We All Fall Down

Spelunking into the Past

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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

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“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

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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

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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.

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Sink your teeth into Guilherme Martins’ Bubblegirl Rozy

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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.

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Get your hooks into Arthur Lee’s Streemerz

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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.

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

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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

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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 )

The Game-Maker Archive: Samples and Demos

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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.

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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.

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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 )