published works

The Game-Maker Archive: Samples and Demos

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker didn’t just throw its users in cold with its development tools and game engine; packed with the core software was a wealth of sample material, largely composed by the programmers, Gregory Stone and Oliver, Jr. Fair enough, this material was a starting place for many, perhaps most, users’ first games.

Yet as simple and illustrative as the material was, it often was more compelling than the end games derived from it. So in effect, in purchasing Game-Maker users bought themselves a collection of rather neat little games and then the tools to rip them apart and rebuild the games in their own image — in concept not all that different from some indie games you’ll see these days, if a bit more elaborate in the toolset.

It would be constructive to peruse these games if just to provide context for of our past discussion (such as last week’s The Descent), and to provide basis for future commentary. Again, though, some of these games are darned good. All of them are charming, and by definition they’re all amongst the most original Game-Maker games you’ll find.

There are seven basic demo games. Three of them are overt tutorials (one of them named Tutor); four are complete and deliberate games of some sort, and the origin of the most of the materials used in those tutorials. It’s those that we’ll be going over here.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Wagging Your Arms Behind You… Love+ [Review]

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by [redacted]

Fred Wood’s Love is not a new game. He first contrived and released it in 2008, as an undergrad sample project. Over the last couple of years he has tweaked and fiddled with the engine and design, first opening up the game to aspiring artists with Love Custom; a stabler version of the engine that came with less music and only the one sample level. It was meant as an empty box, you see, for the end user to fill — rather like Nifflas’ FiNCK.

And then fairly recently, there’s the game’s final incarnation, Love+. The engine is again tweaked, and the levels and music are fewer yet richer than in the original Love. As this is the newest version, and indeed the only version that Fred Wood still supports, I mean to give it the bulk of the focus here.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Explore the Collective Consciousness with Farbs’ Playpen

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Rom Check Fail developer Farbs has unleashed on us all the Web-based communal adventure game creation game, Playpen.

The game presents you with a blocky point-and-click adventure interface; as you click around and explore, you will find your choices leading you down increasingly eccentric avenues — until suddenly you hit the edge of the world. Say you click on a path leading to a fountain, but there is no target page to the click. You are then dumped into a simple image editor, where you can paint the scene yourself and designate however many links you like, to however many other pages.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

FiNCK thrown into the Web

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As of yesterday, Within a Deep Forest and Knytt designer Nifflas has unleashed his briefly-awaited user-supported toss-’em-up, FiNCK. As reported earlier, the game’s abrupt announcement and release are due to an impulsive yet inspired development cycle, brought on by affection for the odd man out of the NES Marios.

FiNCK (”Fire Nuclear Crocodile Killer”; yes, it’s nonsense) has the same grab-and-toss mechanics as Super Mario Bros. 2 and a few other gems like Rescue Rangers, and Pastel’s much longer-coming Life+. Perhaps understandably enough, considering the free level editor and Nifflas’ existing fanbase, the game only comes with five (in effect) demonstration levels.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Cactus’ Krebswelte updated

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IGF Nuovo Award winner and Space Fuck! designer Cactus has released an update of his older… well, maybe the best term is roguelike platformer, Krebswelte. In Krebswelte you jump and aim and shoot; every bit of the level geometry is destructible (though it slowly refills, to prevent you from painting yourself into a corner); few objects are helpful, though treasure allows you to buy weapon upgrades, all the better to destroy your world.

The levels are randomly generated; as in a roguelike the only constant is an increase in difficulty from level to level, and only a single life to die… sort of. Usually. There are a bunch of quirks that make exceptions to the rules, and they’re best found for yourself.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: One-Hit Wonders

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by [redacted]

Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker offered aspiring pre-Web designers the world over their first taste of game development. And for its era, it was darned powerful: VGA graphics, Sound Blaster sound, infinitely huge games. There were some strict limitations and quirks, but at the time there wasn’t much else like it — and it sure beat breaking out Lode Runner for the hundredth time, plus the graph paper and pencil to record your levels.

Although the software was cheap and easy to use, and there was a thriving community around it, it seems most users were content to finish at most one or two games, then to move on. As a result you have a handful of big, influential voices — the artists who made a handful of complete, original games — and a peppering of neato one-off games by people you never saw again. And often it’s those oddball games that stick in the mind the most.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

David Shute’s Entanglement (tentative)

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Small Worlds is one of the best indie games of last year, and one of the simplest. It’s won some, been nominated some. Been discussed much.

With the appropriate praise in hand, David Shute has set himself to a couple of different follow-up projects: one a much larger, more ambitious piece; the other, a simpler project that might be taken as more of a direct follow-up, or a spiritual successor to Small Worlds. For a while, to avoid repeating himself, he meant to focus on the larger project, but then in late February or early March he had a revelation.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Smaller Every Day… Hero Core [Review]

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

Somewhere in the early 1990s, the console-style adventure game got sort of codified, with Super Metroid as the main reference point. The ideal form, as wisdom had it, gradually opened up the world to the player as the player gathered new and usually tactile abilities, the better to traverse the world’s obstacles. Basically it’s a lock-and-key system, except instead of the green doors requiring green keys they demand super missiles and instead of unlocking the next section you climb or swing or blast your way there, once you’ve the right abilities.

This system is valid enough, and when done well it can be fairly invisible. You notice somewhere that you can’t go, and after trying everything in your power you remember your failure. So when you get a power that might let you past that obstacle, you race back to put it to use. The clever thing is that usually this new ability generally improves the player’s character, and slots into the existing move set naturally enough that soon the player kind of forgets that ability hadn’t been there the whole time.

