published works

Downloading Daleks: The Conundrum of Public Funding

  • Reading time:7 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by GameSetWatch, then republished by GamaSutra.

Doctor Who is perhaps the BBC’s biggest worldwide brand. For nearly fifty years the British public has drowned in Doctor Who merchandise and tie-ins: novels, audio plays, comics, toys, and T-shirts. Yet when it comes to new media, the BBC has been curiously slow to act. In the 1980s there were a few Doctor Who text adventures, and in the early ‘90s a pair of dubious licensed games for the PC. Since the show’s successful 2005 revival, Eidos has released a collectible card game across several platforms. Their individual merits aside, none of these games or genres really reflects the show’s talky, exploration-heavy premise.

By comparison, Doctor Who: The Adventure Games is a venture of the BBC proper, and a collaboration with the current TV production team. Over the last few years the BBC’s website division – also paid for through the TV license fee – has experimented with Flash games and animated episodes. Some of those efforts resulted in, for example, the reanimation of lost Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s. All these efforts, however, have been tentative and have skirted the edges of procedure.

With The Adventure Games, the BBC has some motivation – namely competition. Channel 4, the TV station established some thirty years ago to provide an alternate perspective to the cultural mainstream represented in ITV and the BBC’s two channels, has recently begun to expand its remit to cover videogames.

As a broadcaster, Channel 4 is required to air less enfranchised voices and to commission its programming from independent bodies. By the same reasoning, of late the Channel 4 website has become a significant source of funding for British indie games. To keep speed, the BBC seems to be responding to its competitor in familiar BBC style by luring huge and established talents to develop broadly appealing in-house entertainment — as when seven years ago they brought in Queer as Folk creator Russell T Davies to revive Doctor Who.

In this case, the BBC has contracted one of the most respected adventure game authors and perhaps the most respected nuts-and-bolts development crews in Europe. For their part, Broken Sword designer Charles Cecil and OutRun 2 developer Sumo Digital have digested and translated the show’s appeal in a way that spin-off and licensed material – including much under the Doctor Who banner – rarely does. Granted, the actors’ line readings sound like the first take for an audio book and the story itself perhaps borrows too liberally from Back to the Future – yet at no point does the game feel throwaway.

The question is, why? To quote Tom Baker’s Doctor, as he gawped at the remains of planets shriveled into gallery exhibits, what’s it all for? It’s all well that audiences now have a decent Doctor Who game, and it is curious to see the level of collaboration from the show’s production office, but what does the BBC hope to gain from the project?

Surely the game is more than a competitive response to Channel 4. Granted they’re both public broadcasters with a certain remit, and the lack of direct commercial concerns means that not every move has to be absolutely sensible so long as they can argue its creative or social merit — but likewise, it’s not like they’re chasing a buck here. There’s no market to corner, and nothing really to compete over. The games are effectively free to their largest and primary audience, and any foreign sales would be hard pressed to justify the expenditure.

Then again, lately the BBC has been in a weird place culturally and financially. There are growing movements to abolish the TV license fee, meaning that to avoid defaulting to a commercial broadcast model the BBC more and more has to justify its funding. In an era where fewer and fewer people watch TV, and those who do generally record it or download it later, the BBC seems to be constantly experimenting with format and new forms of publicity and new ventures (many of them, such as 3D theatrical trailers and week-long event programming, spearheaded with Doctor Who and its spin-offs), all to ensure the corporation’s tentacles remain genially laced through every aspect of British culture. When TV ceases to be a part of everyday life, every bit of mindshare helps.

To that matter, even for public service broadcasters viewing figures and audience share have taken on an importance far apart from the early ‘80s, when Channel 4 was more or less created with the intent that nobody watch it. Instead of a battle for ad dollars, the BBC is in a battle for relevance. And the moment they slip, they could be in big trouble.

