irregular hiss; the landscape is made of cubes and small dots. The dots are basically spikes; touch them and you die. You walk on the cubes. As you walk and jump, the landscape subjectively shifts and melts around you. Bits will bend up to become land; bits that were land will bend down off the screen entirely. Sometimes when you jump a pocket will form , surrounded by spikes. Scurry in before you land and the world’s “jaws” snap shut on you.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Rocket Jockey

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In his remake of of Rocket Jockey, The Moonkeeper author Ben Pettengill has delivered something of a gem. Both engrossing in its own right and faithful to what little there is to Active Enterprises’ original, Rocket Jockey is one of the highlights of the Action 52 Owns game jam.

The game begins as you find all your cows beamed into space by interstellar cattle rustlers. So you run out back of your barn, hop on the back of your solid-fuel rocket, and blast off in pursuit. Aside from the arrow keys, the game uses a single button. Rather than shoot, you sling out a lasso. If you rope a steer, you get to sustain another hit and your lasso begins to glow and grow in length. Snag a gunman, and you may pull him off his own rocket. You can also grab barrels, and toss them forward.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Teppoman 2 Jumps ‘n Sneaks ‘n Runs ‘n Guns

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Ikiki, an artist new to me yet well-known in some circles (and hugely active between 1999 and 2005), has reappeared from the woodwork to deliver one new major and one minor opus: respectively, Teppoman 2 and Nozumou.

Both games have sort of a covert SNK flavor to them, which comes across slightly in the design and greatly in the soundscape. The music and effects often have a King of Fighters feel, and with its mix of shooting, platforming, and humor Teppoman 2 will call to mind Metal Slug. Yet something about the game also also reminds me of P.O.W.: Prisoners of War — maybe the sounds, or how you recover weapons from enemies, or the limited ammo.

Anyway, Teppoman 2 brings a new perspective to the run-’n-gun by combining some advanced platformer elements and a slight stealth component.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Setting Boundaries

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by [name redacted]

Back in my review of Daniel Remar’s Hero Core, I ruminated on the game’s unusually dignified management of the player’s progress. After the first ten or fifteen minutes, nearly the whole map is available to the player; from there the player’s exploration is bound and guided only by the logistics of the terrain and natural risk assessment.

Since games have gotten complex enough to involve multiple action buttons, large persistent maps, and countless variable flags, developers have done their best to keep the player from getting too far, too fast; from wandering outside the proscribed zones where the designer has accounted for all variables, or feels that the player can safely wander without getting frustrated or confused. Part of the idea is to to pad out the play experience, allowing the designer to spin a sense of scale and scope from a relatively small amount of material. Part of it is damage limitation, either for the player’s or the developer’s ostensible benefit.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Daray Manning’s Baggage

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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

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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 )

David Shute’s Unnatural Selection makes you squirm

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The Small Worlds designer has unleashed a new wayside-n-wayward opus, Unnatural Selection. In this game, you grab a handful of worms, introduce them to new environments, and hope for them to evolve into more grotesque and dangerous life forms. Shute promises sixteen different creatures, and notes that “the last few are pretty fiendish” to find.

I guess it’s a kind of a sandbox puzzle game, both in that you’re free to experiment at will and in that you’re mostly playing in the sand. Sand and drainage ditches and rotted corpses. It’s all high society here.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Sheldon Chase and the Woman Warrior

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by [redacted]

Toward the end of Recreational Software Designs’ support of its Game-Maker development suite, Sheldon Chase became a kind of pervasive presence. Somewhere around 1995 or early ‘96, he hit on the notion of digitizing Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion photography for use as character sprites — sort of a retro Mortal Kombat effect, if you will. The result was a few drafts of a silvery, jittery nude model. After a bit of anti-aliasing and some animation tweaks, and finally some wardrobe assistance, he presented to RSD a stock female character for inclusion in future software updates.