This design’s appeal rests in an illusion of problem solving that makes the player feel clever and involved, when in fact the game is manipulating the whole situation, blocking off whole areas of its world until it figures the player may be growing bored of his current situation and powers.

This system — walling the player off until the game, or rather the designer, feels the player is ready, doling the game out in parcels measured both to prevent confusion and to manage enthusiasm and flow — has always bothered me. Mostly it feels transparent and mechanical. Its worst offenders, like Wind Waker with its inventory full of nearly identical items that each only is useful in one part of the game, raise too many questions. Why can’t I go down here? Because the game doesn’t want me to. Why can’t I open this? Because the game doesn’t want me to. Why can’t I just use the grapple instead of the hookshot? Because the game wasn’t designed that way.

A better way to limit progress is to put most of the onus on the player. Let the player decide when he’s ready to progress, and then be it on his own head. If he gets lost, or injured, or killed, or confused, that’s his decision. Let the player form his own rules: “Okay, the forest is too dangerous and is kind of scary; keep away for now.” And then later “Hey, I’m stronger and I have more resources; maybe I can risk the forest now.”

This is the system that you find in the original Zelda, and in Dragon Warrior. It’s what you get in Lost in Blue, and to an extent in Riven. And it’s more or less how Daniel Remar organized Hero Core.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Digging up the Dirt on Life+

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Life+ is a rather adorable little exploration platformer by Pastel. The game is long in development, and the development blog is updated only infrequently. The game is coming along well, though, is smooth and gorgeous, and incorporates several interesting ideas.

The main mechanic is a digging/pluck-and-throw mechanism rather like Super Mario Bros. 2, FiNCK, or Rescue Rangers — the difference being, you can rip up a clump of floor nearly anywhere. Some objects are heavier than others, and you’ll need to power-up before you can seize them. Once you’re holding something, you can toss it, bowl it, or lock onto an enemy and sling from anywhere.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Preview: Super Mission Extreme

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Blastforce and Sword of Legends developer Deadheat has begun to leak information about his Mission Extreme sequel, Super Mission Extreme.

The original Mission Extreme is a crunchy platform shooter that manages to find its own style in favor of simply aping Contra or Metal Slug. There’s a certain exploration element, and death is no kind of a setback. The (well-composed) music doesn’t even skip, and the action doesn’t pause. You just start up again at the last checkpoint, and all your accomplishments remain accomplished.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Eclypse Games

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by [redacted]

Eclypse Games was basically a guy named James Faux, aka OmegAkira. He lived and attended high school in New Jersey, and he ran a Game-Maker dial-up BBS called SiNiSTRY, which I think was also the name of his personal rock band. The board was only available irregularly, as he ran it off his primary phone line. I can’t quite remember where I first found his work; perhaps on the official RSD BBS in Rockport. Eventually I found myself calling his BBS at all weird hours, to cut down on long-distance charges.

Significantly, Jim was a musician and he was one of the few individuals outside of Epic Megagames to figure out what to do with the .CMF music format that Game-Maker relied on. So if nothing else, his games tended to be all original: new ideas, new techniques, new graphical elements, new sound effects, new music. A few of his earlier games do use the familiar stock tracks, though that tendency soon diminished.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Steam Play Indie Pack

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Spring must be the season for indie game packages. Following the Humble Indie Bundle and Sleep is Death pay-what-you-want specials, and indeed Valve’s own free offer of Portal, Steam has a new package of five indie games for $20.00. Not quite as cheap, but still tidy compared with the $50.00 cover price for all five.

The Steam Play Indie Pack includes Broken Rules’ And Yet It Moves, Hassey Enterprises’ Galcon Fusion, Amanita Design’s Machinarium, Hemisphere Games’ Osmos, and (in case you haven’t already claimed it elsewhere) 2D Boy’s World of Goo.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part One: Echolocation

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by [redacted]

We are all inhabitants of our own reality. On the one hand we’re kind of like sponges, absorbing everything around us and integrating it, whether we care to or not. On the other hand, deliberately or not we shape our worlds to reflect our own inner structures.

Whatever we may carry into a situation, experiences physically change our neural pathways. Repetition, familiarity, reinforces a link, like sketching over a line again and again until it becomes solid. Likewise, the way we position furniture, leave piles of papers or empty cans, what we choose to clean and how, what projects we leave unfinished, what we ruin, what we fix, what we wear down; how we choose to break up and break in and use the space given to us, it all imprints our environments just as emotions crease our aging faces.

In effect, our inner and outer worlds build up a feedback loop. As we carve out our place in the world, we settle into the spaces we carve, reassuring ourselves with their familiarity while we use those bold lines, so often scribbled over, to brand ourselves inside and out. This, we tell ourselves, is how the world works.

This is why videogames are so interesting; they are, in effect, bottled external worlds, into which we can momentarily plug our inner worlds to see what happens. Each game is a little feedback loop, allowing the player both to imprint his actions into a world, to leave his little mark — even if only in a high score table — and to absorb, from a simplified sketch with no social or practical consequences, a new way of being, a new way of doing things.

Some people are more concerned with leaving their mark, others more with expanding their horizons. Some give more, some take more. The point is that in their essence, videogames encapsulate this dynamic between the two. They are a study in cause and effect; the easier those worlds are to affect, the more useful a response they give, the more the player owns actions and consequences alike, the more satisfying the experience.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

Poto & Cabenga Released

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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

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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 )