The dilemma is not unlike the spot that print publications are in now, and that Steve Jobs is doing his best to exacerbate. If a magazine or newspaper fails to keep up its mindshare, and make itself a crucial part of people’s lives, then it’s in trouble. When people are turning to the web and to the iPad more than print, the publications have to assess their likely audience and how much of their energies to divert. The problem is that publications have no extra budget to spend on iPad development. Many of them can barely maintain their web presence. Yet without that presence, maybe people will forget them. Maybe they will lose their relevance, their importance. There’s a bit of desperation at work.

You might also think of the situation in terms of the browser wars. It’s not like Microsoft and Google and Mozilla are selling their applications, so why are they so hot on trouncing each other? Because everyone uses a web browser, and whoever controls the browser – both the technology and the branding and feel of the thing – controls the user’s experience.

Everyone has a different idea of making over the world in his own image. Right now Google wants to move everything to the cloud, and kind of return computing to the old PC terminal days where the data is all “out there” somewhere. “Out there,” of course, being in Google’s hands. In all probability, Facebook is hard at work on its own browser and operating system.

How does the online push relate to the BBC, beyond the cultural tentacle thing? Maybe it’s got something to do with the iPlayer, which might be described as the BBC’s own proprietary Hulu. Maybe it’s got to do with the shift away from TV and toward computer screens.

Common wisdom says the test of any new medium is its suitability for porn, and that the spearhead of most computer technology is videogames. These days the BBC says the test of any new venture is its suitability to Doctor Who – and much like The New York Times or Wired, the BBC really wants a piece of your computer. It’s got to survive somewhere.

Maybe in the future, when we get all our TV through the Internet, it will be hard for entities like the BBC to resist the old multimedia chestnut. And maybe, freed of the boundaries of CD-ROM and ridiculous production companies, there will be a time for… well. Something more advanced than the alternate angles you get on DVD and Blu-Ray. And maybe, through one insidious high-quality download at a time, the BBC is preparing itself for that eventuality.

The Game-Maker Archive: Mark Hadley

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

I’m always impressed when an artist takes some kind of a stance with his work — be it technical or political or social or personal. Well, let me buffer that. I’m impressed when an artist has something to say, and choses to use his chosen medium to explore that idea rather than just get caught up in the trappings of the medium for its own sake. If you give me, for instance, a really excellent, polished shooter that plays like a remix of four other games I’ve already played, then okay — that’s some decent craft there, but to what end? It’s not saying anything. Then if you give me something simple and awkward, that tries its hardest to translate something unrelated into the language of the medium — say, the artist’s obsession with physics or an overactive curiosity about the man who sells hot dogs down the street, then I feel like I may get something out of the work. Maybe not a whole new perspective on life, but maybe a few angles I hadn’t noticed before.

I don’t mean to big up Mark Hadley’s games too much, but I find it curious that his games try to have a sort of a point to them beyond simply being another videogame. Given the limitations of the software, whether they succeed is almost beyond the point. The effort is what counts.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Hands of Time

  • Reading time:4 mins read

by [redacted]

I keep noticing the parallels between the modern indie scene and the old shareware boom from the early 1990s. For those who missed that train, in the period after the Great Crash of 1984 and before the PC was powerful enough to run much more than King’s Quest, there was a sort of DIY phase in the Western game industry. Even the biggest PC developers, like Sierra and Origin, were a bit provincial, and in the arcades Atari Games and Midway were struggling just to be noticed amongst the flood of Japanese imports — so from a mainstream perspective there was slim opportunity for a young designer.

Much as with modern indie games, the answer was to skirt the mainstream, and distribute games through dial-up bulletin boards and word-of-mouth. There are a few differences, though. For one, the shareware boom happened in an era when one or two or a small handful of people could still produce a major, mainstream game. It was getting rarer, but for context the average Sega Genesis game had only half a dozen key staff. So for aspiring game designers, it was not unreasonable to look at shareware as a sort of a potential back door into the industry. Indeed, that’s where we get id Software and Epic Games.