Much as RSD’s Sample hero formed the template for uncounted male protagonists, Chase’s Muybridge lady became the starting place for legions of (often lurid) sprite edits. If for that reason alone Chase’s input would be notable. Yet his Woman Warrior games also exemplified several unusual and advanced techniques, as well as a curious borrowed aesthetic that sticks in the mind.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Three: Focused Fire

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

What can I say about Space Invaders that you don’t already know? Not a lot, I reckon, so I’m not going to go into too much depth on the facts. If you need more, there’s the Internet. Rather, I mean to frame the available information within the discussion we’ve been having, with an aim to highlighting its greater relevance.

You will recall we talked about Pong, and the easy introduction it provided into that alien space on the other side of the TV screen. Although there wasn’t much meaning to be had, the passive control the game provided over that one packet of information, bouncing around its tiny gameworld according to discernible laws acting on their own, allowed the player to mentally map out the game’s reality.

There was a whole new, bottled system of cause and effect for the player’s mind to lock into and understand. And as minimally involving as the laws and interface were, they were novel and fascinating, and simple to digest — to the extent that Pong became a cultural sensation.

Then, as we discussed, four years later, Breakout came along and reframed Pong as a solitary experience, as a complex space, and as a distinct narrative. Now the player’s focus was entirely on the gameworld, rather than the gameworld acting as a catalyst for two players to entertain each other. In turn, the gameworld had more to focus on.

The player’s every action — as indirect as the interface remained — resulted in a tangible effect, or consequence, within the world. A tile would break, the board would be a little more open, and the surfaces to bounce off of would be a little different. The interaction was suddenly more meaningful, at least within the narrow scope provided. And then when the board was clear, twice over, the game was over. There was a distinct goal to achieve, entirely within the parameters of the game’s bottle universe.

Well, all those changes were significant. Different designers took away different lessons by how they balanced those changes in their heads, and ran off to extrapolate further — leading us to at least two distinct schools of game design and a new focus on a single player’s causal relationship with the gameworld, as compared to videogames as a mere game or social tool.

For now let’s jump the Pacific, and ride the narrative train for a while.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

Bits and Pieces aspires for brain food

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David R. Lorentz has reinvented the Action 52 zombie-on-a-pogo-stick game Bits and Pieces as a… well, sort of a monster hell platformer. You play as an amorphous bodiless glob of protein, described as a head but presumably more like a brain, who wobbles and bounces through patterned fields of monsters in search of glutamate.

The action switches up from level to level, as the game introduces unexpected nuances to its apparently simple mechanics. For instance, tapping “jump” again the moment you bounce on an enemy results in a super bounce that can send you about the height of the screen, allowing some interesting vertical sequences that call to mind the ice beam segments in Metroid.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Chris Delay’s Game Jam Indoctrination

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After some apprehension, Chris Delay, the head of Darwina studio Introversion, took part in the June TigJAM UK meet-up. Apparently over the past year a large community of indie game developers has sprung up around Cambridge, which encouraged Delay to take part. Ultimately he designed three games for the jam, each based on a vague theme drawn out of a proverbial hat.

His topics were “White Holes”, “Sega Dreamcast VMU”, and “Mouse input only”. Out of those three themes Delay created the particle graphics demo White Holes; the Ed-Logg-does-Pac-Man action game Trapper; and probably the most interesting of the bunch, the plate-spinning art game Balancing Act.

In Balancing Act, you spin plates that represent personal values such as family and friends; wealth and success. As the game progresses, it becomes impossible to balance everything so you have to start picking and choosing the plates that most matter to you.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Daniel Remar – Garden Gnome goes traveling, and Hero Core update

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A couple of updates from the author of Hero Core, one small and one a bit more significant. Tiny things first: Hero Core 1.2 is now available, adding a Normal mode boss rush plus Russian and Spanish translations. Along with Swedish and English, this brings the language count up to four, and up to the halfway mark. Remar’s goal is to also support French, Portuguese, German, and Polish.

More significantly, the Sweden-based Bob Came In Pieces developer Ludosity Interactive has announced a partnership to port Remar’s 2007 action arcade game Garden Gnome Carnage to various platforms, starting with Flash.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )