New as of the Saturday before last: the sequel to Iji and Garden Gnome Challenge author Daniel Remar‘s own Hero, Hero Core. It’s a crunchy, deliberately old-fashioned game, apparently influenced in equal parts by Section-Z (the character movement), Zelda (the overall structure), and Blaster Master (the enemy movement, and some of the tone). I’d say Metroid, but that’s too easy and doesn’t seem accurate in this case.
Love is a splendid argument for minimal design. The entire playfield is only a handful of pixels. You walk, you jump, you set your respawn point (a nice compromise between quicksaves and lives). White objects probably hurt you; other colors probably don’t. That’s it. Yet the jazzy music, the crunchy mechanics, the feisty interface, the droll explanatory text, and the memorable level design paint the game as a classic.
by [redacted]
Though I’m not sure if he concerned himself with the broader community, Matt Bell’s Paper Airplane is perhaps the most widely-distributed Game-Maker game, and Yuphex is one of the most sophisticated. Matt’s games are defined by a meticulously clean visual style and a talent for both subverting and capitalizing on Game-Maker’s design quirks. It’s not that his games are purely experimental; that same sense of cleanliness and discipline extends to his design concepts, lending his games a strong feel of professionalism.
Matt began his Game-Maker work in high school, as was common to most of the designers I encountered. Most of my our communication was through the post, and carefully packaged 3-1/2″ floppies. From what I remember of Matt he was fairly reserved and didn’t mince words, which shows itself in his art. Offhand I am only aware of three of his games, which I will discuss below. If anyone can fill the gaps, please consider this an interactive discussion. All the better to unearth some indie game history.
by [redacted]
There was a point toward the end of Uin where I became stuck. I had navigated a water level and a forced-scrolling shooting segment, and was now faced with a sort of a boss battle. My character stood in a bubbling pool of water. To the right floated an enormous child, orbited by a handful of large five-pointed stars. Occasionally the stars would shoot out, then boomerang back, causing my character damage. For the life of me I couldn’t beat this boss, and I had started to despair of ever finishing the game.
To further my frustration, the last save point was several minutes earlier — before the water level, and before a sequence reminiscent of everyone’s least favorite part of Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game. You know, the bit with the coral. So each time I reached the boss, both my character’s energy and my own were fairly well drained. And each time I failed, I knew I would have to navigate that whole sequence again.
And then something happened. Well, two things happened. One, I realized that I had recently earned a new power — one that I had never used, as I had been underwater all this time. Two, I randomly hit on a new strategy that used, though did not rely on, this new power. The next time I faced the boss, the encounter was over within seconds — and I realized it wasn’t so much a boss as a random obstruction.
My fault had been in filtering the event too strictly through my own understanding of game structure. And that is the uncertain balance tread throughout this game. For all its waves to tradition, Uin is still a biggt production. It may have an inventory, and a persistent world structure, and sub-quests, and cutscenes, and a fully developed (if eccentric) control scheme, but those details are incidental to the dream logic at play.
Last Wednesday night, You Found the Grappling Hook! author Mark Essen unleashed the trailer for his upcoming No Quarter exhibition piece, Raging Hadron. Described as “a two player competitive game… that combines swashbuckling swordplay with 8-bit psychedelia”, the game comes off a bit like Jordan Mechner on an angry acid trip. Or to phrase it a little differently, Versus Prince of Karateka in Fractal Land.
The shooter is one of the most fundamental design templates, and so one of the most fruitful to dissect. On the analytical end, see Kenta Cho, Treasure, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and the Geometry Wars games.
Theta Games’ Ceramic Shooter – Electronic Poem, released about a month ago and slowly gaining attention, similarly takes advantage of the form.
by [redacted]
Long before Mark Overmars’ popular design tool, Recreational Software Designs‘ Game-Maker (note the hyphen) opened the horizons of Shareware-era PC gamers, forged friendships and dial-up communities, and cluttered the upload directories of bulletin boards as far flung as Russia and South America. There were several dedicated BBSes, including the official RSD board in Kennebunkport, Maine. For those outside of calling range, there was always the USPS and 3-1/2″ floppies. And then development ceased, and slowly Game-Maker faded.
Game Maker was first released around 1992, as a set of VGA mode DOS utilities tied together with a text mode selection menu. For every game produced, the main program file, containing all of the important code, was the same. To distinguish one game from the next, the program file would call on a .gam file, in which the user would compile all of his content through a rather elegant system of brainstorming lines and form fields. The rest of the tools — tile editors, character and monster editors, a map editor, a sound editor, and so on — served to develop that content.
In retrospect it was kind of brilliant; from the program’s perspective all of the important information that made a game unique — visuals, sound, controls, rules, design, structure — was simple window dressing, to call in and process like so many documents. And design was nearly that easy.
So continues the slow drift of indie games to the mainstream download channels. Following the high-profile Wii ports of indie heavyweights such as Cave Story and La Mulana (and indeed the announcement of Diamond Trust of London for DS, several of Jason Rohrer’s early opuses will soon be bundled for play on the Nintendo DSi.