Another thing is that around the turn of the ’90s the PC was sort of a blank slate. 256-color VGA was still fairly new, and Sound Blaster digital sound was a revelation. A 33-Mhz processor was a firecracker, and extended RAM was a luxury. So suiting the geography, most PC games were either simulations or slow-paced adventure games. When Carmack and Romero found a technique for smooth scrolling, it was a breakthrough worth pitching to Nintendo. Yet much as Atari was uninterested in Nintendo’s hardware, Nintendo saw little potential in the PC game market.

With mainstream developers slow to take advantage of the platform, it was also not unfathomable for a handful of clever young coders to be at the forefront of technology and design. So it is that within about five to seven years a bunch of industry outsider nobodies dragged the platform, and along with it the entire medium, up by its bootstraps. The explosion in graphical accelerators comes entirely out of do-it-yourself designers trying to make a name for themselves, trying to be just like the big guys who they admired in the 1980s.

This, of course, created a culture clash. The PC gamers who had been there the whole time reacted poorly to the insolence and the brashness and the overall style of these upstarts. They liked PC games just fine the way they are. The PC wasn’t just an open-platform game console; it naturally lent itself to a different, slower and deeper, psychological space. And the aesthetic that these newcomers were injecting — sure, it was making the PC more popular for gaming. Yet in its Miyamoto-fueled reverie it was also drowning out demand for the kinds of games that attracted PC gamers to the platform.

There are exceptions, of course, but broadly the shareware boom was an attempt by North American designers to answer the mainstream success of Nintendo and Sega using the only available tools — which meant bending the tools to make them work more like the game consoles of the day, and using those tools to mimic Japanese design aesthetics. Though the movement started small, the best efforts were so revolutionary and so popular that they attracted competition like a four-star restaurant in the bad part of town, gentrifying the PC, driving up development costs, and making the platform much bigger than Shareware’s original form of distribution.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Composition Piece

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Today Theta Games, of Ceramic Shooter – Electronic Poem fame, released another poetic, music-related take on a familiar genre. As you start Composition Piece a blocky, distinctly indie-game, protagonist sits down at a much higher-resolution piano and, well, resolves to write a piano piece for a certain Qing Ge. The platforming action that follows, as described on the Theta Games website, serves as a metaphor for the creative process. You move to the right, avoid obstacles, smash through barriers, and seek input from your musical peers.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Hydorah: Retro Face, Progressive Brain

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The first thing you’ll think of when you see Spanish developer Locomalito’s Hydorah, and the way you’ll probably see it described, is a Gradius tribute game. After you spend a few minutes with it, you’ll realize it feels more like Darius — the power-ups and weapon types, the progress map, the look of the shield, the wide and narrow playfield.

The save system is curious, and at first feels like it comes from the SNES era. Again that’s deceptive, as it’s a rather progressive mechanism. You have a total of three chances to save, that you can spend between any two levels in the game. So there’s a sort of self-pacing reminiscent of some recent console shooters like Ikaruga or Gradius V, that gradually offer more lives and more credits, the more hours you put in — except it’s more organic. As your skills improve, you can play further without saving, allowing you to conserve your save points for longer and gradually allowing you to expand your range.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Time Warp Tickers gets you flicking and kicking

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The Brazilian artist Melly has released a provisionally complete version of his Action 52 Owns game jam entry, Time Warp Tickers.

As with many of its game jam brethren, Melly’s game takes the basic premise of its namesake, and a few visual and audio themes, and fleshes them out with modern mechanics and design sensibilities. In this case you play as a tiny cat in a finger mech, strolling through a surreal chessboard landscape, flicking enemies into each other and into background objects with your mech’s “legs”. Charge the flicks for a stronger result. The game also includes some time warp elements: hold both buttons to slow things down and give yourself room to maneuver.

Time Warp Tickers is both visually and aurally gorgeous, filled with rather neat mechanisms and design ideas, and is a rather clever example of deconstruction. It manages both to pay tribute to the themes of the game that inspired it and to use those themes as a starting place to do its own thing entirely.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Mike Perrucci

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Most of the Game-Maker material I know, I’ve known about since high school. When the program was new, there was a thriving development community. When RSD stopped supporting Game-Maker, interest dwindled, the community dissipated, and it became difficult to find any mention of the program. Occasionally, though, I run into a developer who missed the wider loop and just kept on developing in private. The most productive of these isolated cases is also one of the more talented Game-Maker artists of all, Mike “Mazeguy” Perrucci.

Although Perrucci’s two finished games are an apparently simple overhead-view game and its sequel, there’s much more going on than you catch at a glance. For one, the guy never repeats himself. Never mind between games; within each game, no two levels are remotely similar. Typically each stage can boast not just distinct backgrounds and enemies but different mechanics and often a slightly different character sprite, with different animations and abilities to suit the level’s theme.

Where these games really excel are in their creative use of background animations and monster birthing — two of the most powerful, yet least exploited, Game-Maker traits. Between the two, there’s almost no end of effects that you can fake — as aptly demonstrated in Perrucci’s second game.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Spelunking into the Past

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

The last few days I’ve been fussing over Derek Yu’s Spelunky. I know that it’s been around for a while; it’s just one of those things I never got around to. I downloaded it, and then got distracted. Time moved on, and there was always something else to pay attention to. As often happens, I’m rather disappointed that I didn’t jump in sooner — and also glad it’s new to me now, with all the endorphin rush you get from that kind of new relationship.

I’m sure the game has been discussed to death, so I don’t intend to labor the point. For context, the game is a Roguelike platformer released for PC about a year and a half ago. By Roguelike, I mean it randomly generates its levels and fills them with both traps and treasure. Until you know the game inside out and can make an effort to beat it, the point of playing is to see how deep you can go, and how much you can achieve, before dying. The random level layout means the game is infinitely replayable. The easy death means that you’ll be restarting often.

The game is basically an attempt to rehabilitate, or reenvision, Tim Martin’s Spelunker, an early PC game mostly known for its NES port. Although on the face of it the game seems really neat — a tale of exploration and adventure and treasure hunting in the deep places of the Earth — Spelunker is nearly impossible to play, in that the controls are a bit awkward and nearly everything that you can do will kill you. Even falling from slightly over the height of your character spells death. It’s ridiculous, and has gained the game a sort of cult reputation for its perceived sadism.

You can see the thought processes; Roguelikes are difficult and arbitrary, yet within an addictive framework. Spelunker is difficult and arbitrary, and no fun at all. Why not combine the discipline of the one and the premise of the other, and create the game that Spelunker might have been? Good thinking, too, as Spelunky is rather marvelous and instantly claimed a place amongst the most respected of indie games.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Jason Boyer cuts loose with Fuzz Power

  • Reading time:1 mins read

“The barbers have finally found Fuzzy, but this time, he’s fighting back!”

The original Fuzz Power seemed like it wanted to be a low-rent answer to Hudson’s Adventure Island or Wonder Boy. Inspired by the Action 52 Owns game jam, Jables’s Adventure designer Jason Boyer reinvented the game into a short yet transcendent tale of a wild man’s battle against a deranged cult of barbers.

I’m going to again stress how short the game is: it’s only three brief levels and a boss. Yet the mechanics are deep enough, and the world that Boyer has painted is rich enough, to sustain a much broader design. Consider the game as it stands only a taste.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Clear the room with Easyname’s Beeps and Blips

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Taking a different tack from the other Action 52 Owns game jam entries, Easyname’s Beeps and Blips remake goes even more retro in presentation even as it considerably ages up the design.

The game almost looks like it’s running in text mode, and yet for a top-down shooter it’s rather sophisticated. To move to the next room, you clear the screen of enemies. There are two buttons: shoot, and lock your aim. You can move and shoot in eight directions. Touch a purple orb to gain an “option” (in Gradius terms) and increase your firepower. I’m not sure if there’s a limit; you can certainly collect at least three of them. When you’re injured, you lose an “option” and your firepower decreases. When you lose all your energy, you die and start over from the last threshold you passed.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Curt Kling’s Mash Man stomps on your heartstrings

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Now here’s an interesting one. Bravehorse designer Curt Kling’s entry into the Action 52 Owns game jam is a contemplative remake of the under-achieving side-scroller Mash Man. As Kling commented: “We tried to take the mood of the original game and expand on it, since it doesn’t really have any kind of unique gameplay elements to use.”