To editorialize a bit, anthology releases like this, rather like a collection of short stories or short subject films, may soon be an important consumer model for showcasing unusual design concepts. Witness the success of Valve’s Portal, a critical darling (itself based on an indie game project) that many would have overlooked if not for its inclusion in Valve’s Orange Box. With the strict pricing models and content expectations of the commercial market, it’s hard for a small, original title to hold its own. But arrange several games around a theme, or an individual voice such as Jason Rohrer, and you’ve got the basics of an intriguing package.
by [redacted]
Over the years, game design has calcified. If I were to pick a turning point, I might point at the SNES — a system of broadly appealing games that delivered exactly what people expected of a videogame, challenged few perceptions, and established the status quo for 2D console-style game design. Since then it’s been hard to get past the old standards — the prettied-up enhancements of Super Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid that added little new in terms of expression or design language, yet that refined the hell out of some proven favorites.
You could say that the SNES was the epitome of Miyamoto-styled design (even in games by other developers), and you’d have a reason for saying that. Namely, it was the Miyamoto Box: Nintendo’s reward to Miyamoto for the broad appeal of his NES catalog. Meanwhile Miyamoto’s opposing force, in Gunpei Yokoi, was rewarded for his invention of the Game Boy by having his studio removed from mainstream console development to support his brainchild. The message was clear: Miyamoto’s way was the successful one, so he would be in charge of everything important from here on.
The thing is, Miyamoto is just one voice. He had a few brilliant ideas in the mid-1980s, all born out of a particular context and in response to particular problems. And then by the turn of the ’90s he was pretty much dry. All that was left was to codify his ideas, turn them into a near law of proper design — regardless of context — and then sit back to admire his work, while new generations carefully followed his example as if manufacturing chairs or earthenware pots. A videogame was a videogame, much as a chair was a chair. It was a thing, an object, with particular qualities and laws.
Thing is, videogames aren’t things; they’re ideas.
Having gained some renown, or perhaps infamy, with his dadaist La La Land series, Matt Aldridge (aka biggt) has unleashed a significantly more ambitious follow-up.
Compared to the La La Land series, Uin is rather more conventionally structured, if no less evocative. There is an inventory, and exploration, and in place of the sheer dream dump of La La Land, play involves a certain amount of skill or problem solving. There are even a couple of forced-scrolling shooter stages. Yet Aldridge still wraps it up in his typically baffling logic and atmosphere.
by [name redacted]
You may have read the first part of this column in the December 2009 Play Magazine. It was intended as a single article, and the start of a whole series of such lists. In the event, I was asked (due to my incorrigible verbosity) to break the article into three pieces; only the first found its way to print. Here is the column in full.
Used to be, when a game was successful enough to demand a sequel, the design team would do its best to avoid repeating itself. Though I’m sure they mostly wanted to keep their job interesting, the practical effect was that if the games were different, they would both remain relevant. In an arcade, Donkey Kong Jr. could stand handsomely by its father, each shilling for its own share of the coin. You might call them companion pieces, rather than updates or replacements.
When home consoles hit, design teams were even more modest, and were generally left to do their own thing. So starting on the NES, you will see a certain trend: successful game spawns weird, only tenuously related sequel; fans of the original scratch their heads; a greatly expanded dev team releases a third game, which is basically just the first again, on steroids; fans think it’s the best thing ever, because it’s exactly the same, except better! And to hell with that weird second chapter.
Thing is… usually the second game is the most interesting you’ll ever see.
by [name redacted]
Originally published in, I believe, the October issue of Play Magazine.
A new study of gamer health, conducted by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory and Andrews Universities and published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, observes a correlation between extensive videogame use, obesity, and depression.
The expectation going in was that gamers would tend to have a higher body mass index, and “a greater number of poor mental health days” than non-gamers; after studying 552 adults in and around Seattle, that assumption looks pretty much true.
by [name redacted]
Originally published in, I believe, the September issue of Play Magazine.
Remember last year, when the newly-merged Activision Blizzard decided to shuck itself of properties unlikely to lead to a major franchise? Suddenly several high-profile one-off projects like Ghostbusters were left without a publisher. Though most quickly found a new host, Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s heavy metal adventure Brütal Legend was left grasping. In December the recently progressive Electronic Arts stepped up, and all seemed back on track.
Or maybe not.
by [name redacted]
Originally published in, I believe, the August issue of Play Magazine, split into a few blurbs across a two-page spread. I thought it rather worked in that format.
While everyone is freaking out about the economy, some trends are older and more reliable. Over the last decade, as the game industry has become big business and budgets have skyrocketed, yet everyone has continued to produce more less the same material, more and more groups and individuals have had to compromise.
Hey, a couple of the games I’ve worked on are out now.
Lost Empire is a grandiose space strategy thing. I rewrote most of the game text and the manual on a short timescale.
Penumbra is a… I’m not sure. I haven’t played it. Some kind of first-person Lovecraftian survival horror thing. I rewrote the manual, and I think some of the game text. Hard to remember everything I do; this was months ago.
Though I have no comment on the games themselves, I rather like their packaging. Nice, big no-nonsense logos. Understated cover art.
To note, there’s a silly typo on the back of the Lost Empires box. That’s not my fault; they didn’t run that text past me.
EDIT: Speaking of typos… I feel I must have rewritten the text in that Lost Empire trailer, yet those punctuation errors can’t be my own. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. Maybe they used an earlier draft? Maybe I never touched that after all?