That’s an understatement. In the original game you pretty much walk to the right and jump on enemies with your enormous feet — provided you can get around the collision problems. And eventually you’ll get hit and you’ll die. As a game, it’s a bit depressing and futile. Which is what Kling seemed to read into it as well.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Sink your teeth into Guilherme Martins’ Bubblegirl Rozy

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Continuing with the occasionally lovely Action 52 Owns game jam entries, Guilherme Martins has contributed a lush, completely reenvisioned take on game #23, Bubblegum Rosy, adopting little but the theme — an action platformer about a girl who blows bubbles — and a few visual touches, and extrapolating that into a sturdy, whimsical game of his own creation.

You play as a little girl with a double jump and fluttery hair that slows her descent. To defend yourself, you blow bubbles; different flavors of gum give you different bubble patterns. Your goal is to climb into a large bubble at the end of the level, and drift off to the next screen. For some reason you rescue young men along the way, who then appear on the title screen once you’ve collected them.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Get your hooks into Arthur Lee’s Streemerz

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Streemerz: Super Strength Emergency Squad-Zeta is Enough Plumbers co-designer Arthur Lee’s own submission to his Action 52 Owns game jam, a project to remake each of the games in the infamous Action 52 multicart to modern creative standards.

Much as Miles Drummond took inspiration from an obscure Game Boy game as a starting place to flesh out his entry, Arthur Lee has processed the awkward original through a Capcom filter to create something both modern and familiar.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Two: Brick-A-Break

  • Reading time:2 mins read

By [redacted]

Though Pong, which we covered last time, opened the window to a new world, that world was a void. You had some basic physical rules, and you had a packet of information bouncing around in a box.

The bulk of communication was supplied by a second player. Pong exists in a weird medium that offers the player the vaguest hint of another reality — a persistent, active set of laws that react upon the player’s every stimulus — then anchors that experience back in reality. It’s sort of like shaking hands through a curtain of water.

You pass through, and get a fleeting sense of, this alternative medium. That’s nice, and it gives you a sense of the basic laws of water. But compare to snorkeling along a coral reef, and the whole alien world that water opens up by virtue of those laws.

For about four years, no one significantly built on Pong. You saw things like four-player Pong, and Pong with two paddles, and a vertically-oriented Pong that passed itself off as a Volleyball sim.

Atari did experiment a bit with Gran Trak 10 and Tank!, but somehow it took until 1976 for Bushnell and Bristow to hit on a one-player version of Pong. And that pretty much was the missing piece that gave us two distinct schools of design, the home PC, and thereby the information revolution that allows a person to research articles such as this.

As these things go, Breakout was pretty well-named.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

Miles Drummond’s Jigsaw

  • Reading time:1 mins read

So a while back Enough Plumbers co-designer Arthur Lee started up his Action 52 OWNS game jam, the object being to remake, to the best modern creative standards, each of the famously terrible games in the Action 52 multicart (origin of that Cheetahmen game that 2ch was ironically wild about a while back). To date, nine of the games have been remade. One of those, tackled by a certain Miles Drummond, is the poor man’s Nail ‘n’ Scale clone, Jigsaw.

Add some creative deconstruction, and the end result is a rather charming puzzle platformer that plays a bit like Sega’s QuackShot, enhanced with some annoying-to-me, perhaps engaging-to-others SNES-style switch-block puzzles. You’re a carpenter armed with a nail gun against an army of rogue carpentry tools; you navigate two enormous levels by scaling walls and breaking blocks with your nails. Note that you can only use three nails at a time, a limitation that opens up all manner of puzzle situations.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )